Have you ever gone from zero to 60 and freaked out with your child and then spent the next hour drowning in mom guilt? Well, today’s guest, Angie Weber, host of Mom Essentials and founder of The Parent Toolbox has a framework that genuinely changes that cycle. And she’s built it not from a textbook, but from her own healing journey through anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
And then over the years, has developed a very, very strong following of moms and dads who want to know more about how to parent from a position of calm. So in this episode, you’re going to learn about what the calm approach to parenting actually is. And it’s C-A-L-M.
And she goes through each of the letters in that acronym. She also talks about this amazing five point body check-in that helps you to just catch yourself before you hit your red brain. So that instead of responding, you actually can react more calmly.
And she talks about the critical difference between gentle parenting and permissive parenting, which lots of us have questions about. And why getting this wrong is actually costing families their boundaries. And then we talk about how to parent with real stability when you are co-parenting.
So that’s a whole nother area of parenting when you’re trying to navigate it with a partner who’s living in a different home and you’re sharing the kids. It’s tough. This is one of those conversations that really stays with you.
So hit play and please do subscribe. So you always know when we’ve got an update and share this episode to someone who will find it useful. Welcome to Sense by Meg Fora, where we make sense of the science and art of parenting.
Parenting is grey, gritty and beautiful all at once. And my life’s work as a healthcare professional is helping parents feel more confident in a season that can feel really overwhelming. In each episode, we share honest conversations with real moms, dive into the science with experts, and simply make sense of it all in practical ways.
This is your space. You’re not alone. You’re held.
So let’s unpack the journey of a lifetime with Sense. Welcome back moms and dads to Sense by Meg Fora. It is always my delight to meet you here weekly.
And as you know, every week we have either a mom or dad who join us and chat about their journey or a parenting expert, somebody who has developed or learned or had some sort of scientific background in something very niche within parenting. And today is just such an episode. We are very lucky to be joined by Angie Weber.
She is the owner of the Parent Toolbox and the developer of the Calm Approach to Parenting. And so when I was approached actually by her to be on her podcast, I thought, I wonder what it is that she does. And when I started to investigate, I realised that her calm approach really resonated with me.
As a mom of three, I know how tough parenting can be and how out of control we can feel and how bringing a little bit of calm to our world is something that really resonates with us all. So I am really delighted today to welcome you, Angie, here. Thank you so much for having me, Meg.
I’m excited to chat with you. It’s wonderful to have you. So I think let’s start off and just talk a little bit about your journey, what it was that brought you to parent coaching.
And was there something in your journey that was just kind of an aha moment that made you realise that this is a journey you wanted to go down?
[Speaker 1] (3:18 – 6:08)
Yeah, absolutely. So my original background and my first part of my career was in marketing. I helped run a really small marketing company here in the States.
And I really enjoyed what I did, but I also, through the seven years that I was there, went through a lot of changes. I had gotten married. I always wanted to be a mom.
And so I got pregnant, found out it was twins a couple of weeks later. So that was a whole nother surprise. And I was so excited to have them.
But looking back on my motherhood journey, I realised that I got so caught up in my professional life of hearing these messages that I had to add more value in that area to be seen as successful. I kind of missed out on my children’s like first couple of years, I say. I was there physically with them, but mentally I was always thinking about work, always wondering what was going on at the office.
I actually ended up going back a little bit early for maternity leave. And so I got the opportunity a couple of years later, they were about three years old, and they’re the ones who kind of prompted me to quit my full-time job and pursue my passion of holistic health because it was an opportunity to be with them more. Because I all of a sudden had this awakening of what have I been doing with my life?
I created these really cool humans and I feel like I don’t even get to spend enough time with them. And so in my journey, that worked out really great. So I was able to really pursue my passion with holistic health, essential oils, things like that.
Did that for a few years full-time. And then of course the pandemic came in 2020, which no matter where you are, that had an effect on you. Before the pandemic actually hit though, I’d went through some personal trauma that led me on a huge healing journey.
And so I had taken some courses, programmes to understand my mental health better. And I did an intensive outpatient treatment programme for anxiety, depression, and PTSD. And as I was going through that, I was learning these skills that I thought, wait a minute, why didn’t I know this before?
