How many times do you say '“no” to your children? "No! Don't touch that". "No! Don't open the drawer. There's so much "no" a child can potential hear in their life. To minimize the use of "no's" your child's life create a "yes" zone. In this podcast, we talk about how you can achieve a "yes" zone along with the benefits. Join us as we dive deep in this topic.

Please subscribe. We look forward to reading your comments.

TIMESTAMP:
► 00:19 - What does Yuntaku mean?
► 00:54 - Recent Happenings
► 02:23 - Topic of the Day: Creating Yes zones for your children
► 03:27 - Benefits of having a Yes zone for your children
► 04:35 - Using the baby fence to enclose the danger, not to enclose the child
► 05:20 - Other areas of child proofing/safety
► 06:30 - What we do instead of saying “No”
► 09:08 - Personal experiences with “No” growing up
► 12:46 - Our goals as parents

QUESTION: How do you create yes zones for your children?

MUSIC:
► Copyright Chillhop Music - https://chll.to/67239194
► Copyright Chillhop Music - https://chll.to/9b1d1dee
► Copyright Chillhop Music - https://chll.to/7293b0ec
► Copyright Chillhop Music - https://chll.to/0d2cc18a
► Copyright Chillhop Music - https://chll.to/e79a5d63

Podcast Transcription

The transcription below is provided for your convenience, please excuse any errors made by the automated service.

Tamo 0:00

Those are the experiences that has allowed us to come to this point right now and have such a loving relationship with each other with our daughter, and continuing to grow our family in a very rich, warm and loving way.

Akko 0:14

It Yuntaku time with Akko and Tamo.

Tamo 0:18

What does Yuntaku mean? It's an Okinawan word from the islands of Okinawa, which means, chit chat, we want to invite you to our kitchen table and include you in our chit chat to explore new ways of thinking, to welcome different perspectives.

Akko 0:37

And we want to share ideas and how to love yourself. Love your partner, and shower your children with love.

Tamo 0:44

This is episode nine.

Akko 0:47

And today's topic of the day is create a yes sound for your child. But before we get to that, let's talk about our recent happenings. So, this week, we've been scheduling a lot of playdates for our daughter and it's really been a good experience.

Tamo 1:03

Yeah, she's definitely been needing a lot of a lot more social interaction with children her age, right just because it's it's great and all hanging out with the parents. But it's different when she gets to hang out with

Akko 1:15

with kids her own age, or even just close. And it was really cute to see because she's kind of reaching out and trying to hold their hand and she can tell that they're, you know, her age, and she was more interested. Yeah, more interest. I mean, she's still does her own thing. But it's good because she's been wanting this. I mean, she always goes to kids, whether we go to parks, or if we see a younger child or children, she always tries to run towards them and just wave to them very social girl. So we've been very lucky that we've been having these playdates this week so that she can interact, socialize and do what she wants to do. It's great.

Tamo 1:53

And yeah, just even when we go walking down the block, we can tell when she sees children her own age, she's, she's very interested. And now she's able to kind of have these playdates outdoors. I think it's a great win win just because outdoors so that they can run around. And at the same time she gets to play with play with friends.

Akko 2:14

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree.

Tamo 2:16

Super awesome.

Akko 2:18

So that's our recent happenings. And so let's get back to the topic of the day.

Tamo 2:23

So the topic of the day is creating a yes zone for your child. So let's talk about what a yes zone is a yes zone is a space for your child that they don't have to hear knows. Instead, it's okay for them to play and get into things. Or, for example, if they want to climb on the sofa, making safe so that it is okay for them to climb onto the sofa, they want to play with their toys, it's a safe space to do so. So As parents, we don't have to say no, don't do this, don't do that. And creating that space as big as possible within your living space. So not imposing really small areas to play in. But making a being conscious of where you how you design your living space, so that your baby can explore as much as possible.

Akko 3:11

Yes. So just to reiterate, this is not caged them in it's more of you create that space for them.

