Am I A Good Mom?

Hi there. Welcome to the Design Your Dream Life podcast. My name is Natalie Bacon and I’m an advanced certified mindfulness life coach as well as a wife and mom, if you’re here to do the inner work and grow, I can help. Let’s get started.

Hello my friend. Welcome to the podcast. Today we are talking about Am I a Good Mom? We care so much about being moms. I know I do and I know most of my clients do. I actually came up with this podcast episode because I have been coaching on this so much lately. It is not that someone will come to me and say, Hey, am I a good mom? Would you tell me? But it’s implicit in the coaching that I’m doing. There’s this sense of wanting external validation and unknowing that, yeah, I’m on the right track. I’m doing a good job.

So instead of just kind of guessing and or worrying about am I a good mom, I decided to create this podcast episode. Along with this episode, you’re going to want to join me inside Grow You and get the motherhood toolkit where I give you so much more on this. There is a specific workshop on Validation and evaluation. So I show you how to validate yourself as a mom, as a homemaker, as a house manager. And what this means is that you won’t be looking to your to-do list or your home being clean or your kid’s being good to validate yourself. You’ll know how to get that internal validation as well as seeking external sources of other kinds for validation. I also show you what standard to use to evaluate how you’re doing. I show you how often to do it, how specifically to do it.

And in this process it’s very internal so that you end up feeling good based on things that you can control, not based on your kids’ performance or what the neighbor mom is doing. You will truly have an inner sense of confidence. So I’m going to talk a lot about this exact thing in this podcast and give you kind of the bare bones of it. But if you want the specifics, you want the outline, you really wanna understand how to do it and also be able to ask me questions about it so it’s not just a one-sided conversation. Come in to Grow You get the motherhood toolkit right away. Take these workshops and you will be better equipped than ever. And I don’t think that this question will be coming from like the guilt. Instead, when you ask it, you will feel much more confident in being able to answer it for yourself.

So one last little announcement that I want to mention here is that I am hosting Spring Clean Your Mind. It is a four day class that is brand new. I’ve never offered something like this before. It is not live, but you need to sign up to get it. So if you go to momonpurpose.com/spring on March 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th, you will get a wellness training from me every day. Those four days, I will drip out a class to you. You’ll get it via email. It’s a video class. And in that class you will get a training on how to show up as a more empowered mom from the inside out you’re gonna get practical tools to use and hear specific real life examples. So if you would like to get this free training, just go to momonpurpose.com/spring.

Again, it’s different in that you don’t have to show up. There’s nothing live. You’re gonna get it so you can listen to it at any time on your own time, but it is a limited time class. So you’re gonna wanna sign up for it now so that you can get it in, listen to it within that week while it is live.

Okay, now let’s jump back into the topic of Am I A Good Mom? I think that because motherhood is something that most of us have wanted for years, maybe even our whole lives if you’re like me. So we care so deeply about this role and there’s no real way to know how we’re doing. We don’t have a boss to evaluate us. Our kids don’t evaluate us. And of course they shouldn’t. Or if they do, it’s purely based on, you know, are we giving them what they want so it’s based on their happiness, which of course can’t be the standard for am I a good mom?

So we’re sort of stuck with this question and I think that what typically happens is we go to one of three places for the answer. We first end up using our kids’ happiness and or performance. So success to evaluate how we’re doing. And of course this is bad. It’s unfair to us as the mom and it’s unfair to the kids. What your kids feel and do is always based on them. So what they’re thinking, feeling and doing is based on their agency. You also are acutely aware of this. If you have more than one child, you know how different your children are and they require different types of parenting even from you, but you are the same mom. So how can one child’s happiness and or their success be so different than another’s child’s happiness and or success if it’s dependent on your mothering? And the answer is of course, because people are different.

They, they’re different. Kids are different, they have different minds. They have, they have different bodies, they have different capacities and and capabilities. And this isn’t new information. But I think slowing down and really seeing that if you use your kids’ happiness and their success, whatever success means, whether it’s their really successful academically or in their extracurriculars or whatever it is, I call that their performance, how they’re performing. If you use their performance and or their happiness as an indicator of how well you are doing, it’s just unfair. And I think unrealistic because kids are supposed to have challenges and they’re supposed to have different types of challenges and they’re supposed to be different. So I don’t think that using them in this way is helpful at all for you or for them.

The second way that I think we tend to measure how we are doing is based on our home. We look to see if the laundry is done, if the groceries have been put away, and if the meals are made, if the kids are eating a well-balanced diet. If you are preparing new dinners, if you know all of the things around the home are done, if it’s clean, if your kids are taking care of the home and doing their maybe chores as you ask, this is one way that I think that we look for approval and validation in our role as a mom. I think this is also a really bad idea because your home is there to serve you. You are not there to serve it. And if you think that it being tidy and organized and clean and things being done is a reflection of how good of a job you’re doing, then you will end up serving it instead of letting it serve you.

