{"id":1596276,"date":"2020-04-13T10:47:42","date_gmt":"2020-04-13T14:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/divine.ca\/?p=1596276"},"modified":"2020-04-13T11:35:22","modified_gmt":"2020-04-13T15:35:22","slug":"divine-behind-the-pages-interview-shantelle-bisson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/divine.ca\/en\/divine-behind-the-pages-interview-shantelle-bisson\/","title":{"rendered":"DIVINE Behind the Pages Interview: Shantelle Bisson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shantelle Bisson\u2019s debut non-fiction book: Raising Your Kids Without Losing Your Cool will guide you through the anxieties and burdens of raising a family, all while helping you keep your cool.\u00a0 The book takes you from labour and delivery all the way through to the double digits.\u00a0 As the mother of three girls, Shantelle has seen it all, and her book touches on everything from social media to the perils of helicopter parenting and how to maintain your relationship with your partner through this whole crazy journey. It is one sale now through Indigo\u2019s website<\/a> and Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We spoke with Shantelle after self-isolation started.\u00a0 She is focusing on the positive.\u00a0 She hopes that we can learn that we need to stop more often respect ourselves and our need to have quiet and to slow-down.\u00a0 She is unfailingly enthusiastic about life at such a challenging time.\u00a0 She is also excited about her book release, even though, like many authors, she is unable to do book signings and tours.\u00a0 What makes her book unique is that it takes the fluff and the science out of parenting and it about her authentic advice<\/a>.\u00a0 She is funny and insightful and we were thrilled to speak with her again.<\/p>\n

\"Losing<\/p>\n

You became a mother at a young age.\u00a0 What life lessons did you learn having a child when most people are still out partying?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The shallowest part is that you age slower.\u00a0 We are told [she and husband, Murdoch Mysteries\u2019 Yannick Bisson] that we don\u2019t look 50.\u00a0 That is because we were home and we weren\u2019t drinking or partying.\u00a0 We were getting \u201csleep\u201d.\u00a0 The immediate thing that it taught me was that I am idealistic and see things in a very black and white way.\u00a0 Growing up, you have these conversations with your girlfriends, like if I got pregnant and I wasn\u2019t married\u2026everyone would have varying opinions on what they would do.\u00a0 I was always the loudmouth going, \u201cOh, hell, no.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to be a famous actor, there are no babies in my future.\u00a0 I\u2019m not even going to get married.\u00a0 I absolutely would not keep the baby.\u201d The lesson that I didn\u2019t learn early was that you are not in charge of your destiny you can\u2019t speak in absolutes. You don\u2019t know what\u2019s coming down the pipe in your life.<\/p>\n

For me, the driving force behind saying that I\u2019ll never have children is that I didn\u2019t think that I would be any good at it.\u00a0 My mom was a good mother, but I was raised as a first generation Canadian on her side.\u00a0 My mom did the best she could as a single mother.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t show a lot of affection because her parents fled the war [World War 2 Germany] on foot and they weren\u2019t affectionate.\u00a0 They were very much about being raised by the hand.\u00a0 It seemed too hard to me, in the sense that there wasn\u2019t a whole lot of reward.\u00a0 I was tough on my mom and I didn\u2019t want that in my life.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t want this huge likelihood of failure.<\/p>\n

When motherhood was sprung on me, I ended up doing what I tend to do and decided to do it to the best of my ability.\u00a0 There are things that I wish that I had done differently.\u00a0 For example, Yannick is super affectionate and when the kids were little, he would get down on the floor and play with them.\u00a0 He was the one who would cuddle with them, craft with them, hold them.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t that way and if I could go back, I would be more affectionate and let that side of myself go.\u00a0 If I had had my kids in my 40\u2019s, like some many people are doing, I would have been that mom.\u00a0 I was verbally affectionate and I was a good cheerleader, but not physically affectionate.\u00a0 I would have made that shift in my parenting.<\/p>\n

As a mother of three girls, how did your parenting style change from the oldest to your youngest?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

I\u2019ve said this before, if you have more than one child, it\u2019s completely different because they are completely different.\u00a0 The ground rules and standards are the same for everybody. How you implement rules and how you talk to a child or how you engage is going to be completely different because their ability to accept the way you communicate is going to be different.<\/p>\n

