Episode 56: Karen Wagnon's Parenting Philosophy

Karen Wagnon

Intro: 

Welcome to the "Wellness in Every Season" podcast, where we embark on a transformative journey towards achieving total wellness, even in the midst of overwhelming moments. I'm your host, Autumn Carter, and I'm thrilled to have you here.

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Join us as we step out of survival mode and discover the path to thriving, embracing wellness in every season of motherhood. From sleepless nights to new beginnings, we'll explore practical strategies, share heartfelt stories, and uncover the transformative power of self-care and self-love.

Together, we'll unlock the wisdom, strength, and resilience within ourselves, reminding one another that we're never alone on this beautiful, yet demanding, journey. It's time to prioritize your well-being and reclaim your joy, one season at a time.

[Music]

Autumn Carter: Welcome to Wellness in Every Season. This is episode 56, today I have with me Karen Wagnon, and she is going to be talking about parenting by design and I will let her introduce herself.

Karen Wagnon: It's great to be here today.

I'm a wife and a mom and a stepmom got seven kids and a Nina to 11. So our family is growing and growing. I'm also the founder of teaching our youth and the parenting blueprint. My philosophy is all about parenting by design. Each of us, including our kids, are wired from birth with our unique personality traits.

And you've got four children, I've got seven, and they're all so uniquely different. We can start to see different behaviors and traits in the kids, but sometimes it's difficult on how to put our finger on what's really happening and why they think and act the way they do. That comes out of their unique personalities.

They're wired from birth, each of those personalities have internal emotional needs, and when these internal emotional needs are not being met is usually when we experience the disruptive behaviors. Most of us, including myself, wanted to address the behavior, but if I didn't get to the why or the root of why my child was acting that way, That behavior continued or escalated because the child is still not feeling understood.

And when they are younger and they can't tell you all we're experiencing is behavior. It's like we're putting a bandaid on it and they're still not feeling as though you get me, you still don't get me. So the understanding of the personalities just totally transformed the way I saw my kids. The way I parented my kids.

Autumn Carter: Sign me up. I need this. So this episode is for me. Hopefully it's also for you other moms that are out there. You told me a little bit about your journey and I'm excited for you to share it. So this started with your oldest, your son. Tell us that journey.

Karen Wagnon: Yeah, I couldn't wait to be a mom. I knew at some point I was going to be a mom, but I didn't become a mom until I was 27. So that might be older for some people. And I was really excited to be a mom. I was very successful in my career.

I thought I'd become a mom and it was going to be a piece of cake. It was not. It was clearly not a piece of cake, getting through those early stages when the kids are born and, you're up every 2 hours and I don't know what day it is. And, that was 1 season of parenting.

 Once you started developing his personality and I started to see the way not only how he played, but the way he reacted, the way he defied me with eye to eye contact and did exactly what I asked him not to. I knew something's going on here . What is happening here? What is happening here?

 In the beginning I'm like swatting diapers and telling him no and then he would go right back and do it again and I was just confused as to why he would be so blatantly defiant with me. And it wasn't until I attended a workshop and heard a gentleman by the name of Dr. Robert wrong with personality insights speak on personalities and temperaments and Autumn I kid you not, I almost felt as though I was being punked, like someone had a camera on me because as he's talking, I'm thinking, how does he know this is happening in my house? Like, how does he know this is going on in my home?

You know why? Because it was going on in everyone's home. There are predictable patterns in human behavior. And once you understand the personalities, you will clearly see the predictable patterns unfold in your kids. So it's almost as though the fog was clearing and I could clearly see why Kyle was defying me.

I was telling him what to do, because that's my personality as a mom. We'll talk about that in a bit. That was my personality is to be a teller mom. I wanted control and he wanted control, but I'm the mom, so I wasn't giving him choices. I was telling him what to do and he was like. No, and I just did not understand why he would blatantly look me in the eye and do exactly what I asked him not to or not do what I asked him to do. And this went on over and over again.

And when I was able to go through personality assessments with him and understand his personality style blend and realizing that he likes to be challenged. He's very smart. If he's not challenged, he'll become a challenge. He needed choices and control. I had to change the way I interacted with him and offer him choices within my boundaries so he felt he had a level of control so we could do what? Reduce that conflict. With the Parenting Blueprint, there are three components of the framework.

