The Stress Nanny with Lindsay Miller
Mindfulness and stress management for families raising kids with big goals, big feelings, and everything in between.
Hosted by mindfulness coach Lindsay Miller, The Stress Nanny is full of practical strategies for calming anxious kids, supporting high-achievers, and teaching emotional regulation in everyday moments. Each episode offers easy-to-use mindfulness practices, stress management tips, and confidence-building tools that empower kids (and parents!) to navigate challenges with ease. Whether you’re raising a child who struggles with big feelings, a high-performing student-athlete, or simply want a calmer home, The Stress Nanny will give you the resources and encouragement you need.
The Stress Nanny with Lindsay Miller
Ep 179 What if Discouragement is Just a Feeling, Not an Identity?
Have you ever cringed when your child declared "I'm the worst!" during a challenging homework session? That moment of self-defeating language offers a powerful opportunity for transformation—if you know how to respond.
The latest episode of the Summer Skills Series tackles reframing, a deceptively simple tool with profound impacts on how children view themselves during difficult moments. This technique separates feelings from identity, turning global, hopeless statements like "I'm never going to figure this out" into manageable, temporary experiences. When consistently applied, reframing helps children develop resilience and a growth mindset that serves them far beyond academic challenges.
What makes this approach so effective is how it acknowledges emotions while creating pathways forward. Rather than dismissing feelings or rushing to fix problems, effective reframing validates the struggle while maintaining agency. "You're feeling discouraged right now" communicates a fundamental truth: people feel feelings, but they are not those feelings. This distinction allows children to work through emotions rather than becoming stuck in them.
The episode breaks down exactly how to implement this technique, from managing your own triggered responses to using active listening as your foundation. You'll learn specific language patterns that help children navigate discouragement, concrete examples of effective reframes, and strategies for staying present during challenging interactions. Whether your child struggles with homework frustration, social anxiety, or sports performance, these tools provide a consistent framework for supporting their emotional growth.
Ready to transform how your child navigates challenges? Listen now and discover how small shifts in language can create massive shifts in mindset. Share your own reframing successes in the comments—what strategies have worked in your family?
Lindsay Miller is a distinguished kids mindfulness coach, mindfulness educator and host of The Stress Nanny Podcast. She is known for her suitcase tricks and playful laugh. When she's not cheering on her daughter or rollerblading on local trails with her husband, you can find her using her 20+ years of child development study and mindfulness certification to dream up new ways to get kids excited about deep breathing. Having been featured on numerous podcasts, platforms and publications, Lindsay’s words of wisdom are high impact and leave a lasting impression wherever she goes.
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You're listening to the Stress Nanny Podcast and I'm your host, lindsay Miller. I'm here to help you keep an eye on your family's stress levels. In our fast-paced lives, the ability to manage stress has never been more important for kids or adults. When it comes to stress, we have two choices we can decrease stress or increase our resilience to it. Here on the number eight ranked stress podcast, I interview experts and share insights to help you do both. When you tune in each week, you'll bring your stress levels down and your resilience up, so that stress doesn't get in the way of you living your best life. I'm so glad you're here. Welcome to the Stress Nanny Podcast. I'm your host, lindsay Miller, and I'm delighted that you're here today for another episode of our Summer Skills Series.
Speaker 1:So these are episodes where we are applying tools of emotional regulation to small moments throughout the summer to help us use those tools more consistently once school starts and life gets a little bit more crazy and busy. So today, what we're going to be talking about is reframing. This is a simple tool that makes a massive difference, and I'm going to go over why in just a minute, but I just want to start out by emphasizing that this may seem like a very elementary or simple way of addressing a problem, but when you use it consistently over the longterm, it has a significant impact on how your interactions with your kids go or with anyone for that matter, and also on how they see themselves, and that's the key. If we can help them reframe the way that they see themselves, especially when they're struggling, we give them a massive gift in terms of their ability to adopt a growth mindset in challenging situations in or outside of our home. And so this tool is one of my absolute all-time favorites. It's one I use with my clients every single week and it's one we use in our house, you know, multiple times a day, because it really does change the way that a child sees themselves, and that it's just. I can't overstate how important that is for growing minds to see themselves as capable and resilient, and this tool is what fosters that kind of attitude in kids. So here we go. So when we reframe, what we do is we kind of build on these other skills we've been talking about.
