Kim Muench | Keys to Building Happier, Healthier Relationships with Your Children
On this week’s episode of Around Flower Mound, we’re joined by special guest Kim Muench, a Jai Institute for Parenting Certified Coach specializing in working with moms of adolescents. Kim is a firm believer that moms are the emotional barometers in their families and is passionate about educating, supporting, and encouraging them to raise their children with intention and guidance, rather than fear and control.
As a mom of five, Kim leads her clients to happier, healthier, more functional relationships with compassion, and without judgment, through one on one coaching sessions. She also offers wisdom and resources via her Facebook posts, Facebook Live, and most recently on News 8 Daybreak.
We chat about Kim’s 13-plus years as a Flower Mound resident, as well as:
Who she aspires to be a hero to as a parenting coach
Her own journey as a mother of five
The importance of self-care
Why she believes coaching is so important to parents today
And more
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Nicole Smith Woodard: Today, I'm so excited to introduce you to an absolutely fantastic Flower Mound resident. As you know, Around Flower Mound is all about bringing light to community leaders, business owners, parents and charities within our fantastic community. We in Flower Mound are so blessed to have a neighbor and fellow resident who is making a difference in the lives of families all over the world and especially right here in Flower Mound. Welcome my friend, Kim Muench.
Kim Muench: Hey, Nicole. Thank you for having me to chat today.
Nicole: I'm so excited. Well, I'm so grateful to have been introduced to Kim through your husband Tom. So a shout out to Tom and his business Expedia Cruises here in Flower Mound if you need any travel needs. I connected with Tom through the Flower Mound chamber. So even before that though, I feel like I know you, Kim, through your articles each month in the Cross Timbers Gazette, which is awesome.
So before we get into our discussion, I want to share with our audience a little bit about you. A Jai Institute for parenting certified coach specializing and working with moms of adolescents. Kim Muench believes moms are the emotional barometers in their families. She is passionate about educating, supporting and encouraging them to raise their children with intention and guidance rather than fear and control.
As a mom of five, Kim leads her clients into healthier, happier, more functional relationships with compassion and without judgment through one on one coaching sessions and I know you also offer a tremendous amount of wisdom and resources via your Facebook post, Facebook Live, and most recently, on News Eight Daybreak. So yeah, very much in demand and your time is very valuable. And we are just so lucky to have you here. So thank you thank you thank you for joining me today.
Kim: You're so welcome. I'm so happy to be on a local podcast that, you know, talks about how great Flower Mound is. So I'm blessed to be here.
Nicole: Oh, awesome. Well, that leads us into the first question I ask all of my guests which is what is your favorite thing about Flower Mound?
Kim: Let me think. I am gonna say it's a beautiful sunny day and I feel like I grew up in Wisconsin, where winter is many, many months long. So I am going to go with the weather in Flower Mound is my absolute favorite thing about Flower Mound. I don't know if anyone's ever given that answer before but I sure appreciate the shorter, milder winter in Flower Mound.
Nicole: Absolutely. I'm right there with you. So you and your family came to Flower Mound in April 2007. So you're 13-plus years as of that moment of this recording. So what brought y'all to Flower Mound originally?
Kim: Well, at the time, Tom was working for an outdoor media company and took a promotion, and we didn't know anyone in Texas. I had never been to Texas. I've never thought about Texas. But the job offer came in December of 2006. And we had to make a pretty quick decision about it. And the reason that, you know, we were in the midst of the beginning of winter in Wisconsin and I was like, oh, heck yeah, let's go to Texas. That, you know, we left family and all our friends and came to Texas. So yeah, it was an adventure.
Nicole: I love it. Well, obviously, as a mom of five, you certainly have a resume that qualifies you as a mom, but your website references that you are a real-life parenting guide. So tell us what you do and who you want to be a hero to.
The Real Life Parent Guide
Kim: Sure. I really work with parents, moms, in particular, of teenagers because I think that the teenage years can be really, really kind of white-knuckling. I, as a mother of five, as you mentioned, have been through some major challenges myself, and that's kind of what led me in the direction of becoming a parent coach. So I take my experience of the ups and downs of going through adolescence. At this point, my oldest is 33 and my youngest is 15. But I have seen some significant challenges in three-plus decades.
