The GREATEST Gift You Can Give Your Kids (It's So Not What You Think!)

Every mom wants to give their kids the world: to spare them from hardship, set them up for success, & see them be happy. Yet that’s NOT what your kids need from you the most!

The greatest gift a mom can give her kids isn’t stuff. It’s not even time & attention. What your kids need most is to see you take ownership of your OWN happiness! To model healthy emotional regulation & self-empowerment so they don’t fall victim to four harmful outcomes: parentification, insecure attachment, risky behavior, or the belief that happiness is out of reach for them, too.

I underscore all the reasons why moms’ mental health & happiness are absolutely ESSENTIAL for your kids’ wellbeing, both now & in the future. I share two personal examples along with a client’s experience wrestling with unhappiness to convey the impact that your (un)happiness has on your kids & why it’s so, SO crucial you prioritize your own joy.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

•  All the things moms think their kids need but really don’t matter that much
•  What can happen when moms ignore themselves & their own happiness
•  How you taking radical responsibility for your own happiness helps your kids see what’s possible for them (& vice versa: when you’re unhappy, it models for your kids that their happiness shouldn’t matter either)  
•  That kids’ nervous systems are incredibly intuitive & perceptive, meaning they sense how (un)happy you are whether you explicitly let on or not.
•  The most “insidious” form of child neglect, according to experts

FOR SO MUCH MORE:

Ready to take radical responsibility for your own happiness so your kids know a great life is possible for them, too? The Happy Mom ProtocolTM equips you with six simple “Happiness Habits” that are scientifically PROVEN to help you be significantly happier in just seven days!

Join the Moms Making TimeTM Society to reclaim your time, rediscover yourself, & reignite your joy so your whole family can flourish. 

HOMEWORK:

Your homework for today is to reflect on what was modeled for you regarding happiness. To whom or what have you delegated your happiness? What do you think will make you happier? Share your answers with me via email or DM me on Instagram.

COMING UP NEXT:

Join me next episode to talk about what it means to be “winning” or “losing” at parenting. I'll share some of my recent wins & losses as examples to help you put your own struggles in new perspective

The Moms Making Time Society™ is an online membership that equips you with EVERYTHING you need to prioritize yourself and your passions so you (and your family!) can flourish. Lock in the founding-member rate while you can!

CONNECT WITH AMBER: Website | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn

Ready to finally get to the root of your problems and change your life FOR GOOD? Book your free 60-minute consult to learn more about working 1:1 with Dr. Amber.