 First is to become aware of the personalities. Your personality and your child's personality. Because you got four kids and they're different and they could be different than you. They're different from each other. So I need to become aware of how I was wired, how my child was wired, and then I needed to adapt my interactions to meet those internal emotional needs and apply the right strategies.

Not a 1 size fits all approach. We say that, but do we really know what the approach is if I don't understand how my child is wired? This was powerful for me. It just like blew the top off that I could clearly understand now. Adapting my parenting.

Now that's another story, right? I could understand textbook his personality, but now I needed to change my interactions to meet those needs, which was not normal for me.

So let me give you an example of what I would do when my kids come home. " it's time to get your homework done. " he was like, No. So I had to change that to, How was your day? You got any homework? Do you want to do it now? And be done before dinner?

And then you're free for the night? Or do you want to hang out on the game system for about an hour and do it after dinner? You choose, you decide. Of course he defaulted to later. As most kids would. But I gave him a choice that he had time to do what he wanted. And then after dinner, he chose to do his homework.

 It was really understanding myself and why I parented the way I did. And all we bring into parenting is our personality, how we're wired, how we were parented in the past equals how I parent today. And even if I say, I'm not going to be that parent, push comes to shove, we default back to the messages in our head of how we were parented.

 I had to change that. It's like breaking the generational curses, right? My mom told me what to do, and I challenged her, because she didn't understand me either. So when we have a better understanding of how our kids are wired, and we are meeting those emotional needs, they feel truly loved for who they are. And not for who they're not.

Autumn Carter: I have so many parenting books that I've read for this one child that is just like that and a lot of the parenting books don't fit for him. They work for our other kids perfectly. But for him Not at all. All the waitlists that we're on to figure out what diagnosis he has so that we can really dig in and figure out what he needs are a year out. We've been on it for six months and I'm pretty sure it's gonna be longer than six more months. Just, ugh.

Karen Wagnon: Yes, there were many people who observed Kyle's behavior who wanted to think that there was something wrong with him, the oppositional defiant disorder or OCD, his personality.

I work with the disc model of human behavior. So some people may be familiar with the disc model. There's a number of human behavior models out there. Disc is very prevalent in business settings from a leadership perspective, team building, working with clients, in a corporate setting.

 I've taken this model for the adult child relationship.

Autumn Carter: Interesting.

Karen Wagnon: When I saw Kyle's personality assessment, that's the first thing I do when I work with families is we need to understand the family dynamic before we start putting strategies together, and I saw his personality, you could see that there could be tendencies that would check those boxes of ODD or OCT.

But this is how he's wired. This is how God wired him. Now I could label him or I could just change the way I interact with him and raise him to be the best he can be according to his design. As our kids grow, I use a parable or analogy that, and if you've done any gardening and I'm not a very good gardener, by the way, our plants will grow and grow.

And at the end, they're wiry and there's no fruit. There's nothing good out there. And it just needs to be pruned. And with our kids, as they grow and grow, if we're not pruning them, they are going to grow wild. And so our goal is to prune them or discipline. And when I say discipline, that's not punishment.

Discipline is a discipline of self discipline. It's teaching them how to be the best they can be within their design. Does that make sense?

Autumn Carter: Mhm.

Karen Wagnon: And discipline for me is not getting that next piece of pie that I wanted after dinner because the punishment is gonna be the workout or the extra pounds.

It's self disciplining yourself and teaching our kids to have self discipline when they feel an urge or a drive to do something that's not necessarily going to be in their best interest. But also understanding what's the motivator that's driving the internal motivator that's driving the external behavior?

We see the external behavior and as parents when we're juggling all the things we're addressing the external behavior. But are we really getting to the why of the behavior? There's always a root to the behavior. And if we don't get to the root, we're not going to change anything.

Autumn Carter: Tell me what it was like for him when he went to school. So you learned this before he was in school, I assume?

Karen Wagnon: He was probably elementary school when I was introduced to this. So I was already well into this. And I remember going in for second grade, seven years old. I go in parent teacher conference. And the teacher says to me, he tells me that Kyle's intense. Now. Autumn, I know my kid's intense, but I didn't appreciate somebody else telling telling me my kid was intense.

And it was almost like I wanted to lunge across and say, what are you talking about? Kyle only wanted to do what Kyle wanted to do. If he didn't see value in the work, he didn't want to do the work. So for instance, they're showing in second grade, seven years old, a portfolio of his work.