And I want to help inspire parents, especially during the teen years to create happier, healthier relationships with their kids because the reality is when we white knuckle it through their teen years, then the relationship we have with our young adult children isn't necessarily smooth sailing. And sometimes, kids just don't ever want to come home or have a relationship. So I think it's really important during these sticky teen years to have, to build our skills as parents to have the kind of relationships that our kids are gonna want to have after they leave the house.
Nicole: That's amazing. And certainly, I, as a mother of two grown children in their 20s, so that's so important. What, so tell us a little bit about your background and how you found your way to bringing this incredible service to the public.
Kim: Sure. Sure, sure. As I mentioned, I have, my oldest is 33 at this point. He is 10 years sober, but back in 2008 in May of 2008, in fact, I got my what I call parenting wake up call. He was still in Wisconsin, and he called me to say that he had lost the last three days of his life to an alcohol binge and he needed help. So that started two years of a lot of ups and downs and challenges trying to figure out how to A, parent through that and B, help him discover long term sobriety for himself.
During that time, of course, I realized how little control we have as parents in many aspects of our kid's lives. And it began to also make me think about my own raising, my own childhood and what my parents had, how they parented nature, challenges in my own life and who I wanted to be to show up for my kids and their challenges.
So that led me back to School I finished a psychology degree and I was fully intending to go into LCDC to become a chemical dependency counselor for teenagers. Along that route, during the 4000 hours of state-required internship, I decided working with teens who didn't think they had a problem was not my cup of tea but I loved working with their parents. So I took that love of working with parents in my personal experience having been the mother of a child in addiction back to I took it into writing, I wrote a book called My Mother's Footprints, a Story of Faith, Calm, Courage, Patience and Grace.
And that is really a memoir of my own journey with my son. And then I one day happened to see something from the Jai Institute for Parenting in terms of become a parent coach. And I began investigating that. I didn't even think, I didn't know parent coaching was a thing. So one thing led to another and I went through the course and I have continued to specifically educate myself on the parent-child relationship during the teen years. So basically, age 10 to the mid-20s, and really love helping parents proactively. I certainly help people who are in a crisis situation.
They're, you know, they've gone through something and really probably could have worked on their parenting or worked on the relationship with their child earlier and didn't. But my goal is to help give parents, gosh, you know, the tools and the ability to create the kind of connections that they want to have with their kids that maybe they aren't experiencing. So that's what led in the last almost five years now, I have worked diligently and, you know, with passion and perseverance to make it known that parent coaching does exist and my space in it is really to help, you know, parents to work on themselves in order to better the relationship with the child.
It's not necessarily about a whole bunch of strategies and skills as it is about really being able to tune into your own parent or your own human intuition with regard to the children that you are raising in the world because we often have so much noise coming at us and all these opinions and things and parents don't know what to do. And so I help them really hone it in and figure out what are our family's values and how are we going to make decisions with our children and create relationships with them that are going to best reflect us and not care about what the neighbor's doing or anybody else.
Nicole: Hmm. That's amazing. And that's a lot, oh my gosh/
Kim: Sorry, I, you know, it's my passion, but you can to go on. Sorry.
Nicole: Well, what amazes me and what inspires me is with all of that, that you appear and I've, you know, we've had the opportunity to meet in person of course, I, you know, like your, I read your articles, I watch your videos and things like that, but you just seem so Zen. And so are you, Do you have an internal source of peace that comes from knowing like you do? I mean, is this, what you've described from your own work on yourself or just some internal knowing? Or what is it that makes you in that regard?
Learn to Put Yourself First so That You May be Your Best Self for Others
Kim: I think that's a really good question, and I have been told that before that I'm fairly grounded. And certainly, when you're in the midst of a parenting crisis, it can be, or, you know, a difficult situation, it can be hard to be that. But I think one of the things that has helped me over the years is learning to put myself first at times before my kids in terms of taking care of my own well being emotionally, mentally, physically.
