Mich Shannon Paul explores parenting during transitions like back-to-school, using comedy to discuss emotional safety, naming feelings, and ways to support children through anxiety while sharing personal reflections and practical weekly self-care suggestions.
The host greets viewers, introduces herself and explains that this episode is the parenting edition of Comedy Through the Chaos, outlining the series' purpose.
Mich describes the project's mission—using comedy to navigate hard moments—and situates this episode within a month-long focus on safety, noting different contributors' takes and referencing a recent personal incident.
The host frames the episode around emotional safety during transitions like back-to-school, mentions generational differences in handling emotions, and shares her own background and therapy journey.
She offers parenting guidance—naming emotions, allowing 'pinwheel' of feelings, preventing shutdowns or explosions—and discusses helping her child navigate anxiety and other big feelings during transitions.
Mich reassures viewers that emotions are safe and normal, especially for marginalized communities, gives a weekly parenting/self-care suggestion to feel and manage big emotions safely, and shares her personal plans for a cleaning day.
Happy Saturday, Cadre Sphere. I hope that you are doing well. If you are not watching me on Saturday, happy whatever day it is in your world. I am Mich Shannon Paul. I'm a variety of word related things like a comedian, a corporate speaker, a voice actor, event emcee, and a benefit actioneer. And I hub out of the great state of Minnesota. And I am joining you for this parenting edition of Comedy Through the Chaos. Comedy Through the Chaos is a passion project of mine where we use comedy and laughter to help us navigate difficult things in life.
It's comedy through the chaos, not comedy in the chaos, because things are not often funny when we are in the midst. of things. And so we are going to talk about a variety of those subject matters. And so throughout the month of September, we have been given the wonderful task of speaking on the different concepts of safety here in the Cadre Sphere. So if you pop around different contributors, you'll see different takes on that and some people that probably might just go on their own route and decide not to talk about safety at all.
Earlier this week, I was talking about the safety to be weird in the of being yourself because I had one of those mom foot and mouth moments earlier this week with my kiddo and we have for the most part moved past what happened earlier this week. He seems to have forgiven his mom for the misstep of saying something wrong. But it continues to make me think about things like this. And for a lot of us here, if you're in the Midwest and regardless of if you have school-aged children, probably sometime over the last week or the last month or so, you probably have some of that back to school anxiety.
Hi, Andy, how are you? I hope the Saturday is treating you well. So when we're talking about a lot of the things that are going as we go through transitions, and so I'm gonna use the transition of back to school time for this particular lesson and conversation, but I think transitions in general, this would apply to. And it's the safety around having big emotions. And I think it's always good to have these conversations, especially if you happen to be, hello, a Gen. Xer like me, because I think that the conversation around emotions is quite foreign to a lot of people.
It might be because of the generation that you come from. It might be because of the diaspora that you are from. It might be because of the part of the country you're from. Who knows? But there's lots of times where the conversation around how you interplay with your emotions maybe was one that didn't get addressed a lot when you were younger, myself included. I came from one of those, your emotions don't matter, suck it up, deal with it, move on. Your emotions aren't important. So I spent a lot of time when I was in my personal therapy journey, figuring out how to uncork those emotions and go, yeah, your feelings do matter.
And so that's something that I try to relay more openly with my kiddo. And so when you go through these transitional periods, and as I said, we're going to use the concept of back to school transitions as one, there's been a lot of big emotions this week in our house, lots of emotions, lots of things going on. And so it's me trying to help him navigate all of the big feelings, the anxiety, the excitement, the distress, the unknowing, all of these things, and trying to help him name them, navigate them, but also understand that I am here for him, that I'm here for him and help him navigate it.
And my hope as a parent is that if I can help him name and navigate these emotions, that he'll be able to transition within those big emotions easier than what I think happens with a lot of us as we age. Because I think sometimes if we don't have the right skillset to navigate big emotions, we have two things happen. We either completely shut down and end up being in that side of things, or we end up being completely explosive. And we have a difficult time navigating how we can make things smoother for us in those in-betweens.
