Four Ways We Parent With Excess Male Energy (And Solutions!)
SHOW NOTES
When we parent from a place of excess masculine energy, our kids miss out on the softness, reassurance, and grounding that only a balanced feminine presence can offer.
In this episode, I walk you through four common ways hyper-masculine parenting shows up, from rushing through the day to resisting big feelings, and offers practical shifts that bring more balance, connection, and effectiveness into your home. Because everything starts inside of us.
Warmly,
Linda
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Meet Your Host!
Linda Sanderville, LCSW, RYT-200 is the founder of Satya Counseling & Yoga LLC. She specializes in concierge therapy for female founders and public figures, helping high-profile women navigate public scandal, executive burnout, and the values that will define the second half of life. Based in Albuquerque and serving clients virtually in DC, Maryland, Virginia, and beyond, Linda combines clinical expertise with somatic wisdom to help leaders reclaim their truth.
Read below for full transcript.
[00:00] Intro & Why Feminine Balance Matters
Hi, I'm Linda, an emotion coach and hypnotherapist who also loves a good sunrise yoga class, listening to the belly laughs of my baby boys, and hunting down the best vegan donuts. This podcast is for ambitious and high-performing women who want to feel fulfilled in all areas of their life. I'm here to give you practical tips and mindset shifts that will help you to put your self-love skills into action. Welcome.
When we parent with excess masculine energy, we miss out on both giving and receiving that balance of feminine energy that our kids need from us. They need both, right?
So when we don't have that balance, they're going to miss out on that softness, that reassurance, and that grounding that comes from that feminine presence. And when we can offer them these things and learn to offer it more consistently, that becomes the internal resource that they have for the rest of their lives.
[01:04] Way #1: Rushing Due to Perceived Time Scarcity
Four ways that we can parent with excess masculine energy. The first one has to do with time. So rushing due to our perception of not having enough time, a limitation of time. Now, this is totally understandable. Really, all four of these things are very understandable. I've been there, you've been there. And this comes from feeling like we just don't have enough.
And the truth is we may have very limited time. It's a precious resource when you're a parent. So it's natural. Just know that you will eventually get the time back. But we won't always get the time back to have this amount of influence and a positive sense on our kids, right? So we're trying to maximize that time that we have while they're still very young and very impressionable with us. Eventually, it's just going to be like they're friends, right?
So for this one, just make sure that you're giving yourself, I'm just going to give you kind of like some general tips for each of these. Try to give yourself a bigger cushion of time. Give yourself a bigger window of time. We realized that when we would try to get our oldest son to bed, and he was just kind of like not cooperating and like doing his thing, it just became silly to try to like fight the same battle every night, doing the same thing over and over again when we knew he was going to struggle, or maybe like it was getting him to bed too late.
So finding ways to give ourselves a bigger window while also having a lot of consistency within that window so he knew what was going to come next really helped to bring down some of these struggles. Of course, we all have them. Even we have really great routines.
We still end up in these bedtime battles or things or trying to get shoes on to get out the door. It's going to happen and that's fine. But if we can lower our expectations of how quickly it's going to happen and what's going to get done in that time, that can really go a long way.
[02:50] Way #2: Competition & Comparison Between Siblings
So that's the first way that we can be hyper masculine. The second is we have a competition focus with comparing one child with another child. The fact is our kids are not in a race. Like they're not racing against each other. They should not be in competition for our acceptance, you know, based on how they act relative to their brother or their sister or whomever.
So let's be really intentional about protecting that connection between our kids, assuming that we have multiples. Protecting the connection between our kids because that's going to set the foundation for their friendship later in life.
I've heard too many stories of folks who, even to this day as adults, can feel a sense of like just distance and lack of connection with their sibling because of dynamics that really started with how their parents interacted with them or talked about them with each other. So we're wiser, we're older, we know a little bit more. So let's really step back, walk back that competition focus. They are really meant to support each other, right? So instead of competition, collaboration.
Collaboration is much more of like the balanced feminine masculine energy. We can help them to celebrate with each other when they have a win and also think about how can they help each other when they have a struggle or something's difficult or they're not having a good moment. What are some ways we can help each other in this moment as opposed to like, wow, why can't you be more like her?
[04:21] Way #3: Using Size & Voice in Power Struggles
Okay. So the third way that we can be hyper-masculine, have too much masculine energy in our parenting, is relying on our bigger size or our bigger voice to get the advantage or gain the advantage in the middle of a power struggle.
So this one's kind of a double-upper because the power struggle itself is, you know, the odds are we got there with excess masculine energy, and then trying to use like our voice and our size and all that to get them to like become smaller and pipe back down is also excess masculine energy as well.