You will make a messy room mean that you are doing a bad job instead of what I teach is to make a messy room mean that you’re doing a really good job. It means that your family is living there, they are using this space. The home is serving you instead of you serving it. Your to-do list in a home never ends. There’s always more to-do because we’re always living in it. So if you measure your success as a mom based on your home, you won’t ever give yourself permission to take a rest or to take a break. You will constantly feel the need to keep going. And doing your value then becomes determined based on logistics like laundry and meals. So you can see that taken too far. This really, um, becomes a problem. It becomes a problem because you won’t rest and because you see your worth as not being inherent. Instead it’s based on something external, which then keeps you kind of chasing in this race of always needing to do more in order to feel good enough. I e it’s exhausting.

So the third way that I think on default that we look to see if we’re doing a good enough job is through our peers, other moms, what are other moms doing? How are they doing it? And then we take whatever they’re doing to measure up against without our choices are. And if they’re aligned, we say we’re doing a good job. And if they’re not, we say she’s better than me and I’m not good enough. I think that quite obviously and clearly this is not going to be a useful or helpful evaluation tool because we’re all different. All moms are different. We all have different minds, we all have different bodies, we all have different capabilities and capacities and that’s how it’s supposed to be.

We’re all supposed to be human moms. So comparing yourself to your neighbor who has her kids in gymnastics, piano in summer camps and making that mean you’re a bad mom because you don’t have your kids in those activities is not useful. It’s not going to help you feel empowered and make the best decisions for you and your family. It’s just not a good measure of success.

So if you’re like me and a lot of my clients, you may have in the past measured your success or how you’re doing as a mom against your kids’ happiness or performance against how nice and clean your home is or against what other moms are doing. And for I think obvious reasons, but oftentimes it doesn’t become obvious until we hear it in this way explicitly stated, these measurements aren’t helpful for us to show up in a way that is most helpful and beneficial from confidence, from empowerment and from those really useful, you know, emotions that help us.

Right? So what’s the solution here? I think that the solution is proactively deciding on a standard for yourself. I talk about this more inside the Motherhood Toolkit and Grow You, but thinking about your role as a mom, like you would a job with job description and responsibilities in a company, you wouldn’t just show up for your job and just swing it. You have a job description with job responsibilities. So does everyone else in the company and that’s what makes the company run.

So if you can create a job description and responsibilities for yourself as a mom and then use that for the measurement of how you are doing, then you can really save yourself a lot of headache and help yourself show up in a really empowered way. So one thing that I wanna add as a caveat here is that again, you’re not gonna wanna make the job description or responsibilities something that includes your kids’ happiness or their performance or how other moms are doing it or these, you know, other superficial and not helpful standards that again you could use against yourself.

So I’m going to share with you what mine are and what I teach inside Grow You in the Motherhood toolkit to give you some ideas. By no means does this have to be your way of defining it. I just wanna offer to you what this might look like because I think it’s clear what we don’t wanna use. We don’t wanna use the laundry as the measurement of our success. And yet the question then comes, okay, what do I want to use?

So I have five. Um, number one is to keep them safe. This alone I think is like my number one responsibility and you can already see how that could come in conflict with what we normally tend to look at to determine our success, which is our kids’ happiness. Oftentimes, keeping our kids safe means that they will not be happy. They may want to do something that is unsafe. We see this all the time with littler kids, but the same is true with older kids and teenagers. We may make a decision that they can’t go to someone’s house because we don’t think that they would be safe there and that means they’re going to be unhappy. But if you include one of your responsibilities as keeping your kids safe, then you can evaluate how you’re doing based on did I keep my kids safe? Did I do my best effort to keep them safe? Of course we can’t protect them from um, everything outside in the world, but did I do my part?

And that is so helpful because it can feel pretty bad when your kids are unhappy, particularly because of a decision that you made. So if you’re saying you can’t go here, you can’t do this thing, whatever it is, it can feel bad, it can feel like you cause them that. But when you have this standard of I’m doing my number one job and that is to keep them safe, you actually can hold space and allow them to feel their feelings of disappointment or feeling upset and at the same time keep that standard for yourself. You can feel good about yourself for keeping them safe. So there’s room for both there.

The second standard that I have is to create and hold boundaries. Kids need rules, they need structure. They thrive on um, knowing what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. Now, when I teach boundaries, I teach them different than a lot of experts. I hold myself accountable for creating and enforcing the boundary. It is not my kid’s job. And in fact, a lot of times they don’t have the capacity to hold the boundary. So if my son, um, tries to throw something or hit someone, I am going to quite literally stop him from doing that cuz I know he’s a good kid and I want to help him regulate his urge to do that. He doesn’t have the capacity to do that yet. So it’s on me to create and hold the boundaries. That’s number two. And again, you could apply this to older kids as well. All of these, I think, um, the way that I have created these five standards for myself really are such that they can evolve as kids age and grow up, which was important for me.