And so I hope that what I am doing as a parent is helping him go, you can release those emotions in little waves. You can navigate those changes. You can feel them and feel them in the whole pinwheel that you need to within the span that is appropriate so that you're not shutting down. and so that shutdown doesn't eventually turn into a giant explosion. And trust me, there are plenty of times that I wish that we did not have to deal with whatever big emotions he is dealing with at the time. But I also have to remind myself that whenever he is feeling whatever he is feeling, that is not up to me.
His feelings are not on my schedule as much as I would like them to be. I would love to be able to agendaize I like to make up words every once in a while, Mandy. I wish that I could agendize his emotions, just like I wish that I could mine. But that's not the way that it works. You feel what you feel when you feel it. And then you need to be able to go, okay, how am I going to deal with this right now? You know, how can I appropriately navigate where I am at the moment? Is there a way that I can allow this feeling to take its course in a way that will not provide some sort of harmful outcome right now?
What can I do? And I hope that the more that I'm able to go, you know, I'm here for you. I'm listening. You know what? I see you're feeling something. What are we feeling? And help him even name it. Because I don't know that this happens for everybody. I feel like once you're in a certain little group, a little age range, my kid is in that age range where a lot of things come out angry first. It's not really angry, but angry comes out first. So I gotta wait for him to go through his, what I call his pinwheel of emotions.
to figure out what the actual emotion is. And that's my job sometimes is to help him go, are we really angry? Are we really hungry? Are we really tired? I don't know. Do we have some gastrointestinal distress? Whatever it is, you know, kind of thing. We got to figure it out and really be able to put it on their agenda eyes. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, it is on my agenda. It is on my agenda. So we'll work on that. Once we get our emotions in check, then we can go on better field trips. So I'm going to have to do a scouting trip and go and check it out and then see how to best navigate it with my kiddo.
Thank you for the reminder, Andy. I appreciate that. That is my suggestion for the week is that from a parenting advice, from a caregiver standpoint, and even from the standpoint of how you are giving care to yourself. allow yourself to feel those big emotions. Figure out how those big emotions serve you, how they can guide you in the moment that you are in. And then also try to figure out how they can be less volcanic in nature because that usually isn't the way it works. But sometimes maybe you do need to erupt.
Let's just figure out a way to do it so that you are maintaining your safety as well. So It is safe to have all of those emotions. It is expected to have all those emotions. And especially, I want to say this for anyone who ends up watching me in the replay who happens to be any of our people from a different and similar diaspora to me. I think that a lot of us were encouraged to minimize our emotions from a safety standpoint because it was a perception of danger like we were. seen as aggressive or dangerous if we had too many big emotions.
And so I encourage us to figure out how to do that in a safe way now and go, you are allowed to have emotions. that isn't a negative. And so I know that is a difficult Rd. to tread for a lot of people, myself included. So we will continue to work on all of these things together. I am excited about today. This is going to sound odd to all of you. I am having a cleaning day. here. There are a variety of sorting projects that when I have time and I set side time today, I have one meeting with a client.
I'm doing a speaker coaching session with one client. But other than that, it is hanging out with my kiddo and it is cleaning up the house because I need help. And in order to provide the right setting for that help, which is having some people come in and do a deep cleaning, I need to get some of my junk and my kids' junk out of the way. So to set us up for success, I provided a nice soothing, I'm gonna put my good music on, I'm gonna put my hair up in a bonnet, and then I'm going to sort my house in a little bit.
So that is what I get to look forward to. So hopefully you get to look forward to something that is your variety of soothing and releasing today. Whatever that is, it may look different for you. Hopefully next week I'll be able to tell you a story about how I had a giant pile of wood chips delivered to my house. which is the next thing that I will agenda-ize as well. So, you know, take care of yourselves, everybody. Find some hope here in the Cadre Sphere. We're gonna continue to have our contributors try and communicate some things to you in a variety of different ways, to try and be here whenever you need to pop in and go, here's what I'm feeling right now, here's what I need to search for, hopefully there is a message for you.
when you need it. If there's something in particular that you would like us to share, please let us know. You can always drop it in the chat. You can e-mail us, you can contact us and make sure that we add that to the list of things because we'd love to hear from you. So I am off to bonnet and then clean. So thanks for joining me. I hope that the day treats you well. If it doesn't, shame on it, not shame on you. We'll talk to you soon.
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