So this will only work for so long until it just doesn't. And some of you who have older kids already are living that. You know, this is all about long-term gains over short-term gains, very short-term gains, because yeah, you may be able to out-yell them, you know, and slam the door and things like that. But it's not going to give you control over the long term. It's not going to give you influence really. That's more what we're looking for than control over the long term.
So thank yourself later by doing a little bit of the extra work now of really focusing more on connection when there's a power struggle mounting, focusing more on connection as well as sort of not engaging with the more negative behaviors with excess attention.
We can redirect, but we don't want to, you know, make it so that when they want attention from us, they know, well, if I do something like throw this book at my brother's head, I'm definitely going to get the attention, right? We don't want to reward that. So focus more on that connection with them.
And then consistent consequences and boundaries. They will eventually get it even if it takes some time. They will see, you know, mommy, daddy, you know, they're not budging on this. They will get it.
[06:12] - Way #4: Resistance to Big Emotions
The fourth and final thing is just having resistance to the way that our small ones process their emotions, their big emotions, their big feelings. For a lot of us, and me and my husband were talking about this a long time ago, like this can come with baggage from how our own emotions were treated when we were small. Obviously different generation, different times, different knowledge base, all of that. But, you know, big emotions were often perceived as rebellious or disrespectful or a sign of weakness or just plain strange.
So, you know, being able to acknowledge that for ourselves, that that's part of where this is coming from, is just that, oh, wow, this is not, my parents wouldn't have stood for this at all. You know, acknowledging that, knowing that we have our own baggage from how our emotions were handled, and likely we're still kind of sorting through some of that today. We don't want to repeat that with our kids, I'm assuming. I'm assuming, if you're watching this, you don't want to repeat that with your kids.
And also just feeling powerless in the midst of big emotions can make us kind of lean in on like having that resistance with their feelings, because we're just like, I don't know what to do. You're like, that's a lot. And it's natural to feel powerless.
So the truth is you can't overpower, you can't control your little one's feelings. They have to go through it. It's developmental. It's part of their processing. It's part of how their brain is making sense of the world, and how they're learning how to manage the feeling of overwhelm, because they don't have those skills yet.
So reminder, they're not doing their emotions to you, they're not doing something to you. They are having an experience that looks like it feels as bad as what it feels like for you. Like it doesn't feel good. They're not liking it either. They would rather feel like they were in control because they want to be more independent, right?
That's like, from the time that they're little, they're like, no, me do it, you know, and all that. And you're like, oh, we don't know how to do it. They want to. They want to like be, they want to feel like they want to play, they want to feel in control. So when they're having those moments of big emotions or meltdowns, they're not feeling good either.
So just even remembering that, I know that helps me so much, just remembering like they're not doing anything to me. They don't like this either. Then like there's a different sort of softness and compassion that comes up inside of me, that I'm then able to demonstrate with them, and my actual interaction with them, rather than just interacting in a way that's frustrated, which I've done before too, right? But it's also just like not going to be effective. It's not going to do anything.
So having that understanding can lead to more of that softness. And then I can be more accepting in the sense that, not that I'm accepting that they just, you know, scream and thrash on the floor when they do that, but I accept them, right? And I can redirect them. It's so much more helpful if I can say, hey, okay, I know, gosh, it doesn't feel good, right?
And reassure them and validate what their feeling is and why they feel that way. Even if it doesn't make sense to me, that's not important. It's what they're feeling. And then leading them right into some practices to help alleviate some of what they're feeling, you know, whether it's giving them a hug, you know, asking them first, do you want a hug? How about we move our bodies a little bit or let's, you know, breathe in some pizza, blow out the birthday candles, right?
So I'm leading them right into something physical they can do with their body. Then it's like stretching and doing different things. So different things will work with different kids. My older son is pretty experiential. So if I can do that with him, that's a lot more effective than me yelling at him to go to his room where he just screams louder. And it's very dramatic. It's a whole dramatic situation.
[10:07] Closing: Everything Starts Inside
So keep these things in mind when you're faced with your own tendency towards hyper-masculine parenting styles, because they aren't going to be that effective. It does tend to just sort of throw the situation at a whack. You don't feel good, they don't feel good. There are better ways. And it starts inside of us, right? That's the whole point.
With my message to you is everything starts inside of us, whether it's about parenting, our intimate relationship, how we show up in the office, asking for the promotion, like whatever the situation is, it starts inside here. That's the work.
I hope that was helpful and I will see you in the next video. Bye.
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