So number three, validate feelings. I think it’s so important to keep in my role as mom. Again, that means keeping kids safe and creating and holding boundaries. And that means that my kids are going to have feelings sometimes where they’re upset and disappointed and it’s not even always going to be because of something I did. It could be from school or whatever. You know, kids are born with the full capacity to feel feelings and absolutely no skills to regulate. From the first few months that RJ was born, he was so passionate and so strong-willed and showed so much personality and a lot of times that came through with big emotions like very early on. And so validating his feelings has been a huge part of, of how I want to show up and that’s something that I can control. Am I validating them? Validation is simply I believe you tell me more.

So instead of saying, oh, don’t be ridiculous, of course you can’t eat that candle. I say, I understand that you really want that candle right now. I know you’re really upset and I let him be upset if he wants to be upset. Invalidation is you shouldn’t be feeling that way. So I want for myself to have that as a measure of success. Am I validating their feelings? Because to them it’s a real experience. Even if you know your older child, you know, has a fit about going to school and they go to school every single day, it can be so tempting for us to think why in the world are they getting so upset? They do this every single day. It makes no sense to me and it doesn’t matter why, because it’s real to them. If they are upset, then that experience is real. And there’s nothing worse than feeling alone in your feelings. The feeling itself isn’t so bad. It’s feeling alone in the feeling that’s so bad.

So doesn’t mean that they don’t have to go to school. Instead, you can simply validate the feelings. I believe you, you really don’t wanna go to school today. I see that you can be upset about it and, and you’re making space for them to be upset. No, you’re still holding the boundary. They still have to go to school, but you’re not saying you shouldn’t be upset. You have to do this every single day. This is ridiculous. Don’t be so dramatic. That’s invalidating the feelings. So for me, one standard that is so important is, is that validation piece. It’s a huge part of it.

Number four, this is a broad one, but again, it’s something that can grow with them. Teach them as mom, I want to teach my kids from a very young age, we start to socialize our kids, which is a good thing. We want to teach them. You have to wear clothes when you go out in public. You um, can’t throw food in restaurants, right? We teach them manners, we teach them how to be um, civilized. We also teach them other things we want to teach them like religion or our family values. We teach them about traffic. There are just so many different things I like to point out here that the standard is to teach them. It’s not that they learn it. So this comes up a lot with family values and or religion.

You may raise your kids as Christian or Catholic and you may teach them about your religion and they may decide that that’s not for them. You can still say, I did a good job because I did my part, right? This gets into measuring our success based on their performance. You don’t wanna do that because that gets into trying to control them. If you think that you are a good mom based on your kids’ involvement and practice of your religion, then you’re making whether you are doing a good enough job based on their performance and you can get into this sort of push pull dynamic and really wanting to control them.

Instead, if you focus on your job, which is just to teach them and understand that they are their own person and what they do with that information is up to them, then you have such clear boundaries and it actually is is almost like such a relief because you don’t have this tight control on them. You allow yourself to love them for who they are and you don’t have to second guess and question and all of those things you see, these are the decisions that they’re making. This is what they want for their life. Did I teach them what I wanted to teach them? Yes.

Number five, repair for me. I want to apologize and I want to have compassion and communication and say I’m sorry when I get it wrong and when I mess up and I don’t wanna hold myself out as knowing everything. I wanna hold myself out as a human mom. I’m doing my best. I’m trying and I’m still a human mom. I was just coaching someone recently inside Grow You. And she had such a brilliant question. She said, you know, I am trying to teach my elementary school kids how to be less judgmental. And she said, but I’m working on it myself. How can I teach them that at the same time, not be perfect at it? And what I said was, instead of trying to hold yourself out as someone who never has judgments, hold yourself out as a human with a human brain who sometimes judges people and takes responsibility for that.

So it would sound like, huh, I’m noticing myself judging those people at the sporting event. It’s interesting how my brain is doing that. I’m taking responsibility for that. I’m gonna get really curious about it. So you’re modeling doing this inner work. You’re not modeling perfection. I think that showing our kids that we are humans makes space for repair.

So another one that I coach on most commonly is yelling at your kids. Again, I teach feel your feelings, feel all the anger you want. Anger’s not a problem. Now there are certain actions that you take from anger that are not okay. So if you don’t wanna yell at your kids and you want to apologize for that, that would be an instance of repair where you want to say, I am so sorry I didn’t process my feelings. I was feeling so angry and I reacted to the anger instead of just allowing it. This is something mommy’s working on. I think that repair is particularly challenging because of how much shame we have. So we feel so bad about it that we almost wanna hide from it and make excuses for it. And that is one of the worst things that you can do with repair. So I like to have it as one of the standards by which I want to measure myself. Like am I owning up to my mistakes? Am I making myself human and showing them that? And what a valuable skill that they’ll learn along the way.