You end up having different relationships with your kids because they show you who they are and they reveal their personalities and character.\u00a0 So, when I\u2019m with one, I need to use this part of myself.\u00a0 When you are upset, you need to be spoken to this way.\u00a0 One needs to be held the other just needs to be allowed to talk.\u00a0 In being a parent, you\u2019ve got to be flexible and you can\u2019t be rigid, because inevitably, the child that doesn\u2019t flourish under that one way of doing things is going to suffer.\u00a0 You have to be able to put yourself aside as a parent and do what\u2019s best for your child and communicate in a way that makes that child feel supported.<\/p>\n

How did you keep your cool as a Mom of 3?\u00a0 <\/strong><\/h4>\n

The way to keep your cool with three different children is really understanding how they are uniquely their own person.\u00a0 It also means disciplining them in a way that is going to be impactful to them to spark change and reflection.\u00a0 You have to be willing to honour who they are as an individual and that will help you keep your cool.\u00a0 Since I am an idealistic person, I spent the bulk of my life living with expectations of how I would do things and putting those expectations on others.\u00a0 It\u2019s something that I have been enlightened to in the last couple of years.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s about letting go of expecting people to behave in a way that you would and allowing them to be who they are.<\/p>\n

There are pluses and minuses to having your kids young and then older.\u00a0 We had them young and dragged them through everything because we didn\u2019t know how to have a good relationship.\u00a0 They took the brunt of us having to work our stuff out and become a functioning couple.\u00a0 I hope that it taught them that it is not all roses and romantic dinners.\u00a0 You have to grind it out sometimes and you won\u2019t talk to your partner for a couple of days because you are still mad.\u00a0 It shows them a realistic thing just because relationships have ugly periods, it doesn\u2019t mean that they are over.\u00a0 It is unfortunate in the sense that we are now able to fight and have it over with in a few hours rather than a few weeks.<\/p>\n

I would have been more patient and more empathic, but when you are young, you have energy to run them around to a thousand activities and still have joy. When you are older, it\u2019s more daunting and draining.\u00a0 From both angles, you can stay cool.\u00a0 When you are older, it\u2019s easier to have more patience emotionally, but when you are younger you have more energy so it\u2019s easier to keep your cool when they are throwing a fit or won\u2019t sleep.\u00a0 Parenting is a moving target and that\u2019s the thing that a lot of parents need to understand.\u00a0 It\u2019s never going to be the same.<\/p>\n

Breast-feeding is a particular hot button amongst parents.\u00a0 What should women know about breast-feeding but may be afraid to ask or say out loud?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

This is a great question, because it actually happened to me.\u00a0 I was 19 when we had our first baby.\u00a0 I had been a dancer my whole life, I was healthy, I was in great shape and young.\u00a0 Obviously, breast-feeding was going to be a breeze. \u00a0Then, \u00a0I couldn\u2019t nurse my first baby.\u00a0 My milk came in, but for some reason, she had colic and stomach issues from the beginning.\u00a0 For the first ten days, I was literally nursing her every hour \u2013 hour and a half, to the point where my nipples were cracked open and bleeding.\u00a0 The pain of trying to nurse her, was worse than the pain from labour.\u00a0 I was getting infections and it was hell.\u00a0 I was devastated.<\/p>\n

I had this vision of how it was going to all play out and it didn\u2019t match that vision at all.\u00a0 The worst part was that Yannick\u2019s father\u2019s second wife had just had a baby and she was the Mother Theresa of nursing and she shamed me so hard.\u00a0 She accused me of giving up too early and not fighting through it.\u00a0 Finally, my mom got on the phone with her and told her to back off.\u00a0 She told her that she wasn\u2019t seeing what was going on and that I had been doing everything that I could and the baby just will not nurse.<\/p>\n

What women need to know, and a lot of people won\u2019t tell them this, is that breast-feeding can be more painful than the actual delivery of the baby.\u00a0 I say this in my book, but women need to back off.\u00a0 One woman\u2019s experience is not your experience and because it worked beautifully for you doesn\u2019t mean that it is going to work beautifully for someone else. There are health benefits to breast feeding but by telling a woman that she is failing at it, you are making her feel that out of the gate that she is failing as a mother.\u00a0 It is one of the most obnoxious things that a woman can do to another woman because mothering is already the most difficult job that a woman is going to do.\u00a0 To add that burden of making a woman feel like she is failing is shameful.<\/p>\n