Transcript

0:00

Do you know the greatest gift you can give your kids? I'd be willing to bet you don't. It's so not what you think. Welcome to More Time for Mom, where overwhelmed moms get science-backed strategies to overcome the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. I'm your host, Dr. Amber Curtis. Ready to make more time for you? Let's dive in. Today's episode is going to ruffle some feathers. It may come off as a bit of a rant, but that's because I am so passionate about raising awareness about this, both because it was a huge past mistake I made and because it's something I've seen all the time in my six years as a life coach. Before we get to what the greatest gift you can give your kids actually is, we of course need to get out there what it's not. It is not whether you had a home birth or a hospital birth, breastfed or bottle fed, co-slept or sleep trained. It's not whether you feed your kid exclusively unprocessed organic food or red dye cereal and McDonald's. It's not about where you live, the size of your house, or how clean or dirty your home is. It's not whether you work inside or outside the home, or whether your kids go to daycare or not. It's not about how much money you make or how many vacations you take. It's not about how many activities and lessons your kids are involved in, how many friends they have, or how much quality one-on-one time they have with you. It's not about whether you homeschool or put them in a good private school with small class sizes and personalized attention from the teacher. And it's definitely not about the amount of stuff you give them or how much financial success you're setting them up for. Research repeatedly shows that the number one thing that matters for your kids' present and future well-being is how happy you are. Sweet mama, the greatest gift you can give your kids is your own happiness. Not in an irresponsible, hedonistic, do-whatever-you-want-as-if-you-didn't-have-kids kind of way, but as an example, of self-sufficiency and healthy emotional expression. Otherwise, four really harmful things can happen. Number one is parentification, which is basically role reversal, where a child takes on the physical or, in this case, emotional responsibilities of the adult. It can be the child becoming the emotional support for the parent, the one offering the parent comfort, the one trying to resolve the parent's problems. Or it can be the child taking on a misplaced sense of blame and guilt for why the parent is unhappy, whether that's objectively true or not. Kids' little nervous systems are so perceptive. They need to feel safe. and won't if they can sense their caregiver is chronically stressed and unhappy. Number two, the second thing that can happen is that it creates insecure attachment. I will make a future podcast episode on attachment styles if you're not already familiar. But three that children of dysregulated adults can develop are anxious attachment, where the child fears abandonment and is thus overly worried about a caregiver or later their spouse's emotional state. Avoidant attachment, where the child learns to avoid intimacy and maintain emotional distance because that feels safer to them than being vulnerable and trying to get close. and disorganized attachment, where the child experiences contradictory impulses, desiring close connection, yet fearing it because it's not readily available, especially unless specific conditions are met by the child. The third danger is that study after study shows the biggest determining factor in kids' development, mental health, and future success is the mental health of the mother. Obviously, so many variables go into that, like how much spousal and social support you have in your motherhood journey. And we'll have future podcast episodes on that as well. But hear me again. Your mental health is a significant predictor of your kid's brain development, behavior, likelihood of risky activities, or addiction to drugs and alcohol down the road. The Institute of Family Studies published a 2019 study looking at 13,000 families and showing that mom's happiness matters more than dad's for their family's well-being. Happy moms are more likely to produce teens with fewer mental health problems, and mom's happiness early on determines how close of a relationship she has with her kids later in life. According to the study, these findings apply regardless of mother's ethnicity, how old she was when she gave birth, whether she was married or not, and whether she had a university degree or not. Arguably the most important consequence, is what it models for your kids. Unintentional as it is and as much as you would never want to hurt your kids, your unhappiness sets their expectations for what their future life should be. If they don't see you happy, they won't know or believe it's possible for them. They might not feel worthy of happiness and subconsciously sabotage it every time they do start to experience good things as an adult. I know you don't want that. And this isn't to put added pressure on you to get your life together so you don't mess up your kids. But as another study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association's Internal Medicine shows, more mothers than ever are struggling with their mental health. This study surveyed 189,417 mothers and finds a sharp drop in maternal well-being, with only 25.8% of mothers reporting excellent mental health in 2023 compared to 38.4% in 2016. If you are struggling, if you're not happy, you are not alone. But you don't have to stay there and suffer. This is deep stuff and not enough people are talking about it, which is why I am. We are not saying you have to be happy 100% of the time. Absolutely not. That kind of toxic positivity, where you're always smiling and making light of bad things and trying not to let your kids know when you're having a hard time, that wouldn't be healthy either. Your kids need to see you modeling the whole spectrum of emotions, good and bad, and showing them what