Tamo 3:20

Yep, exactly. And so before we get into a little bit more ago, could you share some benefits of

Akko 3:25

Absolutely. So some of the benefits are that it actually builds confidence in them, and also even helps them learn another benefit is that it gives the children more time to explore the world on their own. And also a child will start to develop the ability to focus as well. And another one is that a child is more likely to cooperate outside the yes zone. And this is because they're not having to say no, no, no. So they more likely listen to the parents

Tamo 3:53

much more. And yeah, I think that's it can go one of maybe two ways where if you're always hearing No, that no can become a heavyweight on a child. And they end up not really expressing themselves whereas some my strongly rebel against it against that no, but if we are to create a more free yes zone. So it's not like we're necessarily saying yes, you can do this. Yes, you can do that. No, but having them be themselves and playing the way they want to play and not imposing very strict physical space that they need to follow. So that they don't have to hear nose as much. Yes. And for us what this means is, for example, having a child fence baby fence, and we've seen baby fences used to fence the baby in and placed inside the fence. But we took the opposite approach where we actually use the baby fence to fence the dangers or things that we don't want our child to touch from her and so she gets explored everywhere else. Yes. So, of course, she's been putting everything in her mouth. So we fenced off the shoes, because she'll grab those shoes and put it in your mouth. We don't want that. So we fence that. And of course, we've been working on the backyard with our raised bed garden. So we have a few tools there so that she doesn't get to it. And you know, it could that could be dangerous. Yeah. But other than that pretty much 90% 90 95% of the living spaces available for her to explore and play.

Akko 5:29

Yeah. And just to run free with the curiosity. And we also covered our outlets. We don't have any, you know, some people might have planters or pots or whatnot. They don't have any of those that's within her reach.

Tamo 5:43

And then we've, of course, all the sharp edges, we've,

Akko 5:46

we've cushioned,

Tamo 5:47

yes, we've cushion those. And then what else have we done, we've hid all the cables, the electric cables as much as we can.

Akko 5:55

And then we locked up all of our cabinets because she has access to our kitchen. So we locked up all our drawers and anything that she's able to pull open, although we did the one for her to open,

Tamo 6:10

free so that she at least gets a little bit more feeling of controls. And we're planning to do a product review on those. So if you're at all interested in childproofing your house, please check out our YouTube and subscribe. So when the product review videos come out, you'll be notified. Yeah. And we've been very conscious of not using the word no. So freely, right? Yes, we are very conscious of instead of saying no, what can we can we teach her? Can we redirect her energy attention to something that is a lot more productive? So I definitely see that, you know, even today, we had, we've been feeding her on the highchair and she started to throw food. And we just had to, instead of saying, No, we tell her this is food, food is not meant to be thrown. And so we just have

Akko 7:01

to let her know friendly. I'll look into her eyes and let her know that you can't throw food on the floor.

Tamo 7:07

And when this happened, both Akko and I were together in the same room. So as Akko was explaining this to our daughter, I was standing behind her and just, you know, being on the same page, looking at our daughter in the eye, and just being being serious that you know, this is we're serious about where we're talking about. Yeah, we're definitely on the same page there.

Akko 7:27

Yeah, absolutely. So it always helps when your partner is always on the same page as you Yeah, so there's a lot of things you know, in life, you have to say no to a lot of things to a child. So if at all possible, you want to really limit that amount of nose. Because I mean, can you imagine if you hear a lot of nose in your life, it just gets programmed into your mind. And you start to think that you can't do some other things when you can. And you know, a lot of people say mind over matter. And so you know, from a young age, you don't really want to program all those nose in their mind. So we as parents can at least limit the amount that we say no to our own control to our own ability course, if she's trying to run outside onto the streets, we have to say no to that, right.

Tamo 8:12

And so what we're saying is don't ever say no, that's not what we're trying to say. We want to be very conscious of when we use No, no as a tool, like anything else. Language is a tool like anything else. And what we're doing is making sure that we don't unconsciously just say no to everything that we don't want her to do. And sometimes it really takes us to take a step back and say, oh, does this actually even need to know why don't we want her to do this? And sometimes it's really just we've been programmed from society, from our upbringing in our culture and things like that. And it requires a lot of work in terms of being aware and thinking about things like this. on the fly. Yeah. Right. And that's what we mean by creating this yes zone. So not necessarily again, saying yes. But at the same time, not necessarily saying no, yeah. And as a as a personal side, for me. I've heard a lot of nose growing up, I actually didn't know that I've heard so many noes. Until very recently years into a lot of this for personal development work and through meditation and getting coaching and things like that, and I just sat with it. And more and more, it became clear that hey, this no is not necessarily mind. What I want to convey is that no had been programmed into all of us children. And through the work. I've been able to shed a lot of it but there's still, I'm sure so many more that is subconscious and so we don't want to pass that on to our children, right. So we want our children to grow up to be who they really are at their core not tainted by society, culture or upbringing. parenting things like that. And we want our children to shine their light. And so when we are parenting, our children want to make sure that they're not hearing as much. No. And the only knows that they hear are things that would put them in danger. Yes, right. physical danger, especially.