Women need to step back and allow themselves to have their own experiences.\u00a0 We see this a lot, where everyone thinks that their opinion is the only opinion and it needs to be heard.\u00a0 Quite frankly, it doesn\u2019t and if you are not a friend, and you are a keyboard warrior, your opinions matter even less.\u00a0 None of us are in each other\u2019s shoes and you don\u2019t know what someone else is going through.\u00a0 Maybe it was their dream to do it and it\u2019s not working out and that\u2019s their private struggle.<\/p>\n

\"Losing<\/p>\n

How do you think social media has changed people\u2019s parenting styles?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

I have a hate\/love relationship with social media.\u00a0 If I didn\u2019t need to have it, I wouldn\u2019t.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been told to follow all of these mommy bloggers to help with my brand and to align myself with current moms.\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting to me, as an older mom, that people give birth and the very next thing that they do is make themselves a mom blogger.\u00a0 It\u2019s like we need to know everything about their mom journey.\u00a0 It\u2019s cute when the kids are little and will dance in front of the camera and you can get 10,000 likes.<\/p>\n

I think what\u2019s it\u2019s done is it removed the intimacy between parent and child and\u00a0 created this relationship where the child is being exposed to the habit of acceptance and likability.\u00a0 When you put your child out there as part of your mom brand, you set them up for the expectation that they are cute, popular, funny and that people are going to like them.\u00a0 The reality is the world doesn\u2019t work that way.\u00a0 Not everyone is going to like your kid.\u00a0 When they go to school, they may not gel with other kid\u2019s personalities.<\/p>\n

In one way, it does a disservice to the mother\/child relationship at home and puts pressure on young moms who see all these mom bloggers and instagrammers have the perfect house, do perfect crafts with their perfectly dressed children and their perfect husband. It makes them think, how come my kid won\u2019t sleep, won\u2019t eat, yet these other moms seem to have it all handled?\u00a0 It\u2019s sending out the message that I am awesome, that I\u2019m doing great because I can breast feed, and have a perfect home and perfect children and you are just not doing it right.\u00a0 You are failing at your mom role.\u00a0 It\u2019s a huge disservice.<\/p>\n

What parents need to understand is that you don\u2019t own your child.\u00a0 They are not your property.\u00a0 A lot of parents on social media seem to want the likes and to be gifted things.\u00a0 Can we all just stop and just honour that our families are our own little nucleus?\u00a0 These things are all things that kids have done for more than a millennium.\u00a0 They talk, they walk, they laugh and cry.\u00a0 In my book, I talk about how it disgusts me when people post pictures of their kids in vulnerable situations, like when their kid just got their wisdom teeth out.\u00a0 That\u2019s there forever and your ten-year-old might not know that you\u2019ve posted that but when they are 20, they will be like really, that was about me, not about you.\u00a0 It will create a backlash and what it\u2019s done is it\u2019s allowed every parent to be a stage parent.\u00a0 Everybody is putting on a show, but for who?\u00a0 The ones that I enjoy are the people who are being honest.\u00a0 Their makeup isn\u2019t done and they are telling it like it is.\u00a0 Social media has removed a lot of the authenticity from being human.<\/p>\n

You touch on helicopter parenting in your book.\u00a0 How do you think parenting changed from when you were raised to when you became a parent?\u00a0 How do you think it\u2019s changed from when you became a parent to now?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

As mentioned, I\u2019m first generation Canadian.\u00a0 My mom was raised autocratically.\u00a0 You did what you were told, or you got spanked.\u00a0 My mom went one step away from that, but I was still chased around with a wooden spoon. The expectation was that you don\u2019t mouth off and you do what I say because I said so.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t want to parent like that if and when I had kids.\u00a0 We\u2019ll have some dialogue and my kids will be able to express themselves and give their side of the story.\u00a0 When we parented our kids, we still had house rules and if they didn\u2019t follow them there was a consequence.\u00a0 They would get two spanks on their bum and nobody ever got chased through the house.\u00a0 There was no rage or getting to the boiling point.\u00a0 We eliminated that part of the parenting scenario of just lashing out by hitting your max and totally losing your cool.\u00a0 I thought we had a good balance, but looking back, and conversing with all of the girls now that they are all between 23-31, we wouldn\u2019t have done the spanking.\u00a0 We were part of a church group that believed that spanking was part of parenting.\u00a0 I would have changed that.<\/p>\n