it looks like to have big hard feelings, but then having the tools you need to re-center and re-regulate your nervous system so you respond to every situation, from peace and calm, not your default threat response. Most importantly, your kids need to know you have ownership over your feelings and are taking radical responsibility for your own happiness so that they don't subconsciously internalize that they are in any way responsible for it, let alone to blame for your unhappiness. No one tells you this, and if anything, many of us grew up believing the exact opposite, that a good mom is someone who sacrifices every ounce of herself and always puts herself last so that her family can be happy. But that is so backwards. Let me give you two really personal examples. The first one makes me tear up just thinking about it, but it's about how many times I remember seeing my mom cry as a little girl. I loved and idolized my mama so much and especially as the oldest child, I felt a deep connection to her and remember always being acutely concerned with how she was doing. While I would be the first to tell you that I overall had a really wonderful childhood, now that I'm older, I realize how many big, hard things were going on behind the scenes in my parents' lives and relationship, not to mention the wounds they carried with them from their own childhoods that affected how they got along with each other and how they approached parenting us kids. While my parents must have gone to great lengths to keep us kids from knowing the extent of their difficulties, I knew my mom was struggling. I have so many memories of seeing her with quiet tears streaming down her face. I would ask her what's wrong and she would just say, nothing. Oh, to be able to go back and help her know that I get it now. I have a newfound appreciation for the weight she must have been carrying, how hurt she must have been, how alone she must have felt. While I couldn't understand it back then, I still wanted to fix it. My little nervous system took on a deep desire to make her feel better. It's one of several factors that instilled in me a great drive to achieve and perform and be perfect because I learned that if I did something, quote, well, she would smile and be proud, which I mistook for her being happy. Children are naturally egocentric, meaning self-focused. They can't help but see the whole world through their own eyes. Adults think it's children being selfish, but that's how little brains are wired, to be constantly on alert for what makes them feel safe or not, and seek to be constantly reassured that they are safe. For kids, everything is about them because their nervous systems don't know any different. They are entirely dependent on their caregivers for survival, so they inherently want their caregivers to be happy and stable in order for their child brains to feel safe. Even if the situation genuinely has nothing to do with the kid, a kid will believe it does if the impact it's having on her caregiver means that caregiver is upset and less physically or emotionally available for the child. Over time, being a high-achieving perfectionist whose worth was tied to external praise and validation from others became my personality, not solely because it was one way I sought to make up for my mom's unhappiness, but that was definitely part of it. Fast forward 30 years, when I had my first son and even my second and third. I still believed what society had taught me, that a mom should be at her kids' back and call 24-7, that her happiness should be on the back burner or, if anything, rooted in how well her kids were doing, how well they behaved, in how smart and healthy they were. I exhausted myself trying to be the perfect mother, endlessly searching for the one right way to do everything so that I wouldn't mess up my kids, because I thought if my kids were okay, then I'd be happy. It's so backwards. making no time for myself, barely even for showering and almost not at all for sleeping. I ended up suicidal because I didn't know how to keep up with it all or how to express how unhappy I felt. Plus, sleep is the number one thing that affects your mood and energy, so it was all very intertwined. I got a lot of help and recovered, but for years, still had this subconscious belief that you don't matter once you're a mom. The kids, the house, I thought it was all more important than me. This is where I see so many other women falling into the same trap. I'll give you one more example, this time from a client we'll call Ashley. Ashley was a high-performing lawyer who struggled to get pregnant. So when she finally did, she quit her job to stay home with her daughter. She had three kids in just four years and came to me because she was so overwhelmed by the noise, mess, and chaos of her daily life. She confessed she sometimes had thoughts of wanting to just escape from it all, then felt horrible for wanting a break, so she never spoke to her husband about how unfulfilled she was feeling. They started having a lot of fights. She was mad that he got to go to work all day while she was changing diapers and running kids to doctor's appointments. He went golfing and to the gym on a regular basis. Her only alone time was running errands while her husband was home with the kids during their weekend nap time. Her oldest child started having a bunch of issues at school, with the teacher calling home to say that her daughter had been defiant or hit a friend or refused to participate in what the rest of the class was doing. There were so many little signs that Ashley's latent frustration and depression were spilling over and affecting her family. We worked together for several months, slowly helping her get to the root of how her nervous system had been wired from a young age to think her self-worth was tied to how much money she brought in. We identified that as a stay-at-home mom making zero dollars, she felt worthless because all her hard work went unnoticed. I equipped her with powerful tools to identify