The teacher said, he doesn't color the color pages. And I said, "really? So what does he do, if he's not coloring while the other kids are doing it?" And he said he had a basket of Legos because he's a left brain kid and he would build.

He wasn't a disruption, but he didn't see the point of coloring Because that's not work. Do you see where I'm at with that? That was his perspective when I asked him, Why don't you color the color pages? And he says, Because that's not work. That's coloring. This was just the beginning. So I asked the teacher, Can you just give him more sheets to complete? Because we need to keep him busy. They are very smart. They are task driven individuals.

Let me give you just an overview of how we determine different personalities. There's 2 observations that we use if we're not going through assessments real briefly.

The first thing we ask people is what is your pace in life. Some people are outgoing personalities and others are more reserved. And outgoing are more the extroverts. They're fast paced individuals. Everything they do is fast. Walk fast. Talk fast. Eat fast. Work fast. They're always in a hurry hurry.

Then we have our other personalities that are more reserved, and the reserved personalities like to take their time, think things through. When things get too hurried, it starts to stress them out and cause them anxiety. It's not right or wrong, it's just different. And I can usually ask a parent I'm working with, if you had to choose between the two, and Autumn for our time together, if you had to choose between the two, how does your motor run? Do you find that you're more outgoing or you prefer to take your time and think things through?

Autumn Carter: I'm a thinker.

Karen Wagnon: Okay, so you take your time and think things through. So that's one simple observation. And when it comes to our children, I usually say, how do they interact? How do they play? Okay, so you can really tell the kids who are actively running and doing things versus the kids who sit and play with the blocks or Legos. You can observe this. It's a simple observation.

The first observation, how does their motor run? The second observation is what is your priority in? Some people are task driven individuals. They're all about results, plans, progress. They are the list making people. We make lists and we check things off of our list. If we did something in the day that wasn't on the list, we put it on the list so we can check it off the list. Then we have those who are more relational and people oriented types, and the people oriented types probably know that they have a task to do, but they can be easily distracted by the interaction with the relationship.

And again, if I were to ask you to choose, and you may be a little bit of both, depending upon the situation, you already jumped on that.

You are more task driven. And so when we put that those two observations together in a wheel, and I know we're not drawing that out right now, it gives us four quadrants of the disk model. So we have dominant and inspiring and then supportive and cautious are more dominant. Inspiring are more outgoing. And supportive and cautious are more of the reserved.

Kyle was more of the task driven, cautious and dominant was on the left side. So his way was the right way and there was no getting around it in his mind. It was not willing to yield to authority. He was not willing to change his perspective. So can you see how strong willed he was?

Autumn Carter: Does he own his own business now? What is he like as an adult?

Karen Wagnon: He's a quality tech in an automotive plant in in Michigan, and he's black and white. If the parts aren't right according to the spec, they're not leaving the building. He is perfect for that. Because there are people, they're like it's not that bad. And he says, if my name is going on this, I'm not sending it out. Like he's black and white.

Autumn Carter: I'll take a car from him.

Karen Wagnon: There were also times where he was very rigid and not willing to yield. It really cost him some things, he was not always a team player because he's black or black and white. When we got into high school. He's very smart. He was assessing out past high school when he was in middle school. We get into geometry. I guess that was probably sophomore year he was doing geometry. There are steps to a theorem in geometry. The teacher wanted to see all the steps of the theorem. Kyle can do math in his head because he is very smart and he was skipping steps to the theorem and the teacher was marking his answers wrong even though they were right because he wasn't marking the steps of the theorem.

So I met with Kyle and said, the teacher's asking for the steps. "Why are you marking me wrong? My answer is right." And I said, "because you didn't follow the process." " four times four is 16, why do I have to write four times four at 16? " Then I said, "I get it, but the teacher's asking you to show the steps of the theorem and how you got your answers."

I met with Kyle. I met with the teacher. I met with Kyle and the teacher. He was not willing to yield to authority. Guess what? He failed that class because seeing Kyle's mind, the answer is right, but in the teacher's mind, you're not showing me your work. So you see, there was a power struggle there in that classroom, and that teacher failed him.

So now I got to offer choices again, because he was very frustrated about that. And I said, here's where we are with this. Either you earn the money and take the correspondence course and pick up that half a credit and you graduate on time or you don't do anything over the summer and you graduate a year late, but it probably won't be with your friends.

