Delight in Parenting with Dajana Yoakley

Think about the last time you tried to calm your child down and it went sideways.
Maybe you crouched down and said, in your most measured voice, “Let’s take some deep breaths together,” and your child screamed louder. Maybe you tried every tool you’ve collected, and the meltdown grew anyway, and underneath your patience you could feel your own frustration rising.
And afterward, did you find yourself wondering what you were doing wrong?
Have you ever noticed that the things you know perfectly well when everyone is calm seem to vanish the moment your child falls apart?
My guest this week knows that feeling from the inside, and her story surprised me.
Jamie Lynn Tatera was already a mindfulness educator when her first daughter was born. Her daughter was a little sensory sensitive, and she had meltdowns whenever she got overloaded. So Jamie Lynn did exactly what her training told her to do. She used her mindfulness techniques. She helped her breathe.
And she felt like she was making things worse.
So she went to see a therapist, thinking that maybe something from her own childhood was getting in the way of her parenting. Her therapist listened, and then said something Jamie Lynn wasn’t expecting: “I think you need self-compassion.”
That sent her to California to train with Dr. Kristin Neff and Dr. Christopher Germer, the creators of the Mindful Self-Compassion program. And what she found there wasn’t a better technique for her daughter. It was something about herself.
As she put it, she had a fix-it habit. When she was struggling, she would try to fix herself, to make herself better with all the tools she knew. Nothing wrong with those tools. But she had no practice with the other half. In her words: “I wasn’t so skilled at being with myself when I struggled. And therefore I was not so skilled at being with my daughter when she struggled.”
Sit with that one for a second, because I did.
Our kids don’t only need our strategies. They need us to be able to stay present with something hard without rushing to make it stop. And most of us can’t do that for our children because we’ve never once done it for ourselves.
In our conversation, Jamie Lynn goes much deeper than I expected, and honestly, a few moments landed hard for me:
* Why perfectionism in parenting comes from shame, and what that means for those of us who are trying so hard to do this right that we’ve made ourselves anxious.
* Why she stopped calling it the inner critic when she works with families and started calling it “the unhelpful helper,” and what changes when you hear that voice and think, “I must be scared,” instead of believing what it says.
* The two sides of self-compassion, the gentle and the strong, and why having only one leaves you off balance.
* What happens in a child’s mind when a parent can’t show up consistently, and why children so often conclude that something is wrong with them rather than something is wrong with their parent. This part connects directly to how shame travels down through generations.
* What to actually say to your child on the days your best is, in her words, two thumbs down. She gives the exact words she uses with her own kids, and they include the sentence most of us never heard growing up.
* Why she says that when shame really has hold of her, she doesn’t try to practice self-compassion alone. She phones a friend. And why that counts.
And her answer to the question I asked near the end, about the legacy we received and the legacy we’re choosing to leave.
She also mentions that after more than a decade of teaching this work, she hasn’t mastered it. “If I start to think I’ve mastered it, I probably am losing it,” she told me, “because part of self-compassion is that I’m on the learning team.”
That might be my favorite thing anyone has said on this podcast.
Listen to the full conversation here.
It’s worth your walk, your commute, or your folding-laundry hour. And if you’ve ever felt like you know exactly the parent you want to be and can’t quite reach her when it counts, I think you’ll hear yourself in this one.
Jamie Lynn also shared a free resource with our listeners, her Feelings Habit Animal quiz, which you and your kids can take together. The quiz comes from Jamie’s Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids, which my kids and I would highly recommend! Super fun read with lots of animal friends represented in the framework of self compassion! My kids and I also took Jamie’s course for Kids and Families on self compassion and my kids loved it!
Want to go deeper than one conversation?
Everything Jamie Lynn and I talked about in this episode comes back to one thing: knowing about self-compassion and being able to reach for it when you’re flooded, ashamed, or exhausted are two different experiences. The first one takes an hour of listening. The second one takes practice.
That’s exactly why I trained to teach Mindful Self-Compassion, and I’m hosting a free live session where we’ll look at this together.
Free Info Session: The Voice Your Child Will Carry for LifeWednesday, September 30th at 12pm CT/1pm ETWith me and my co-teacher, Ariane Arpels- Josiah
In about an hour, I’ll walk you through the three parts of self-compassion and why most of us have only ever tried one of them, the reason being hard on yourself makes the next hard moment harder instead of easier, and what your child is quietly learning from the way you treat yourself when you fall short. We’ll do one short practice together so you can feel what this is like, and I’ll share the details of my upcoming 8-week Mindful Self-Compassion course for anyone who wants to keep going.
No meditation experience needed. Bring your coffee and your questions.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit delightinparenting.substack.com/subscribe