Because as I started learning more about myself and bringing those tools into our home, I saw the relationship with my children change, with my husband change, their relationships together changed as they started adapting to some of these new tools. And so I did a class called the Parent Toolbox, which was about holistic health and therapeutic concepts and techniques. And so many moms afterwards were saying, why didn’t we know this?
Why aren’t we teaching our kids this? And so that’s really when I pivoted my business to the Parent Toolbox, developed the calm approach to parenting and really just have the overall goal to create more communication and connection and calm in homes by working directly one-on-one with the parents.
[Speaker 2] (6:09 – 6:24)
Love that. So communication, connection, and calm, like three very clear words that stood out in that sentence because my next question is gonna be, what problem were you trying to solve? And of course it was that, it was getting parents to connect and be a little calmer in their journey.
[Speaker 1] (6:24 – 8:08)
Yeah, absolutely. And I wasn’t, I was actually thinking about this last night. I like to tell my parents, like we get handed down our tools from our parents who got handed down their tools, who got handed down their tools.
And I know you talk a lot about technology and we can kind of look at that with our parenting tools as well as the world is just so much different now. And so we need different tools and we can upgrade our parenting tools, not saying we’re gonna shame our parents for what they did or how they did it because they did the best with what they had at the time. But now we really have the opportunity as we have more awareness and knowledge and understanding that we can do things differently.
And I will say that’s probably one of the biggest things parents tell me is they want to parent differently than how they were parented. And so in my household, when I grew up, my dad was very quick to raise his voice. I won’t say that I did that a tonne, but I know there were times when my kids were younger that I definitely raised my voice, but I was thinking about it last night and I was like, I might still get stern with my kids because I like to hold boundaries with them.
However, I haven’t yelled yelled in a really, really long time. I can’t even honestly remember when I’ve raised my voice to the point of yelling, yelling in our household. And I think that’s what so many moms really struggle with is they go from zero to 60 and then they yell and they get upset and then they go through this whole other cycle of feeling guilt and shame.
And then they just spiral that way, feeling like they’re the world’s worst mom. So how could we upgrade their parenting tool so that they can feel more confident as a mom and have better relationships with their kids?
[Speaker 2] (8:09 – 8:20)
Amazing, absolutely incredible. So is that, is the strategy that you use then when you kind of improving, bringing calm to the home, is it the calm parenting that you go through?
[Speaker 1] (8:21 – 11:03)
Yeah, yeah. So the calm approach to parenting is an acronym. So every letter stands for a different foundational piece.
So I like to make it very clear as well with parents when I’m working with them that every family is so unique and different. Before we hit record, we were talking how I have twins. They are 11 years old right now.
One’s a boy, one’s a girl. They are similar in some ways, but obviously very, very different in others. So I know that I need to have different tools for my son than I do for my daughter, even when I want the same outcome.
And so when I walk families through the calm approach, I make it very clear that every family is unique and different. And we’re gonna have to tailor each of these steps to what they need, want, and based on their kids as well. Because again, everyone’s different.
Every child is different. So I’m not someone who thinks that there’s a one size fits all out there for parenting styles, because there are so many. I think that we can take little bits from each one.
So the C of the calm approach stands for compassionate communication. So there we talk a lot about different ways to communicate with our children. Also the importance of actually listening because that is a huge piece of communication.
And we go into a lot of pieces about how can we connect differently with our children, especially in the face of things being so digital and technology having such a large impact on our homes. The A stands for awareness and accountability. So that is the kind of a two piece part as well where we wanna become curious with our parenting.
We live in a really reactive society. So we are very quick to assume, we’re very quick to put a bandaid on things. And I really encourage parents to take a step back, become curious, become kind of like little detectives so that we can truly understand what the behaviour is that our children are showing us.
Because especially if they’re younger, sometimes they don’t have those communication skills. So they tell us what they need through their behaviours. So understanding that.
And then accountability is really that piece of like making sure that we’re holding ourselves accountable and that our children are understanding accountability through consequences, which are not bad. They’re very important in parenting and child development. The L is learning emotional regulation.
So really understanding when those emotions are coming up and how we can process and express them in healthy ways. And then M is mindful modelling. So really the saying of do as I say, not as I do.