So you choose and you decide how you want to handle it this summer. Now, I wanted to say, get the correspondence course, get this done or you're not going to graduate. I wanted to tell him, but then that was going to be the automatic wall up because you cannot tell these kids what to do when you have a child like this.

You cannot. So I had to let it sit and he eventually brought me the paperwork and, gave me the cash and I had to write a check. This was back in the day where we didn't have all this online stuff. He's 35 today. But these were repetitive, predictable patterns in his behavior. Now, did I have to guide him through it? I did. Did I have to let him fail sometimes? I did, because that's how he learned. It's not what I said. He needed to experience the logical consequences of the real world before he was willing to. And that's just one child.

Autumn Carter: my wheels are turning so much over this, amazing.

Karen Wagnon: So it is fascinating. Yeah.

And when you're struggling as a parent to understand why your child thinks and acts the way they do when you're struggling to connect, especially when we get into the adolescent years and they start pushing us away. This is just a vital nugget or foundation for parents to understand how to, the second part of the framework, adapt my interactions and apply the right strategies to reduce the conflict and maintain the relationship.

Our kids just want to be understood, but when we misunderstand them and we are reacting and responding in ways that are trying to get them to change who they are. I wanted Kyle to follow the rules, but he had his own rules, he saw things a certain way, and he would explain it to you, he could tell you why he thought that way and I kept saying, but the teacher's asking you to do this Kyle, if you don't show the steps he's going to fail you.

Autumn Carter: I saw a really funny, I think it was on Instagram or something. It was a while back, so I don't know that I could find it for you again, but it was somebody in a pretend job interview, and the one hiring said, I'm sorry I can't hire you because you didn't show your work.

Karen Wagnon: If I had that, I would have totally forwarded it to him because we would laugh at this today.

There is value in that personality. It wasn't easy to parent. In his career right now, what he does, he has found his fit, right?

Both my boys worked at McDonald's when they were in high school. Kyle's very organized and structured and Eric is the complete opposite. Eric's very social, fun, not organized at all. And so they Kyle goes into the freezer to get fries for the fryer and he comes home and complains that all the boxes are in there and they're not in order.

You can't even see the labels and blah, blah, blah. Why would you unload the truck and not put all the fries together with the labels out and while the burger is together, all the labels out, everyone just shoves everything into the freezer. Why isn't it organized? And I said, could your brother probably did it?

 Unloading the boxes, put them in the freezer, not paying attention to the details. Now you got to spin all the boxes around and find the labels and how much time is wasted in doing that. And just going in and saying, here's the fries here, the burgers, because So he doesn't understand why, I said, because not everybody thinks and acts like you, Kyle.

So there are just little stories that I would see between the two of them. Unloading the truck and putting in the freezer is probably to somebody unloading a truck and put it in the freezer. But did you say put all the like items together with the labels facing out? And Kyle's, that's a given.

Autumn Carter: With our oldest, he is considered an able learner. So he's in the more advanced class. He's in third grade and my husband told him, dress warm to go outside.

 We said because it's cold, but he missed that part, so he went and put summer clothes on to go play with our dogs outside, and it's windy and cold, and he came in complaining that it was cold, and we're like, We meant, put a jacket on, put gloves on, put a beanie, not wear shorts kid!

Karen Wagnon: But it's just that whole communication part, right? That We're coming from here as parents, and they're coming from here, and they have their own unique personality, and it's very obvious to see, even as newborns, just how different each of them are, and it just, I understood it in a textbook way, but once I had my own, I'm like, I get it now,

 He was so unique that he was going to do it his own way, and I knew that was going to catch up with him at some point, as it did in 10th grade. You know what I mean?

When you just don't want to color the color pages, okay, maybe you can get away with that. But when you're not wanting to show your work, and on top of that, the teacher was saying, how do I know you're not cheating? With that cautious personality who is perfectionist, that's not even on their freaking radar that they would ever do anything like that.

They're not going to break the rules. So now you're challenging my integrity and think that I would cheat. Now he's really mad that you accuse me of cheating? It just was spiraling and spiraling.