Have you ever stood outside your child’s bedroom door at nine at night, completely done for the day, and thought, “Why is this still so hard?”
If bedtime in your house comes with one more hug, one more story, one more “can you just stay a little longer,” this conversation is for you.
I’m sitting down again with Clara Roulev, a Peaceful Parenting coach, mind-body coach, and the voice behind Share Peace Parenting. Clara found this work the way a lot of us do. She realized that everything she’d studied and believed about parenting wasn’t always available to her in the hardest moments, and that her own nervous system needed just as much attention as her kids’ did. Since then, she’s built her practice around helping parents understand what’s actually happening in the body during those tough moments, especially when anxiety shows up.
And it shows up a lot at bedtime.
In this episode, Clara and I talk about why bedtime asks so much of both you and your child. It’s completely normal to feel exhausted and touched-out by the end of the day, and it’s just as normal for your child’s nervous system to be running on empty too, just from a different angle. We walk through what’s really happening when a child who slept fine last week suddenly can’t fall asleep without you in the room: how separation, darkness, and a quiet, understimulated mind can all pull that need to stay close to you for protection.
I know it’s hard when you’ve spent all day validating, connecting, and staying calm, only to hit bedtime and feel like none of it worked. Clara offers a reframe here that I think a lot of you will recognize yourselves in: calm and confidence are not the same thing. A child can learn to settle down and still walk away from hard moments believing they can only be okay once the scary feeling disappears. What you’re actually building toward is a child who can feel uncomfortable and still trust that they’ll be fine, and that takes something different than simply calming a child down in the moment.
We also get into the practical side. Clara shares how she and her son came up with a plan together for the restless, wiggly energy that shows up right around bedtime, and why bringing your child into the problem-solving, instead of handing them a solution, makes such a difference. We talk about the difference between forcing a child through discomfort alone, which can leave a small trauma behind, and standing beside them while they do something hard. Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to face something scary when you know someone’s right there with you? That’s the whole idea.
By the end of this conversation, you’ll have a clearer picture of what’s underneath your child’s bedtime resistance, and a few real starting points for building your own plan together, one that fits your specific child instead of a one-size-fits-all script.
Clara is sharing a free resource with the bedtime plan we talk about in the episode. Grab it using the link below.

Want more support with bedtime struggles? Join us for the upcoming FREE Anxiety to Confidence webinar, where I’ll be sitting down with Dr. Christopher Willard to go deeper into why anxiety shows up the way it does in our kids and what actually helps. Save your seat at delightinparenting.com/anxiety.

To learn more about Clara Roulev:
https://www.sharepeaceparenting.com/

Connect with Dajana Yoakley
Delight in Parenting
Step #1 — Get the 3 Steps to Reset Your Nervous System FREE Guide or book a FREE 20 minute consult.
https://www.delightinparenting.com
https://www.delightinparenting.com/book-online
Step #2 — Connect With The Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/delightinparentingfree
Step #3- Follow me on Social Media:
https://www.instagram.com/delightinparenting/
https://www.facebook.com/delightinparentingcoaching/
https://www.youtube.com/@DelightinParenting
https://www.linkedin.com/in/delightinparenting/


