Many times during our parenting journey, our kids will say things that will help ground us and understand ourselves and live a little bit better.
Many times, we look at our children as though they may not know a lot, or that they are too young or too immature to turn to when we need them the most. However, we neglect to realize that our kids watch, see, and hear everything in the world around them, and because of this, they can give us a lot of solid advice that we never knew we needed.
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Sometimes, when we have big meetings or events, we can get nervous.
It is natural for any person to feel nervous or anxious for important meetings or events that can come up in life. Sometimes, we are so nervous, that we let our nerves get the best of us and it can throw us off. We wouldn’t think to turn to our children, but they can be extremely helpful in the matter.
Gwenyth Todebush, a mom from Michigan, was feeling nervous about an upcoming meeting.
The mom shared with Good Morning America that she relayed to her son she was feeling rather nervous about a parent-teacher conference she had that day. She told her son she was “feeling a bit nervous” for the meeting and her son, surprisingly, met her with some completely solid advice she had never expected.
Her 5-year-old son, Clark, said he “always gets nervous.”
When she had told her son she was nervous, his response was: “Mama, I am nervous all the time. I know what to do.” From there, Clark was able to give his mother a ton of nice life advice that he learned over the short 5 years of his own life. In the end, when his mom shared the advice on Twitter, it went viral.
The mom was rather surprised.
“Before that tweet, I had 300 followers and it was mostly just a few moms that actually interacted with me. After the tweet, everything just exploded!” she wrote via her personal Twitter account.
The thread she shared with her son’s advice now has nearly 94,000 likes and has been retweeted over 17,000 times.
Some of the advice her son gave was simple.
One piece of advice he gave his mother was, “Don’t get distracted and your feet will stay on the sidewalk and not too full of snow.”
Another was, “You gotta take a deep breath and you gotta do it again.”
Some of his words were very, very powerful.
“You gotta say your affirmations in your mouth and your heart. You say, ‘I am brave of this meeting!’, ‘I am loved!’, ‘I smell good!’ And you can say five or three or ten until you know it,'” Clark told his mother.
Clark also told his mom she should “appreciate the good stuff in life.”
Clark told his mom that when life is hard, we should appreciate the good things. Find the good in every day. He said, “Think about the donuts of your day! Even if you cry a little, you can think about potato chips!”
Another piece of advice was about having big confidence in yourself.
Clark also shared that his mother should have “confidence” in herself. “You gotta walk big. You gotta mean it. Like Dolly on a dinosaur. Because you got it,” Clark shared with his mother.
He also said that even if the day is “bad,” she can always get a “hug.”
Clark’s mom said the outpour of love and appreciation for her son’s “advice” changed her perspective.
“I think stuff kids say resonates with people so often because we as adults have so much that we know and think about, but when we hear it simplified through a child’s lens, it’s easier to find the distilled heart of what matters,” Todebush told Good Morning America.
And, many of these things stem from your own parenting lessons and styles.
“We had been working on a lot of coping mechanisms and such, but I think it’s normal to assume kids aren’t listening to you that hard, only to find that they are really soaking up everything you say,” she said.
What a wonderful child and family!