her triggers and catch herself starting to spiral with negative thoughts so she could break her default threat response patterns and start taking alternative steps to build in more time for what brought her joy. As she learned to regulate her nervous system, she could apply those same tools with her children to better appreciate why they were acting out and what they really needed in the moments they were, quote unquote, misbehaving. Her changes not only helped her feel better, but helped her feel closer to her kids and have big conversations with her husband about what to change in their situation. It's not like things were instantly better, but after a while, her oldest daughter's demeanor completely shifted and she stopped acting out at school. Ashley got some help watching her daughters during the week so she could go to the gym and spend some time on her hobbies. Her happiness was contagious, and her kids now love to copy her doing exercises or working at her computer. She stopped passively waiting for things to improve on their own and recognized that her unhappiness was in her control, that she could do something about it. It's the same kind of journey I've been on, and I really want you to know that's possible for you, too. Right now, you're so busy you hardly even pause to admit that you don't love your current life. You think you'll get to your goals someday, when the kids are older and things settle down? You work day in, day out to run the household and carry the burdensome mental load. You feel good when things go well and your house is clean, your kids listen, your husband is happy, but you cringe at the slightest insinuation you're not doing a good enough job. You ignore all of those little thoughts and sensations within your own mind and body, knowing that something is missing. You're afraid to speak up for what you want. You harbor all kinds of bitterness, even resentment, about how uneven and unfair things feel. Then you feel guilty for not appreciating your blessings more and resolve to self-sacrifice even more to atone for that. You outsource your happiness to someone or something else, expecting your husband, your kids, your job, the Amazon truck, a glass of wine, or Instagram to make you feel better. If they do, its effect is short-lived, and when it's gone, you're left feeling hollow again. You ultimately resign yourself to just getting through these endless days, believing things will automatically be better in a later season of mom life. They won't. You're chronically stressed, snapping at your kids or your husband, wishing they'd help more, but annoyed because they don't do it right? Letting your kids watch way too much screen time because you don't have the energy to play with them? Because your brain tells you you have to get work done first, and there's always more to do, so you never rest or relax. you lose sight of yourself, of who you even are, apart from being a wife and mother and household manager. It doesn't have to be that way. Sweet Mama, this episode isn't meant to scare you, only to wrap some virtual arms around you and give a gentle plea that if it's resonating with you at all, Start taking steps to feel better, to get help, to reclaim ownership of your own happiness, and if you are not already 100% happy with how things are, to start doing things to improve that. Your kids sense everything. No matter how old they are, whether they can consciously verbalize it or not, they feel if you're not happy. Again, we're not saying moms can't have hard days or weeks. The crucial thing is that your kids know those hard days are not their fault, that the hard days don't change your determination to make things better for yourself, and then that they see you having just as many, if not more, good and great days. Circling back, here's the big takeaway. The greatest gift you can give your kids is taking radical responsibility for your own happiness. You need to model for them how to handle the ups and downs of life without making them mean anything about you or your self-worth. This is what prevents kids from thinking they have to fix things to make you feel better or taking any guilt or responsibility on themselves. It's essential for giving them the confidence and empowerment to pursue their own happiness in life. Personal development expert Ed Milet has a really eye-opening quote that says, the most insidious form of child neglect is a parent who doesn't go after their dreams. I'd argue going after your dreams is just one dimension of happiness, but the message still applies. You would never intentionally hurt or neglect your kids, but if you settle for unhappiness, and don't do everything in your power to find what brings you joy, that's basically what could happen. No more. Around here, we are moms who've learned that being our best selves isn't selfish. It's what's absolutely best for your whole family. I've got so many tools and resources to help you do that, so reach out when you're ready to learn more. Your homework for today is to reflect on what your mother and grandmother modeled for you regarding happiness. Do you believe you're worthy of being happy? That you have agency and control over your own happiness? To whom or what have you delegated your happiness these days? What kinds of things do you think will make you happier? And when can you start taking baby steps to do more of those things? In a similar theme, join me back next episode to talk about what it really means to be winning at parenting. I'll share some of my recent wins and losses as examples and help you put your own struggles in new perspective. Until then, remember nothing you do changes how wonderful and worthy you are. Have a great day. I know more than anyone how precious your time is, so the fact that you spent it listening to this podcast means the world. Make sure to subscribe and if you got value out of this show, I would be so honored if you'd leave a review and share this episode with another busy mama who needs to hear it. We've got this.