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit delightinparenting.substack.com/subscribe

Have you ever done everything the books told you to do, and your child is still anxious anyway?
You validate. You get low and slow. You say things like “I can see this is really hard” and “I’m right here.” You’ve read enough to know that shaming a scared kid never works, so you don’t shame them. You stay calm. You connect.
And somehow, the anxiety is still there tomorrow. Sound familiar?
I want to tell you about a mom I’ll call Sarah, because her story is the one that kept coming up as I recorded this week’s podcast episode.
Sarah isn’t new to this work. She knows what co-regulation means. She knows behavior is communication. When her son gets anxious at bedtime and doesn’t want her to leave, she stays, because she doesn’t want him to feel abandoned. And it helps, in the moment. He calms down.
So the next night, he needs her again. And the night after that. Then he doesn’t want to go to his friend’s house unless she stays close by. Then there’s a field trip he says he can’t do, and she doesn’t want to push, because she knows forcing him could backfire and rupture the trust she’s worked so hard to build.
Every single thing Sarah is doing comes from love. From real, hard-won knowledge. And her son’s world keeps getting smaller anyway.
It’s completely normal to feel confused by that. I know it’s hard when you’re doing everything “right” and the fear just keeps finding a new door to walk through. Bedtime. Then school. Then friendships. Then anywhere you’re not standing right next to him.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of sitting with parents like Sarah: this usually isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s a calibration problem.
You already know how to validate. You already know how to regulate yourself before you react. What nobody quite tells you is what comes after the validating. Your child says “I still don’t want to go,” and now what? Do you encourage him forward? Do you let it go for tonight? Do you hold the moment a little longer?
That gray zone right there is where the real work lives. And it’s where even the most conscious, connected parents get stuck.
Because here’s a distinction that changed everything for me: calm and confidence are not the same thing.
A child can become very good at calming down and still walk away from every hard moment believing, “I can only be okay once this feeling stops.” What we actually want for our kids is different. We want them to be able to say, “I’m anxious, I’m not sure how this is going to go, and I can still handle this.” That’s a whole different kind of strength, and it doesn’t come from comfort alone.
Calm isn’t the goal. Confidence is.
If any part of Sarah’s story sounds like your house right now, I don’t think you need more information about validation. I think you need help with the gray zone, the part in between “I hear you” and “now what do we do.”
That’s exactly what Dr. Christopher Willard and I are covering in our free live workshop:
→ From Anxiety to Confidence
We’ll walk through why the same fear keeps showing up in new forms, how family life can quietly start revolving around anxiety without anyone meaning for that to happen, and why so many mindful, connected parents still feel stuck. Most importantly, we’ll talk about what actually helps a child move from “I need you to make this go away” to “I can handle this.”
This is live, and it isn’t getting recorded and sent out later, so if you want to be there, now’s the time to grab your spot.
→ Register free here: delightinparenting.com/anxiety
When you register, you’ll also get the free Anxiety Pattern Finder, a quick check-in to help you notice where anxiety may already be showing up in your home in ways that don’t always look like fear on the surface.
If you’ve been carrying that quiet question, “I should know how to do this by now,” I want you to hear this clearly: the problem was never that you don’t care enough or haven’t learned enough. You have. What you need now is the next layer, and that’s exactly where we’re headed together.
Warmly,
Dajana
P.S. Connection matters. Regulation matters. And they were never meant to be the finish line on their own. The real goal is a child who can feel scared and still know, deep down, “I can handle hard things.” That’s what we’re building toward in this workshop. Save your seat: delightinparenting.com/anxiety



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit delightinparenting.substack.com/subscribe