Autumn Carter: And it makes sense now, because my husband's an engineer. And there were times where he got the answer wrong, but just by a little. And if he showed his work, and it was like pages worth for one problem, took him hours to do. Because he'd come home and say, Oh, I have five problems to do. And I'm like, Oh, you just have five problems. Just. No. It's all night long, he's staying up late, has to wake up early the next morning to get it done, and he gets the answer wrong, but the instructor is able to go through and say, okay, I see where you did it wrong, here's where you did it wrong, but Following what you did.

Yes, that's the right answer. You didn't get it wrong here. So he was able to go through and give back credit because of that. The teacher was able to explain that, but all they're stuck in is that you have to show your work in 10th grade because. Where's the, finish that because if you go on with math, it's really helpful to see where you went wrong.

Karen Wagnon: And that's what I said. If you make a mistake, you don't know where the mistake was made. But in his mind, he doesn't make mistakes. This is where I was at. It was a circle. The answers are right. All it did was feed a power struggle and I had to let him learn through logical consequences.

Autumn Carter: And it's better that he does it there where he has the safety net instead of now at 35.

Karen Wagnon: Yeah, it was rough. He had a job, Autumn, he's been working in the automotive industry in this quality tech position. He was working second shift and all the parts were coming off and they weren't meeting spec. They're still coming off and they're not meeting specs. So he shut the plant, he shut the machine down and sent everybody home.

Autumn Carter: Wow.

Karen Wagnon: But he didn't tell anybody. Just shut everything down and sent everybody home. And he was like, why are we going to continue to run this shift and pay these employees and keep the lights on? I can't use these parts. So I just sent them back. I'm like did you call a supervisor and ask permission to shut the place down? So he wasn't at that job too long.

I understood where he was coming from, but it was the communication piece. Like he was making a decision that this is pointless, and we're going to continue to take these parts. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of material. Send everybody home until they have somebody come in and recalibrate the machine so that we get the parts back to spec.

But there's the communication part. So there was a logical consequence. He was dismissed from that. Now you learned from that. You had to learn. Communication is key. But these were things that we could tell a child, and at that point a young adult, or they have to learn through their logical consequences.

I valued the relationship more than continuing to be in the power struggle. if he wasn't going to change, life was going to teach him, but I still wanted to be the go to. So when stuff like that happened, I'd be like, sorry, you went through that. What do you think you could do differently next time?

I had to go into reflection with him. I'm sorry you went through that. Makes sense. I get where you're coming from. Didn't quite work out that way. What do you think you could do differently next time? And that's all I can do is help him problem solve. And that was with the strong willed child.

Now, you have a different personality combinations. And my son, Eric is just fun, easy, always made me laugh. It's hard to discipline him because he'd crack me up all the time with his reasons why he did what he did. But I remember him in middle school, bringing home his binder and it was a binder check they did one day, it would have been 100 points and he had 10 points because his name was on it, because there was nothing in it.

 It was all in pockets or in other books, he just wasn't organized. And I could say, where's your stuff? And he's it's somewhere. And I'm like like where. It's somewhere. You need to get organized. And he's I am because in his mind it was somewhere.

Karen Wagnon: Do you see how totally different black and white versus it's somewhere. And so we had to go through all this stuff. We had to find all his papers. We needed to put them in all of the different areas of the binder where they belonged by the dividers.

So that we could show him what that looked like because organization didn't come natural to him. It was somewhere. So anybody who's got a kid like that, you could say get organized after the one who was extremely organized. Okay. And this one is just like, why is there a problem here?

I'm like, because you can't find Eric. You got 10 points because your name was on it. There's nothing there. And then I had to be doing binder checks to make sure that everything was where it was and hold him accountable. And if he did what he was supposed to do, then he had time on his game system.

Autumn Carter: This is my daughter.

Karen Wagnon: So now you see the difference in that. So I said to him, if you keep putting stuff in the pockets, I'm going to get an X Acto knife and cut out the pockets. So you don't have pockets anymore.

You need to put them where they belong, so when you go back to find them, You have them. So now he's in college. He's taking a class at the college. They're going to be renovating the building. They let the students know we start the renovation. We're going to a meeting at X Y building in this room shows up at the school up.

They're renovating the building. He has nothing written down, does not know where he's meeting. He has to go to student services and find out what building what room because he didn't write it down. Still struggling with the same pattern gets to the room. They were taking a quiz and they didn't let him in, zero for that.