Speaker 1:So response versus reaction, and then active listening reframing, you know, utilizes both. So in a situation where a child says something that kind of makes us cringe and we're like, oh, I'm so sad that you see yourself that way. Or like, oh, I hurts my heart to hear you say that about yourself. In those moments we often have our own reaction right and we might say, like don't say that, or like that's not true. And then we also sometimes like, sometimes we'll also reframe after we have that initial reaction, but a lot of times it kind of like hurts our heart and it's hard for us to respond in an intentional way.
Speaker 1:So a lot of the reaction response work here is going to be for us as the parent. When we engage in the situation, we're going to need to be intentional about our response. And then we're going to use the active listening skills that we cultivated last week to help us create that reframe. So we're going to notice our feelings, we're going to really listen and clarify what's going on and then we're going to just like shift the words a little bit. We're still going to be true to what they're saying, but we're going to clarify for them and we're going to give them a pathway through. Again, I'm going to go over that in just a second. But the things that we're going to say in this moment require us to be really present, because we're going to have to process our own feelings about it. We're going to need to actively connect with what our kid is feeling and then we're going to find the words that help all of us move through a little bit more effectively.
Speaker 1:So the words that we use matter right, and when we're in a situation, say, where our kids are doing homework and I hear this from clients where you know like they're in the middle of solving a problem and they can't figure it out, they're like I'm the worst. I'm the worst at you know, fill in the blank of the subject or I'm the worst in general, like I'm the worst, I'm never going to figure this out. And a lot of the client work that I do is around growth mindset, and so, as we're talking about different growth mindset ideas, one of the important things is that we see ourselves like as a person having a moment, instead of globalizing that moment. So in this situation, if we're sitting there, our kid is at the kitchen table and we hear I'm the worst, I'm never going to figure this out with some, you know, like fist slamming or throwing papers or just like exasperated size, then that's when we like put our tools to work Right, and we're like oh, it sounds like you're feeling really discouraged right now. Tell me what's going on. Okay, now it's a simple reframe, right, like in from. I am the worst, I'm never going to figure this out.
Speaker 1:Our reflection back to the kid, our active listening, is it sounds like you're feeling discouraged. So we figured out the feeling and we say, right now we're going to conceptualize it as like a moment in time, not everything about you, and then tell me what's going on. So then we invite the child to then use, like, their logical sequencing part of the brain to connect with the emotion and then, like, create a narrative that's going to help them move through the moment. And as we are listening, we're going to continue to reframe so that we help them, like, have a momentum forward instead of that feeling of stuck. And it's a really simple thing and we can do that with words. So let's break that down a little bit in a little bit more detail.
Speaker 1:So again, the child says I am the worst, I'm never going to figure this out. So this is where we use our active listening and we're going to say like, okay, instead of feeling what, we're going to notice first our own response right, like we might be feeling exasperated, frustrated, we might be feeling like I don't have time for this. We might, you know, there might be any number of responses we have personally. We sort those, we notice them, we don't respond from that place. We like let those thoughts come and go, we normalize them and say, yeah, like I'm having a rough day, there's a lot going on right now. Like it makes sense that I'm feeling frustrated, I'm going to so that I can be productive in this exchange with my kid and then.
Speaker 1:So then we say, okay, our active listening is telling me that my kid is feeling discouraged, right, like, if I'm listening and I'm really like mining what the feeling is behind, I am the worst. I'm never going to figure this out. That's discouragement, because that's the sense of, like you know, hopelessness. We're not going to be able to move through this math problem or science problem or English essay, whatever it is that we're working on. Like I am stuck. And when we feel discouraged and helpless, we're, we're not in a position to take effective action, right, but if someone can come and help us recognize, like, oh, this is discouragement. It's really normal to feel discouraged when you're learning something new. That's what everyone feels. The important thing is that you keep trying and eventually that discouragement will turn into confidence and then you know, like those types of situations, you could use your own words.
Speaker 1:But when we normalize the discouragement in a moment where a child is learning something new, we give them permission to feel it and then, once they have permission to feel it, they can move through it right. So us being able to identify what's at the heart of the words is going to be key to this reframe and what we do in that situation. So again, if we reframe I'm the worst too it sounds like you're feeling really discouraged right now. Just by changing those words a little bit, what we do is we separate the feeling from the person, so you're not a person who's the worst, I am the worst. It becomes a like a part of the identity, right? I'm never going to figure this out Like this is all like a permanent part of your identity, right?