Aside from those sort of five standards that I have for myself, I also think about how I want to show up. I wanna show up with clean thinking. So this month inside Grow You I taught a new class on clean thinking, how to show up, where I’m taking responsibility for how I feel, where I’m not controlling, where I’m vulnerable and still, you know, showing up as the mom that I want to be. This means I’m managing my mindset and my emotions. I’m not blaming them, I’m not blaming the world. I’m not in self-pity. I’m not in that martyrdom. I’m coaching myself and coming to my family from a place of clean thinking. Am I perfect at it? Absolutely not. But that’s the standard that I want to include and sort of measure myself from.

When to evaluate yourself. I was also coaching someone recently and she said she was evaluating herself weekly. Now just imagine that you had a job outside the home and you might, and every single week you had a performance review. How stressful would that be? So stressful. So I think of reviewing how we’re doing as something you might wanna do at most quarterly, but I typically suggest annually or every six months like, hey, let me check in with how I think I’m doing now in a job setting where you go into the office and you have a uh, manager or a superior of of some sort, they’re going to talk with you. A good manager anyway is going to talk with you about what you’re doing really well and also what you can work on.

And they’re not going to have 6,000 things that are listed for how bad of a job you’re doing. They’re not going to be hyper critical and mean. So I I, you know, almost hesitated with this podcast because I don’t want you to use it against yourself. Like, oh my gosh, I didn’t validate their feelings, I’m not a good mom. That is absolutely using the tools against yourself. Don’t do that. These are sort of like standards that you wanna set for yourself so that you can feel empowered by knowing that you can sort of go through this list, okay, am I keeping them safe? Am I holding boundaries? Am I doing my job? Yes I am. And they’re all based on things you can control. How you show up, how you think, how you feel, how you act versus the tendency again, which we talked about in the beginning, which is to use our kids and their happiness and their performance or to use our house or to use other moms as the standard.

So I do think that the pros sort of outweigh the cons here in sharing this, but I do also want to mention that you don’t wanna use it against yourself and be evaluating every day and be hyper-critical. It’s just sort of guidelines that you might look at for yourself. If you want to have some standard that isn’t just spaced off of that default brain, looking at your house, looking at your kids’ grades or looking at the mom next door to evaluate how you’re doing, this is actually a much more useful way of doing it because I think that, you know, just in a role at all, understanding what it looks like for you to be good at it is useful. I mean, you could do this for any role and it can change and evolve. It’s not like set in stone. Just like companies job responsibilities and descriptions evolve. Like think about asking yourself, am I a good friend?

Now again, this isn’t based on whether your friends text you back, whether they invite you to things. It’s based on things that you can control. So you can come up with a few standards. Do I make an effort? Do I show interest in what my friends are doing? So you really can do this for any of your roles. The key is to make it dependent on what you can control and to evaluate from a really kind supportive place.

Another part of this is validation and wanting to feel validated. When validation comes internally, you need less of it from outside of you. This is the ultimate goal. But I just think as humans we naturally want to be externally validated. So there’s this balance. We’re always working towards more validation internally and yet knowing there’s the natural human tendency to want it from outside of us. I think that if you diversify your roles, you can more easily get validation from other ways. You’ll more easily feel fulfilled and validated if you have other sources of it. So I think getting it from yourself, absolutely. But what else? And where else can you look for validation? Is there something that lights you up? It might be your friendships, it might be volunteering, it might be photography, it might be, um, going to the gym and working out. It might be your job if you work outside the home, it doesn’t really matter what it is. It’s just noticing that if you’re looking for all of your validation from your home or your kids, you can end up putting a lot of pressure on yourself.

I think that 100% you can get that validation from yourself and make it a habit. And I highly recommend doing that, creating a practice for validating yourself. And yet I do think that if you still would like more validation, um, diversifying where you’re getting it in your roles can be really, really powerful. So inside Grow You you get all of this and this framework in much more detail, um, videos on it and you know, I do the whiteboard and it’s just clearer. You’ll have an outline to follow. You also get lessons on creating family values so that you know kind of where your North star is, where you’re headed. Is it that we need everyone to be in the most activities and perform, um, the best or is there something bigger here? Is it relational? Is it based on family and connection? Because I don’t think this just happens, at least it hasn’t for me. So I have really created family values and identified what I want the North Star to be for our family. And um, this has been just so helpful for myself and I know for my clients as well. So if you want more of that, come on in to Grow You. Nataliebacon.com/coaching. And with that, I will talk with you next week. Take care.

If you loved this podcast, I invite you to check out Grow You my mindfulness community for moms where we do the inner work together. Head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more.