One of my really big goals is to change that to do as I do because our children are watching us all of the time. And so we need to make sure that we are modelling the correct behaviour for them that we’d like to see them model as well.
[Speaker 2] (11:03 – 11:34)
That’s amazing. I absolutely love that. I mean, you’ve encapsulated really very mindful parenting in each of those different pieces.
I’m really interested in the compassion and communication piece, particularly with little ones, because I think sometimes it might be easier to do it when they’re older, but when you’ve got an 18 month old who is being irrational and difficult and digging in their heels, how do you with that child, can you give us a scenario with a very little one, how you would be able to bring compassion and communication into that journey?
[Speaker 1] (11:34 – 12:53)
Yeah, so when they’re younger like that, it’s definitely one of the biggest pieces is getting down to their level and making sure that we are trying to be the calm in the storm as much as we can. And so we may have to pull from some of the other pieces as well, like learning emotional regulation, because when our children are dysregulated, it’s really easy for us to become dysregulated, and then that’s not gonna help the situation at all. So if a child who’s 18 months, for example, is having a fit, is throwing things, the first thing we can do is get down to their level and not raise our voice, but talk to them just as we’re talking right now, because if we raise our voices, it’s really not gonna do anything.
It’s like when you are trying to talk to someone who doesn’t speak your language and you think by talking louder, somehow it’s gonna translate to them, it just doesn’t work like that. So we wanna make sure that we can stay calm, get down to their level, talk to them, and also simplify things too. They don’t have the brain development, they’re not gonna sit down and say, well, mom, this is what’s going on right now, and this is why I’m crying and I wanna throw things.
So we can do stuff like choices, for example, like we don’t use this to throw, would you like to do A or do B and then leave it at that without trying to give them a million different situation options as well is one thing that they could try do.
[Speaker 2] (12:53 – 13:11)
Very interesting. So I would love to know what your thoughts are on the kind of gentle parenting kind of approach that a lot of parents, where children need to be happy all the time and when you never say no to them. And I mean, can you give us a little bit of what way you think that is landing us?
[Speaker 1] (13:11 – 14:34)
Yeah, from the stuff that I see a lot, I think gentle parenting in a nutshell gets a really bad reputation because I think it gets confused with permissive parenting a lot. So, gentle parenting is typically seen as the, you never say no to your kids, you don’t hold any boundaries. So people can see that as you’re raising these entitled brats type of attitude, but really gentle parenting at the core of the definition does have consequences and boundaries ingrained in it.
But again, what happens is it gets confused with permissive parenting where we’re not holding boundaries, we let the kids do whatever they want because we don’t wanna disrupt their lives, we don’t want them to be upset. And so I think that’s one of the biggest disconnects. I’m very much of like, hey, let’s have our children thrive because that’s what we wanna do.
We wanna see them happy and thrive. And we still need to put in expectations, boundaries, consequences are such an important piece of it so that we’re not just creating really great kids, we’re creating really amazing humans that they’re gonna grow up to be. So us trying to mow out all the obstacles to never have them fail or never have a discomfort is doing a much greater disservice to them than when we’re trying to just make everything butterflies and rainbows for them 100% of the time.
[Speaker 2] (14:34 – 17:22)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s a very important differentiation that gentle parenting doesn’t have to be permissive parenting. I think it’s very important that we see that.
The reality of gentle parenting with boundaries is that you are going to face your child’s wrath. You’re going to have a child who’s very angry with you, very frustrated, and actually very unhappy sometimes because part of not being in the permissive parenting cycle means that you’ve got to draw in some really firm boundaries and say, well, that is not how we’re doing it. We are going along it this way because it’s the better way to do it and I’m the adult in the room.
And I think what I feel for parents now is that there’s a lot of noise, particularly on social media and the snippets around gentle parenting being the way to do it and that your child has to be happy and in this happy state. And actually, parents must be asking, well, what happens to the boundaries? How do I put these in place?
And so I think that that is really something that’s very tricky. I always talk about the ABC approach to parenting, to any discipline. A being acknowledge, which is acknowledge either the intent or the feeling behind the behaviour.