So sometimes it's those logical consequences that I felt bad and he was angry. They wouldn't let him in. I said, Were you aware of the quiz? Did you write it down? Did you have it, in your planner that on such and such day will be meeting? He didn't write it down. So even though we try to train our kids, teach them, discipline them, as I said, the pruning, there's still going to be things in their life that is going to catch them.

But it's those real life consequences that will happen. Help them become more self disciplined in the future, right? I think it's important as parents to look back in our own lives and see where that happened and where it was Beneficial and maybe let go of any Residual guilt that we have about it and the beating up that we still might be doing about it and empathy like I've learned Rather than be critical. To have empathy and just say, I'm sorry that happened, gosh, that's That must not feel really good right now.

Are you okay? Just be empathetic and then collaborate rather than discipline and yell because a lot of times that's what they're expecting from us when something goes wrong. Be empathetic that they made a choice that didn't work out in their best interest. So what do you think you might want to do differently the next time?

And that's what's beneficial to us as adults. So why not them of allowing them that space? And it's really hard when you have lots of kids, as you do, because you

Autumn Carter: I conveyor belt parent a lot of the time is wait, I already took care of you. I'm working on the next one. Nope. Nope. You can't have more problems right now.

Karen Wagnon: Yeah, conveyor belt parenting. I've never thought of it that way. I talk about crowd control, but each one of them have individual needs. And rather than playing whack a mole, which a lot of parenting does, just trying to put out whatever situation we're dealing with. When you understand the family dynamics in advance, these are predictable patterns that then we can support our kids.

And encourage them not necessarily focusing on their blind spot, but giving them the guardrails to become successful. In their blind spots, right?

Autumn Carter: I love that, kind of goes with I have a worksheet that's all about creating mindful morning and evening routines. Sorry for the kids. Because otherwise it's like that, getting ready for the day, right?

Yep. And it's because we're not preparing things the night before, we're not waking up in time, if we're waking up as the kids wake up. We're already waking up behind. We're not getting that time for us, and it's very much that whack a mole, so I love that visual.

What does your ideal client look like? And then tell me the ways that people can follow you.

Karen Wagnon: With the parenting blueprint, a lot of parents will come to me when they're in crisis. I've had a few clients who come to me when they're being proactive. And honestly, most families come to me in the adolescent years.

Now you're just entering into the adolescent years, but I'll tell you, it's like someone flipped flips a switch and you're thinking, where did my child go? Where did my sweet child go? The one who loved me and wanted to spend time with me. And that's when parents start to get a little unsure on how to adapt the parenting into this new season.

 A lot of the families that I work with are parents of tweens and teens. Some parents are just starting to see changes happening. Other parents are already down a pathway where things are starting to get really rocky and then we need to repair and restore. But the parenting blueprint gives the the insights to go deeper rather than a parent saying my kid won't get up and go to school.

They won't do the chores. They spend too much time on digital. Why is all this happening and how can we communicate the right strategies to change that behavior or discipline? As I said, not punishment, discipline, setting boundaries so that we can get the positive outcomes and run our homes so that we're not feeling as though we are always in conflict in a power struggle every day.

There are many Moms and probably dads who pull into the driveway and have to take a moment before they walk in because they don't know what they're walking into. No one should have to do that. You want to walk in and you want to embrace your kids. You want to embrace the diversity of your kids. You want to be able to enjoy Kyle's analytical style.

I want to enjoy Eric's lighthearted style and Anna's sweet, sensitive style because I understand that. It's not right or wrong, it's just different. And so the parenting blueprint basically takes families on a journey of self discovery, starting with the personality assessments. Once they see the assessments and they see the plotting points of the family on a graph, they can see our differences.

And now how do we close the gap of understanding? The parenting blueprint is a self paced course that takes you on that journey of self discovery. As you're listening to the modules, you're already starting to see as we've been talking, things that have been going on in my family, but we put a framework and a structure to that to understand the strengths, struggles and strategies of parenting the different personalities.

But based on what you're experiencing, what did I learn from this training that I need to begin to apply in my life with my family? That's where the coaching comes in that we can start putting direction, making some changes, being intentional and changing our communication, setting the appropriate boundaries, using the right strategies.

Not a one size fits all approach to get the transformation that we're looking for. And once we get that communication, that trust and mutual respect in place, especially through the adolescent years, it's so much easier to get through. But so many parents are just struggling and sometimes it's I'm just muddling through.