Have you ever stood at the stove making a third different dinner, wondering if you’re the only parent whose kid survives on the same five foods?
You’re not doing anything wrong. And I promise, that scene at your table is more common than you think.
This week I’m bringing back my most downloaded episode ever, my conversation with Katie Kimball, a former teacher, two-time TEDx speaker, and mom of four who created Kids Cook Real Food and writes at Kitchen Stewardship. I recorded it a while back, and I keep coming back to it, because what she says about picky eating is really the same thing I keep saying about anxious kids in general. It just shows up at the dinner table instead of at drop-off or bedtime.
I wanted to resurface it now, right before September 10th, because if you’ve got a child who struggles with worry anywhere in their life, this episode will help you see the pattern clearly before we dig into it together live.
Here are three shifts from our conversation that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
1. It’s rarely about the food.
I know it’s hard not to take it personally when your child pushes the plate away again. Katie’s perspective on this stuck with me. A lot of what gets labeled picky eating is actually something physical hiding in plain sight, a child who hasn’t built the jaw strength to chew tougher foods, an undiagnosed food sensitivity, even constipation. And when it isn’t physical, it’s often anxiety wearing a disguise. Eating, sleeping, and using the bathroom are some of the only places a child has real control over their own body. When the rest of life feels unpredictable, that control shows up at the table.
It’s completely normal to feel like your child is doing this on purpose. Almost always, they’re not.
2. Zero pressure to eat doesn’t mean zero boundaries.
This is the part that connects directly to what I teach about anxiety more broadly. Katie was clear that pressuring a child to eat backfires, because it’s a promise you can’t actually keep unless you’re willing to force feed, and kids learn fast when a parent doesn’t mean what they say. But she was just as clear that removing all boundaries creates its own kind of anxiety. A child with no structure around food, no expectation to at least sit at the table, doesn’t feel free. They feel unmoored.
There’s a specific line she shared for holding that middle ground, one that’s honest enough for a child to trust and firm enough to actually mean something. I won’t spoil it here, but it’s a phrase I’ve started using myself.
3. Confidence gets built through ownership, not outcome.
I know it’s hard to celebrate a meal that ends in three bites and a lot of pushed-around peas. But Katie made a point I keep returning to: what you praise matters more than what gets eaten. She also talked about getting kids into the kitchen itself in small, doable ways, and how that changes a child’s relationship with food in a way the dinner table alone never could.
She also shared her go-to approach for what to actually put on the plate and in what order, something she calls “leading with your ace.” It’s simple once you hear it, but it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to get backwards without knowing why it works.
None of this means every meal needs to be a production, and Katie was honest about that too. Some nights you just need everyone fed.
Click below to listen to the full conversation with Katie, including her take on picky eating in teenagers, the boundary she calls “leading with your ace,” and the free five-day picky eating challenge she offers listeners of this podcast.
I’ve had a lot of you tell me this one changed how you think about your table. If you haven’t heard it yet, or it’s been a while, this is a good week to give it a listen.
Want more support with the anxiety underneath the surface, whether it shows up at meals, bedtime, or drop-off?
That’s exactly what Dr. Christopher Willard and I are digging into together in a free live workshop called From Anxiety to Confidence, on Thursday, September 10th.
I’ll be honest with you: calm isn’t the goal. Confidence is. Helping your child feel better in the moment isn’t always the same thing as helping them believe they can handle hard things later. We’ll talk about why anxious patterns keep repeating even when you’re doing everything right, and how to interrupt that cycle while it’s still this easy to change.
If you’ve got a child who struggles with worry, whether that’s around food, sleep, school, or something else entirely, I’d love to have you there.
Join us for From Anxiety to Confidence

To learn more about Katie Kimball & Kitchen Stewardship:
https://www.kitchenstewardship.com/
Connect with Dajana Yoakley
Delight in Parenting
Step #1 — Get the 3 Steps to Reset Your Nervous System FREE Guide or book a FREE 20 minute consult.
https://www.delightinparenting.com
https://www.delightinparenting.com/book-online
Step #2 — Connect With The Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/delightinparentingfree
Step #3- Follow me on Social Media:
https://www.instagram.com/delightinparenting/
https://www.facebook.com/delightinparentingcoaching/
https://www.youtube.com/@DelightinParenting
https://www.linkedin.com/in/delightinparenting/