I do a lot of walking. I meditate daily. And I think those things I mean, when my kids were little, like, I never dreamed of putting myself first in any way, shape, or form. And I think as parents, we often put ourselves last. But if there's one thing that I think COVID, especially has taught us is how much we really need to take good care of ourselves so that we are emotionally available and attuned to our children. Because we're their calm in they're storm and so this is what I help parents achieve is confidence and calmness in their parenting.
Nicole: Oh, wouldn't it be gravy in a bottle and then just like, you know, but to your point,
Kim: There's no easy button. There is no easy button on it. People are looking for the quick fix, the give me the pill, give me the three-step process that's going to get me there and it really is, it can, you can get there and it doesn't have to take years. It's just about paying attention, being open-minded and doing some things differently than maybe your parents did or maybe you have been doing as a parent.
Nicole: Right. Well, you're obviously an expert in being the face of parenting coaching here in our area, which is just a huge asset. And obviously, parenting is so important, raising our children. But why do you think coaching someone alongside is so important to parents today?
Kim: Hmm, just like our children want to be seen and heard, so do adults. And in particular, parents. And I think a lot of times, worries can perpetuate in the minds of parents and future tripping to be for an example, you know, what is this? My kid doesn't do this and then this and this and this. And I think having a coach, having someone that will listen, that will ask you the right questions that help you get to your, the information and the intuition that you need to be the parent your child needs.
Because not, every kid needs a different parent. Even my own five kids all, I need to show up a little bit differently for each one of them. But helping parents by just having someone listen and help guide you and someone who's walked the path, someone who's done the work themselves is such an asset to making a parent feel like I can do this. I got this. It's about taking the time though to do that though. It's really about setting aside a time, making it a priority and then, you know, putting the time in.
Nicole: I love that. Well, obviously, and COVID is front and center right now as we're recording this in 2020, which obviously is creating tremendous and unique challenges for parents, but even more than that our world has changed in so many different ways. I mean, you know, we aren't parenting in the same generation we were being parented, if that makes sense. And so, what do you recommend as your coaching parents of teenagers now, as a constant that regardless of the uncertain times, regardless of COVID or not, what do you recommend being the constant?
Kim: I think keep educating yourself. We do a really good job of educating ourselves before our children come into the world and maybe even collaborating and, you know, working with other parents when our kids are little where there's a lot of community In parenting young children. However, I think when our kids gets middle school and high school, there's this, you know, people are busy and or they just don't take the time to really authentically connect with other parents.
And I think the one thing I would say is continually educating yourself on the stage that your child is in and really understanding what does adolescence mean? How does their brain change? And I don't mean, you know, you have to, like get all scientific, but it's good to really be aware of what goes on for our kids. What's normal?
What are red flags? And also, I think, as you're parenting a young adult, I've done a lot, and you just mentioned COVID, and I've done a lot of work with parents of young adults who come home for one reason or another and really trying to figure out how do you parent this child who, this kid, this young adult, who has been gone for a couple years either in college or on their own and now they find themselves back home and, you know, we can't revert back to saying they were in high school and parenting them that way. So what does that look like?
Nicole: That's tremendous as well because, like you said, there's of lot of transitioning going on right now in our world. Well, you have an awful lot going on, I know. So how do you structure your energy, the self-care you describe and the attention of all the different roles you have in your life as you're, you know, you're a coach, you're in demand with the media, you're, we've got some future projects I wanted you to share with us about and parenting and being a wife. How do you keep your sanity?
How Kim Maintains a Sound Mind
Kim: Meditation, number one. I also walk several, I actually also walk several miles a day. Tom and I are doing a lot of walking. So walking is a good way for, I think I've walked to every street in Flower Mound quite frankly, during COVID. So, walking, meditation, I also, my guilty pleasure is a glass of Chardonnay and HDTV at 10 o'clock at night. I spend an hour doing that. And then it's really important that there are a lot of things going on in my life. But it's super important to me as my two youngest are 15 and 17 to remain present to them.
