The Daily Dad

You Don’t Even Realize How Much You Say It

Mar 22, 2024

02:50

Snipd AI

The podcast dives into how seemingly innocent phrases impact parent-child relationships, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing children and being mindful of the messages we unknowingly convey.

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Quick takeaways

Parents need to prioritize spending quality time with their children as the most important 'work' they have.

Small phrases and actions can unintentionally convey messages of disinterest and make children feel like a burden.

Deep dives

Importance of Expressing Love and Prioritizing Children

It is crucial for parents to communicate their love to their children and make them feel valued and important. Despite our genuine love for our kids, we often unknowingly send signals that make them feel like a burden or inconvenience. The podcast highlights how small phrases like 'shush, I'm working' can have a significant impact on children, conveying unintentional messages of disinterest. Parents need to be mindful of the subtle cues they send and ensure that they prioritize their children by recognizing that spending time with them is the most important 'work' they have.

The Impact of Words on Parent-Child Relationships

3min

So why on earth do we so often signal the opposite? Literally and figuratively, we send the message that they’re bothering us, that they’re a distraction, a burden, annoying. As Evelyn McDonnell writes in her fascinating book The World According to Joan Didion, Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo once wrote down a list of her mother’s sayings. They were: “Brush your teeth,” “Brush your hair,” and “Shush, I'm working.”

Only later do we realize what we’re saying to them—as Didion did tragically in her haunting book Blue Nights—how this hurt them, how it contradicted what we felt deep down inside. We were just busy in that moment! We just needed to finish something real quick! We didn’t mean anything by it!

Of course, we have to make a living. Sometimes we do have to finish things. Some things are important. We just have to make sure that we value what really is important, that we remember, as we say in the March 22nd entry in The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids, our kids aren’t a distraction from our work, they are our work.

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