So I know that like a child throwing a temper tantrum at four o’clock in the afternoon, I know it’s the end of the day and you’re probably hungry now. You know, like what’s going on behind it? Get underneath it.
The B is the boundary. Like you absolutely cannot keep jumping on the sofa because you’re gonna hurt yourself or you cannot watch screens now because we’ve had our screen time today. And in the choice, which you actually mentioned, which is between two things that you can manage and that you think that are within the remit that is okay for them at that time.
And when parents can go there, it’s ideal. The difficulty comes, and you actually mentioned it just now, is that when you are in your red brain, so when you are in flight, fright and fight, when your sympathetic nervous system is screaming because you’re tired, you’re sleep deprived, you’re overstretched, your child’s throwing a temper tantrum, made a mess, whatever it is, it’s very hard to get yourself into a green brain, into your prefrontal cortex sufficiently to actually go, hold on, let’s be rational here. Let’s be the adult in the room, ABC approach to parenting. Do you have any, and I’m sure that it comes into your mindful side of it as well in your regulation, is do you have advice for parents?
When you’re going into your red brain, how do you recoup? How do you get yourself back into your green brain? Today’s Dose of Sense is brought to you by ParentSense, the expert-based parenting app that gives you daily support from pregnancy to sleep feeding and daily routines.
Take the guesswork out of parenting, download ParentSense today and use the code SENSE50 for 50% off. Do you have advice for parents? When you’re going into your red brain, how do you recoup?
How do you get yourself back into your green brain?
[Speaker 1] (17:22 – 21:44)
Yeah, absolutely. And then I wanna say something really quick about boundaries too, that it’s not just something that you should say one time and expect your child to remember. I’m very passionate about families coming together and discussing what the boundaries are, especially if they have older children or older elementary age, getting towards preteen, really talking and helping them understand the why behind the boundaries and then also attaching a consequence that makes sense.
That’s where a lot of power struggles come in is when we say, oh, you didn’t clean your room, so you can’t go to the birthday party in two weeks. That’s just, that’s not something that the children can necessarily correlate together that makes sense. And that’s where power struggles come in.
So I just wanna, boundaries can be challenging to implement, but the more you can communicate with your children and with your family and showing the reasoning behind it and just the repetitiveness of it, that can help a lot to kind of ease some of that tension and have it escalate into a fight, for example. And then yes, how do we get into our green brain versus our red brain? And this is why I love to work with the parents directly.
I don’t go in, I’m not super nanny. I don’t sit there in the corner saying, this is what you’re doing wrong and I’m the perfect parent because I’m definitely not. But I love working with the parents because we sometimes have a harder job with trying to rewire our brain and change those behaviours and habits that we’ve had for so long.
Whereas once we are able to make some of those changes, again, then the children see us make those changes. And at a younger age, they’re a lot more mouldable than we are in our 30s or 40s or 50s or whatever age we’re parenting at. And so one of the biggest pieces that learning that emotional regulation, because a lot of us grew up hearing things saying, why are you upset?
It’s not a big deal. Don’t get angry. Why are you crying in front of people?
And what that did is that wasn’t teaching us how to deal with these emotions that were coming up. It was telling us to suppress them and that we were wrong. And so when those emotions come up later on in life, we don’t know what to do with it.
So we push it down or we use some kind of maybe survival coping skill to deal with them, which again is not going to be the best outcome for anyone. And so once we can start really tuning into our body and understanding what the cues our body is sending us before we get into that red brain, the more we can adapt and pivot to be like, oh, I can understand that I’m starting to get really stressed out in this moment. And so now I can make a different choice and I can use a different coping skill to help me come back to what I like to call our sweet spot of emotion.
So when I work with parents, I teach them to start practising five different check-in points of their body. One, body sensations. Where is it showing up in our body?
Body movements, because feelings are energy. And so how is it trying to get out or is it making you feel very weighed down where you can’t move? What kind of thoughts are you having in that moment?
And also how fast are they coming in? If they’re super fast and you can’t comprehend them or if they’re like molasses and it doesn’t feel like you can even comprehend one at a time. And then emotions, which seems silly because you might say, well, I’m just really angry right now, Angie.
Like, what are you talking about me? You know, my kid is throwing stuff. Of course I’m angry.