And yes, they need me less than when they were little, but our kids, our teenagers, our young adults still need us to be around to listen. And I end every day in my 15-year-old daughter's room with my 17 and 15-year-old and we talk about the day in the light of her salt lamp so it's very dim in there and we just kind of, they're willing to unpack their day and their challenges and sometimes I don't get to bed until like after midnight. But that really feeds my soul is knowing, you know, really knowing that I'm connected to my kids.
Nicole: I love that. My takeaways for that is A, you practice what you preach, right? Which is you start, you know, you take care of you with the things that feed your soul, that feed your body. And then you also have a structure for creating that connection. Obviously, that habit that you're in now with the salt lamp at night, didn't, it wouldn't happen without some planning and in some way some sacrifice on your part as, like you said, you might get to bed a little late. But when it gets, I remember those days when my, you know, daughter would, you know, flop on bed at like 11:30 at night and it, you know, it's like, I didn't want to give up that time with her.
Kim: So tired. Yeah.
Nicole: So hindsight 2020 for me is, you know, having had that habit, having had that structure of that self-care and that kind of activity with your teens is just what a gift you're giving to yourself and to your children and for that matter, of future generations. I mean, I think that's one of the biggest impacts that I can see that the work you're doing is just so valuable. So you do have some exciting things that you're working on now that depending on when people hear this broadcast may already be out into this world. What do you, do you feel comfortable sharing some of those things?
Kim: I am working and I have been working, I feel like I've been talking about it forever, but I am working on a second book. And it really, the first book I mentioned earlier was my personal journey of parenting a child through addiction. And this coming book is going to be more kind of sharing about the challenges that parents are having and coaching them through those. So really helping people see what the coaching process looks like and the end result. So I'm working on that.
I'm also really excited later in this year to be doing a podcast myself that is going to be called Becoming Me While Raising You. And it's really going to showcase women who are building businesses while they're being a present parent to their child and the challenges that come along with that and their triumphs. So that's, those are two really big things that I'm working on at the moment aside from actually continuing to be a present parent to my kids.
Nicole: Of course, of course. And then you do offer one on one coaching, correct?
Kim: I do. One on one, I've done some workshops. I am open to, people will come to me, I've done some like YMSL groups NCL groups, you know, coming and presenting either to the moms or to the kids. Yes, I work with parents, and especially moms of teens most but I also work with teens to help them learn how to maybe have more meaningful conversations with their parents.
You know, just help them to connect with their parents better. So I have spoken about my own, you know, pretty much from my parent's perspective, two groups of teens and just my own, you know, personal experiences as a teenager to try and help them to have another point of view that isn't necessarily their parent's, but it is another adult point of view. So I've been blessed to be able to speak in those two arenas as well.
Nicole: That's awesome. Well, just kind of a philosophical question that I like to ask folks is, you've obviously had tremendous success personally and professionally. So what is it do you believe that makes some successful while others may struggle?
Changing Familial Patterns for Generations
Kim: think the answer to that, for me, is an optimistic attitude, a passion and a perseverance and determination for what it is that they're, you're building. The belief in it, I believe that the work that I do with parents does not only change the current relationship with our teenagers, but changes patterns for generations. And I feel like it is my own challenges have been put to good use by helping others. I want to shift the way, shift and evolve the way we're pairing our children to one of, with them rather than over them. I just truly believe that some of our children's behavior is screaming to us that as parents, we need to evolve
Nicole: Powerful. Awesome. Well, I am so excited and so appreciative of your time, your wisdom and the gifts that you're giving to our community and our culture. And so how can people connect with you if they want to learn more?
Kim: Probably the easiest way is to go to my website, which is realifeparentguide.com. There's only one L in that. So real and life share the L and then parents guide.com. Or I'm on Facebook at Real Life Parent Guide. And certainly, you can probably find me driving around Flower Mound in my little white Kia Soul with the red accents because on the back of my windshield it says Real Life Parent Guide, peaceful parenting starts here. So you probably will catch me driving around Flower Mound as well.
Nicole: I love it. I love it. Well, Kim again, thank you thank you thank you for all that you do. And thank you so much for joining us today on the Around Flower Mound Podcast.
Kim: Thank you, Nicole. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat today.