Akko 10:20

And that's what we should stress, uh, no one. And I completely agree, I grew up in an environment where there's a lot of nose too. So I understand when it comes to hearing a lot of nose and that just being in your subconscious, and then you know, you just wonder why you think you can't do it sometimes. And you're just getting Hold on, I can do this. So you just want to think about your children, by them not hearing a lot of nose would put them ahead of the game, because they'll believe in themselves, they'll be more confident in themselves, they'll be able to follow their heart and be what they want to be and follow their curiosity.

Tamo 10:54

Yeah, I think that's a really great point. Because the thing is, for me, I had spent so much energy actually money to getting coaching, doing all this work for myself in order to shed what had been programmed within me during my life. So yes, of course, we have a lot of parenting. There's also other things, for example, things that happen during school, or maybe even outside of school, all these things add up. And for example, if you think of it as like, we all have a backpack when we're born, and all the experience, we throw in that backpack, and it gets heavier and heavier and heavier. But some experiences are actually really light, it's kind of like adding a helium balloon, which actually makes it lighter. What I mean by that is if you have great accomplishments, or great social relationships with great friends, or maybe you have best friend that had always had your back those things, lighten your backpack, right. So your walk through life is much easier, it's lighter, right. But if you have trauma or issues, those things are very heavy in the backpack. So when you're walking through life, things get heavier, and heavier and heavier. And like I mentioned, I had to do work to take all that junk, the heavy stuff out of the backpack, and so that I can walk a lot more lighter. And a majority of it was with the relationship with you, you've helped me really lightened my heart up through the love you've shared with me. And for me to open up my heart, you really, you're able to encourage me to open my heart and really share what's inside. Right? And if we can have our children start off, at least at this point, and Yeah, that'd be good. You're gonna be able to go further. Yeah, right.

Akko 12:46

And that's what we want. We want our children to surpass where we are. Exactly. So that's our goal as parents to raise them so that they can surpass however much we've evolved. And this is nothing against our parents. I mean, they did their best they could, they did the best they could but with the resource that we have now. And the tools that we have now Now we know what's beneficial for the kids. And what's a little more traumatizing to the kids. And this is something that we can use because of the generation that we were born into.

Tamo 13:16

Right? Yeah, I think that's another fantastic point, our parents didn't have these tools. And for us, now we have Google, we can research these things, right? And yes, these things are still not taught in school, but the research is out there. And we can make the best use of our time by researching and then integrating that research with our daily lives. And so yeah, you're you're totally right, we have nothing against our parents. And a great indicator of how much you've matured is how you're able to see your parents. And a quick idea of this is obviously when we're very young, we're attached to our parents, we need our parents in order to survive, or a least a parent figure in our lives to survive so that they can support us, feed us, protect us from physical danger, things like that. Now, as we grow up, we need to start physically and emotionally distancing ourselves so that we can do our own growing separately from our parents. And then as we continue to grow, there may be times where you do have to step away from your parents, just because especially if one has parents that are very overbearing, it might require some time away for you to grow as an individual grow as a human being. And then once you're ready, you can go back and have an even better relationship with them. And so it really depends in my own life, I see clear stages of growth, from dependence to independence, and then to interdependence. Yeah.

Akko 14:46

Yeah, I completely agree. I have to say even with my parents, they were very overbearing, so when I had that distance with them, our relationship got a lot better and I felt like they understood me a little better. So there's definitely distance that needed to happen for those parents that wanted control, or that needs control,

Tamo 15:06

right. So, and these are really difficult things because to some people, they've never even had time away from their parents, right? We've always kept in contact, but sometimes in some situations that's needed. And again, we're not endorsing anything. It's just that in our own experiences in our lives, that's how we've been able to grow and we wouldn't take it back. Those are the experiences that has allowed us to come to this point right now, and have such a loving relationship with each other with our daughter, and continuing to grow our family in a very rich, warm and loving way. Yeah, yeah. And now because of that, we can also come back and share that love with our parents too. Because we're so overflowing we've been doing and we continue to do our own work individually. And then together as a couple and then together as a family. Yeah, then we can share that overflow with all of our friends and

Akko 16:05

yeah, yeah, well said Well said. So we went on a little bit of a tangent there but what our message was that you want to limit the amount that you say no, by creating this yes zone and so that your children can grow to be their best self.

Tamo 16:19

So we have a question for you. How will you create a yes zone for your children?

Akko 16:24

We love to hear from you. Please comment on our YouTube channel by searching Yun duck time.

Tamo 16:29

Alright, thank you very much and take care.

Akko 16:32

Bye.