But feelings have a way of masking themselves. So really digging into say, here’s my first instinct, but is there another feeling underneath that that I can figure out? And then the last one are your five senses.
Are any of them heightened or dulled in the moment? And so that might seem like a really long list to your listeners right now, where they’re like, oh my gosh, how am I ever gonna go through all of those? Every single time I’m getting dysregulated when my child is throwing a fit, but you just have to start practising it.
And as you get more in tune with your body and understanding the simple check-in points, again, the more you’re gonna be able to kind of put up that warning sign of, oh, yep, my shoulders are getting tense right now. My thoughts are increasing in speed. I can see that I’m starting to get really stressed out.
So I’m gonna take a mommy minute, as I like to call them, as long as the child is safe, saying, I need a mommy minute. Take a step out for 30 seconds and then come back in and again, get down to their level and go from there, for example.
[Speaker 2] (21:44 – 23:32)
Oh, I absolutely love that. Really, I mean, I’m going to have to take notes afterwards and put them into the show notes because that really is just, and it’s very mindful. It’s taking a moment to get into ourselves.
Where are we now and what’s happening? And I think, you know, it’s very interesting. I had a wonderful interview a few months ago with a medical doctor, psychotherapist, and she was talking about how do we centre ourselves?
How do we ground ourselves? And she said, a lot of the emotions that we have as parents actually have to do with past and future. Oh, I shouldn’t have done that yesterday or, oh no, like I’ve stuffed that thing up or I’m so furious with my child because an hour ago they did this or I made this whole meal and now they’re not eating it.
You know, it’s all history or looking forward and going, oh no, like if I give in to this, then it’s three years worth of them, you know, whatever, or they’re going to end up never being able to potty train because they’re going to walk down the aisle in their diapers, you know, so you’re kind of either thinking past or you’re thinking future. And actually what you’re talking about there is grounding yourself right here in the moment, in the now, what’s happening in my body, what’s happening in my mind, what’s happening in my senses and, you know, grounding yourself, taking a breath. A thing that I read, amazing thing that I read very recently, I’m sure you’ve seen it all over LinkedIn and so on, is how many more afferent neurones we have from our body to our brain rather than efferent neurones from our brain down to our body.
And so a lot of what happens in our brains with how we’re feeling and being in that kind of green brain, red brain comes from our body. And so now we’re understanding that taking that breath is actually the thing. It’s not the kind of, it’s not the outcome of what you’re thinking.
It is the thing that drives the way that you think, just stopping and taking a breath, taking a moment, tapping your shoulders, whatever it is that helps you to ground in the now is something that can actually regulate your thoughts as well.
[Speaker 1] (23:32 – 25:08)
Yeah, I love all that. And the more that as parents, we can come in connection with our body again, because our emotions are always sending us these cues and these signals. We just need to learn how to listen to them.
We can then communicate better with our children about what they’re feeling. So I never expect, like you wouldn’t sit down with an 18 month old and say, can you please tell me what your body sensations are right now? Because they’re not gonna know how to communicate that way.
But we can say, can you point to where this, where this is happening in your body? Or can you, you know, do you feel like you need to dance right now? And so we can start getting them really in tuned as well so that they don’t have to do all this rewiring in their adulthood.
They can really learn it and embrace it as their children. And of course, with saying that too, like I am not saying that it’s okay for our children to throw stuff or to be angry all the time, but every emotion is normal. It’s just an emotion.
And so there’s no good or bad ones necessarily. They’re all just energy. They’re all just emotions.
We all have them. And that comes into the boundaries of, okay, when you’re angry, you can express it like this, but there’s always three rules that I teach with anger too. You can’t harm yourself, you can’t harm others, and you can’t harm property that’s not supposed to be harmed.
If they wanna tear up a piece of paper because that’s how they get their energy out, right into the trash, sure, I didn’t need that piece of paper right there, but we’re not gonna throw something across the room or break a dish or go over to our siblings and hit them. So again, we can still put boundaries around those feelings and still help them really understand what those are, the emotions are, so they can properly express them.