Speaker 1:When we say something like it sounds like you're feeling really discouraged right now. We separate the feeling from the person, so you are not discouragement yourself, you are feeling discouraged, and while it feels like a big feeling and is taking over all of your feelings right now it's just still a feeling. You're a whole beautiful person who is feeling discouraged at the moment. And then the other thing we do with that reframe when we say it sounds like you're feeling really discouraged right now, we take it from a global situation I am the worst. It's like a universal global statement Like this is how it has been, this is how it is now, this is how it will always be. I am the worst, right. But when we say you're feeling discouraged right now, that takes it from hopeless into situational. So instead of it being this hopeless, global, always has been, always will be statement, it becomes like oh, you're a person who's feeling a lot of different things and right now you're feeling discouraged. Yesterday you're feeling excited, tomorrow you might feel angry. People feel feelings. People are not feelings. So again, we don't have to say all that, and this doesn't.
Speaker 1:This isn't about making it into a lecture where we explain each of these things, but I'm just giving you like insight into why these small and simple reframes have a massive impact. So, with those, just that one sentence, right. So you hear, I'm the worst, I'm never going to figure this out. And then you reflect back it sounds like you're feeling really discouraged right now. Tell me what's going on. You have separated the feeling from the person. You have made the situation like a true situational exchange instead of something global. That's always going to be this way, and you open yourself up to learn more.
Speaker 1:If the child says like the teacher didn't explain it right and I don't understand how to do it and my friends aren't available and there's just no way I'm going to figure this out, then again you can say like wow, it feels like you're really feeling stuck and it is so hard to feel stuck. Feeling stuck is one of the worst things I I would say I'm allergic to helplessness, but I but I hate that feeling. But when we notice that's what we're feeling, we can work with it right and we can sit with it. But if I fight helplessness and I'm like no, no, no, you're not, you know you're not feeling helpless, then I'm not actually giving my child the opportunity to engage with A the feeling and then B the solution. So if I say, oh my gosh, helplessness is so hard to feel, I hate feeling helpless too.
Speaker 1:Let's figure out what we can do in this situation to see if we can make it feel a little less helpless, right? Is there anyone else you could call? Could we look online, you know, for some tutorials or a support or a solution? You know, if it's math are we like is there a Khan Academy tutorial or is there something on YouTube that could help us? I mean, I'm not a big fan of using chat GPT to like write our essays, but is chat GPT something we could consult right now, right?
Speaker 1:So all of the things we're like teaching our child in this moment is like how to work through this feeling that they're feeling. That feels really like uncomfortable. But if we're fighting, like we're not even willing to feel that feeling or sit with them in it, that's where we're like just gloss over that, don't feel helpless, just do something different or figure it out Like you'll get there. Those things are all great and it's good to encourage them. But when we can really sit with them in that moment and hear what they're saying and understand the feeling that they're having, then we can like problem solve from their vantage point. Right, and instead of just throwing out ideas from a far away place, we're like sitting with them in that moment and being like, yeah, this helpless feeling about your homework is awful, let's figure out how to move through Right.
Speaker 1:A lot of times, as we are in these different situations, we get triggered. We aren't able to reframe because we're having a hard time managing our thoughts about the situation. So if we're not able to manage our mind in that moment, it's going to be really tricky for us to reframe. And examples of not managing our mind are we may spin off into worry about why our kid feels this way, what it means for their future, how they felt this way last week, how it's irritating to us and we have so many things to do and we're trying to make dinner how this emotion might stir up something in us because we maybe didn't like this subject also and we're feeling, you know, a sense of our own previous discouragement about it.
Speaker 1:Whatever it is, it's all normal that this happens and that it triggers different things in us. But the key is to mindfully move through that right. We can be present, recognize that that's happening, let those thoughts go and then choose a reframe. Because if we respond from one of those places, like if we respond from our our feeling of frustration and like timing and I don't have time for this right now and like those are the thoughts that we're kind of operating from. It's going to be really hard for us to use a reframe in a way that is effective and that does not to say we need to take 30 minutes to address it, cause we don't always have that Right, but we often don't have that. But what we can do is just like take the 30 seconds to let our own emotions move through and then reframe, you know, uh, and that's, that's the