Do you really want to muddle through? This is the most important job we will ever have. Autumn, you know that and nobody teaches us this. I think we are led to believe as women. That when we have children, we will know. I think we need to put that myth aside, because I've lived in that shame of being successful in my career and failing as a parent, and not wanting to talk to anyone about it.

And we've got to just remove that, clear the veil, and just say, we're all struggling. Because all we bring to parenting is our personality, how we were parented equals how you parent today. And to some people it's natural. Look, some of my kids were easy, some of my kids were not. But I still wanted to have relationships with all of them.

The most important job we will ever have, and we do not put the value on it. That we should, right? We, there are people who have business coaches and physical coaches and spiritual coaches and financial coaches and we don't have coaches for the most important role we will ever have in our life? And then we go to bed crying and feeling as though we're failing? Look, moms, dads, this is hard.

I have a Parenting Blueprint Toolkit which just gives an overview of understanding different personality styles. That's a free download that will really give some families just an overview and you can start to understand a little bit more of the family dynamics. If you want to work with me or the parenting blueprint coaches, because what I've done now is I've created a certification for other parent coaches to use this framework as they're working with families.

So we are training coaches that have different backgrounds. Someone may have neuroscience. I have another coach that works with trauma and addictions. I have another one that comes from leadership. So you will find a coach that will fit your personality, your style, your family dynamics that will be able to take you on that journey from chaos to confidence in your parenting.

And you can find that on our website at teachingouryouth.com. And you can look look at that under the parenting blueprint.

Autumn Carter: Perfect. And is that the best way to get on your newsletter?

Karen Wagnon: The newsletter comes in LinkedIn. And once you get in, you opt in and get the download of the blueprint, you'll start getting additional parenting tips from me as well. I have a Facebook group. Parent by Design with Karen Wagnon. Come on in. I am so blessed to have such a positive group of families in this group. I don't know if you've been in any parenting Facebook group, but some can be a little toxic. Everyone who's there is understanding the philosophy of understanding the personalities and temperaments and adapting to meet the needs.

So it is calm, it is supportive, and it is encouraging because people are starting to see the difference that this is making in the relationships when they follow the framework of the model.

Autumn Carter: Thank you so much for being on here.

As the dawn breaks and the world awakens, we often find our thoughts adrift in the sea of the future, a horizon filled with both hope and uncertainty. For many moms, this uncertainty can stir a whirlwind of anxiety and questions. But what if there was a way to navigate these choppy waters with grace and confidence?

Next week, our podcast brings you a haven of understanding and guidance in the episode "Anxiety over the Future." Tailored for moms, this episode is a journey into managing feelings of uncertainty, armed with practical coping strategies and a roadmap to achieve your goals. We delve into the power of mindfulness, emphasizing gratitude and the beauty in the things going right in your life.

This conversation is more than just words; it's a shared experience, a collective journey of moms striving for empowerment and clarity. Don't let this voyage of discovery pass you by. Subscribe to our podcast today and join us next week for an episode that transforms uncertainty into a path of strength and serenity. Subscribe now, and step into a future where your anxieties are met with understanding and resilience.

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Outro: 

Thank you for joining us on this week's refreshing wellness discussion. I'm Autumn Carter, your guide through the seasons of motherhood, and I hope you found inspiration and valuable insights during our time together.

If you resonate with the topics we explored today and want to continue your wellness journey, I invite you to follow me on Instagram at Moms Wellness in Every Season. There, you'll discover a wealth of ongoing wellness tips specifically curated for moms like you.

Sharing our podcast with others is an act of caring, and I invite you to spread the word by sharing, subscribing, and leaving a review wherever you enjoy your podcasts. Your support is deeply valuable to us and enables us to reach more mothers who are seeking transformation and empowerment.

If you have a specific topic you'd like us to cover in more detail or if you're interested in a free coaching consultation, don't hesitate to reach out. You can send me a direct message on Instagram or visit my website, wellnessineveryseason.com, to send an email. I'm here to support you on your wellness journey.

Thank you again for being a part of our vibrant community. I'm genuinely excited to connect with you, hear your stories, and continue this important discussion in the weeks to come.

Until next time, remember to prioritize your well-being, embrace every season with grace, and always strive for wellness in every aspect of your motherhood journey. Take care, and I can't wait to catch up with you soon.

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