[Speaker 2] (25:08 – 26:43)
Yeah, I love that. I call that, in the UK, they have a, in England, they have a, every business talks about health and safety, like there’s health and safety, health and safety, health and safety. And I always say to parents, you’ve got kind of two litmus tests for whether you wanna chase something down with your child or have a boundary.
The one is health and safety. So exactly as you said, if it’s gonna harm yourself, harm others or harm property, you may not do it. That is a clear boundary.
And I always talk about water wings or armbands or whatever you call them when children are learning to swim, like they don’t wanna put their armbands on, they simply don’t swim because that’s a health and safety issue, black and white. You can’t drive in the car unless you put your seatbelt on. It is just the way it is.
So if you don’t wanna put it on, you can’t come in the car. That’s a health and safety boundary. And then the second bucket of boundaries are pick your battles because some things that we chase as parents should not be chased.
And I always use the analogy of a four-year-old who wants to wear pyjamas to preschool. Well, that’s okay. They’re wearing clothes.
They happen to be the clothes they slept in the night before. Don’t pick that battle. And so, kind of giving into as many things as you can and giving them the control over as many things as you can is actually also an important default point.
So chase down the health and safety and for the rest, think twice and decide, is this really important? And it might be important because it could be saying please and thank you. And that’s manners.
And for your family values and for your culture, that’s important. You can chase it down. But is wearing pyjamas to school that important?
Maybe not. So yeah, that’s kind of the parameters I look at.
[Speaker 1] (26:43 – 27:14)
Yeah, no, that’s a great point. And I work a lot with co-parents as well. And so when you’re looking at a co-parenting situation too, I have to remind the parents that of like, what hill are you willing to die on?
And is it going to benefit your children in the long run or is it going to do more harm because you are just digging in your heels because you don’t want to be, you don’t want your ex to be right or get their way. And so, but when it comes to our kids wearing pyjamas, I mean, my goodness, my kids had the most ridiculous outfit sometimes when I was like, hey, you have mismatched socks, you still have socks on and it’s cold out. So I think we’re good to go.
[Speaker 2] (27:15 – 28:05)
Brilliant, absolutely. Well, I just love that you’ve moved on to co-parenting because I know that that’s a personal passion of yours. And you just actually alluded to something.
I mean, my husband and I have always had a great marriage. When we work hard at it, we have a great marriage. But even in the context of that great marriage, I really hate it when he’s the nicer parent.
Like, I want to be the nicer parent. I want to be the parent that the kids want to be without, you know, it’s just, it’s inside of us, even though we are a great team. I can imagine that if you are divorced or if you’re co-parenting, like you really, really do want to be the parent that’s the parent in favour.
And that will mean that there is a mismatch on the parameters and the boundaries because maybe there’s a parent who’s going to be more permissive because it makes them cooler, makes them easier. Can you help us with that? How do you advise parents to navigate that?
[Speaker 1] (28:06 – 29:59)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, co-parenting can bring in, it’s totally different challenges, which is exactly why I love working with co-parents because when I work with them, typically I work with just one parent. And so they have two different situations that they’re looking at.
One, how do I parent the best way I can when I only have my kids part of the time? And how in the heck do I navigate this relationship with my ex or soon to be ex? Because we probably don’t see eye to eye on a lot of stuff.
And honestly, there was probably a lot of miscommunication that may have led to this divorce in the first place. So now that they’re divorced, that miscommunication may continue, right? And so one of the things when it comes to co-parenting is that you need to understand kind of what we were just talking about, like what can you control and what can you not control?
You can control what happens in your house. You can control your rules, your emotions, your behaviours, your reactions. On the flip side, you cannot control your co-parent’s house rules, behaviours, reactions, emotions, everything like that.
And so it’s really coming to terms with that. And in a situation where maybe the co-parent feels like, well, you told me what to do all of our marriage and guess what? I don’t have to listen to you anymore.
That’s gonna make them even want to go the opposite way even more. And so we can’t hold onto that. What we really need to focus on again is what is in our control and how can we parent the best way we can?
Now, with that, I always say there’s research out there that shows that it’s not necessarily the divorce that has an effect on children. It is high conflict co-parenting situations that have more of an effect on children that can show up academically, behaviourally, emotionally. And so in my, for example, in my Calm Family Planner, I really enjoy telling people or co-parents about this because they’re…
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