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit delightinparenting.substack.com/subscribe

What if helping your child feel better right now isn’t the same thing as helping them become confident over time?
Because when your anxious child is spiraling, every instinct in your body says the same thing.
→ Make this easier→ Help them calm down→ Get them through the moment→ Whatever it takes, just make the fear stop
And of course it does. That instinct comes from love.
In my latest podcast episode, I sat down with Dr. Christopher Willard, a clinical psychologist and author of twenty books on mindfulness and self-compassion, and he gave me a way of thinking about anxiety that I haven’t stopped turning over since we recorded it.
He compares your child’s anxiety to a smoke alarm. Not a fire alarm. A smoke alarm.
It’s completely normal for that alarm to go off when there’s no actual danger in the room. That jolt of panic or dread your child feels doesn’t mean something is wrong with them. Their nervous system is doing exactly what it was built to do. It’s trying to protect them.
Here are three shifts from our conversation.
1. You are the tool, not the technique
Dr. Willard put it plainly. When kids are anxious, or panicking, or shutting down, the best resource in the room isn’t a breathing exercise or a script. It’s you, staying present and steady, even while they’re dysregulated.
I know it’s hard to hear that when you’re already stretched thin. It doesn’t mean you have to be calm all the time. It means your presence matters more than your perfect response.
2. Repair matters more than the rupture
We talked about what happens when you lose your patience, and he shared a story about snapping at his own wife in front of his kids that made me feel a lot less alone in my own imperfect moments.
His point wasn’t that the outburst was fine. It’s that what your child actually learns from is watching you come back afterward. How do you apologize? How do you reconnect? That’s the part that shapes them, not the mistake itself.
3. Relief and confidence aren’t always the same thing
This is the part that stuck with me most.
Sometimes a child feels calmer because the hard thing went away. Because the plan changed. Because someone stepped in. Because the uncertainty disappeared.
That relief is real. But confidence grows from something different. It grows when a child starts discovering, “This feels hard, and I can still handle it.”
Click here to listen to the full conversation with Dr. Willard, including his thoughts on teaching kids self-compassion through play, why conflict with your child isn’t the problem, and the three-breath practice he gives to parents who feel like they’re about to lose it the second they walk in the door.
To learn more about Dr. Christopher Willard:https://www.drchristopherwillard.com
Want more support?
That conversation with Dr. Willard really stuck with me, especially the part about the alarm system in our brains. When you see your child spiraling, everything in you wants to make it easier, help them calm down, get them through the moment. And that instinct comes from love.
But here’s the question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Is helping my child feel better right now the same thing as helping them become more confident over time?
Not always.
That’s why I keep coming back to this idea: calm isn’t the goal. Confidence is.
This is exactly what Dr. Willard and I are digging into together in a free live webinar called From Anxiety to Confidence.
We’re going to talk about why anxious patterns can keep repeating even when you’re doing everything you can to help, why immediate relief and lasting confidence aren’t always the same thing, and how anxiety can start quietly organizing more and more of family life.
If you’ve got a child who struggles with worry, whether that shows up as separation anxiety, bedtime struggles, school avoidance, social anxiety, reassurance-seeking, control, or a nervous system that seems to be on high alert more often than you’d like, I’d really love to have you there.
Join us for From Anxiety to Confidence

Connect with Dajana Yoakley Delight in Parenting
Step #1: Get the 3 Steps to Reset Your Nervous System FREE Guide.
Step #2: Connect With The FREE Facebook Community.Step #3: Follow me on Social Media:https://www.instagram.com/delightinparenting/https://www.facebook.com/delightinparentingcoaching/www.youtube.com/@DelightinParentinghttps://www.linkedin.com/in/delightinparenting/


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit delightinparenting.substack.com/subscribe