I think because of the autocratic way many people used to be raised, you now see parenting where nobody is wrong, everybody\u2019s feelings are valid and everybody can do it when they feel it\u2019s time.\u00a0 There is a lot of leniency and we don\u2019t say no in this house.\u00a0\u00a0 Everybody always wins, and the issue with that and what we are seeing happen is that a lot of these kids grow up, and learn everybody doesn\u2019t always win.\u00a0 When you apply for a job, not everybody can get it. Not everybody will get a promotion and you can\u2019t split it up and share it.\u00a0 We are setting kids up for failure.<\/p>\n

When our oldest was growing up, people were still parenting with consequences.\u00a0 By the time our youngest was going through school, we noticed a huge shift, so she ended up having more issues going through school than our oldest girls, because back then, a lot of kids were raised with the same expectations.\u00a0 By the time she got to school there was a change in the rules.\u00a0 Parents automatically sided with their child because they were perfect so your child must have started it. There was a shifting of blame.\u00a0 What happens in those scenarios is that kids don\u2019t get a realistic understanding so when they go on to university and their parents aren\u2019t there to do their assignments or call your teacher to get you that A+ and you are just a number in a lecture hall with three thousand kids, some see that they aren\u2019t capable of doing it.\u00a0 These kids are lost.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a psychiatrist, but if I were to guess a reason why there is a spike in depression is, they don\u2019t have coping skills because they were never allowed to fail.\u00a0 They were not taught that failure is a part of life and is a normal experience.\u00a0 They can\u2019t cope with schedules, deadlines and not being special.\u00a0 With helicopter and lawnmower parenting, the path is cleared for them to succeed and it instills false confidence. It\u2019s the greatest disservice to not let your kids work things out on their own and I\u2019m proud that we gave that to our girls.\u00a0 The balance was there.\u00a0 We supported them as they needed it emotionally, but we made them problem solve. They had to find the solutions on their own.\u00a0 We would guide them and give them advice but we wouldn\u2019t solve the problems for them.<\/p>\n

I think that the bottom line is that most parents do what they are doing because they love their child so much.\u00a0 The older a person is when they start to parent, the harder it was for them to have that child.\u00a0 Most parents are not coming from arrogance.\u00a0 It\u2019s coming from a place of love and gratitude and wanting their child to have the best life experience that they can.\u00a0 The mistake made is that holding their hand through every part of their journey is not the best way to love them.\u00a0 The best way is to catch them when they fall, not keep them from falling.<\/p>\n

Part of your book is about how to KEEP HAVING SEX with your partner.\u00a0 How can busy moms make the time or the effort when they just don\u2019t feel desirable?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

When you are younger, let\u2019s face it, you are just horny.\u00a0 Your hormones are just designed that way so it\u2019s easier to keep having sex when you are young.\u00a0 Plus, you have more energy, so you can squeeze it in at midnight. It is harder to keep intimacy going when you are a parent.\u00a0 Scheduling sex would never work for me, but that\u2019s not a judgment, it\u2019s just how it works for some people and a lot are doing that. The advice that I would give to couples that are struggling to have the time and energy for intimacy is to remember that intimacy starts from the moment that you wake up.\u00a0 It\u2019s easier to be sexual and to want to have sex if each partner decides each and every day to be in love.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I think it\u2019s the same thing with sex. You aren\u2019t always going to feel like having sex, but you have to start wanting to have sex and what does that look like to you.\u00a0 As a couple, when you find yourself in a place where sex isn\u2019t happening organically, like everything in life, you have to sit down with your partner and communicate.\u00a0 It\u2019s figuring out how to rectify it.<\/p>\n

It starts with open communication about what your sexual \u00a0needs are, how much sex you want and need and then you go from there.\u00a0 I think a lot of couples don\u2019t like to talk about sex.\u00a0 They don\u2019t want to admit how important it is in their relationship.\u00a0 At the beginning of most relationships, it\u2019s a non-conversation because it\u2019s easy and natural.\u00a0 As the relationship goes on, couples are afraid they are going to hurt each other\u2019s feelings if they admit that the sex isn\u2019t good anymore or it\u2019s not enough.\u00a0 It\u2019s a huge mistake to not be clear and open about your sexual desires.\u00a0 That\u2019s where you may need to get a therapist involved.\u00a0 Not having intimacy is the greatest way to break down a relationship.\u00a0 Sex is a way to make us feel close and tied to one another.\u00a0 We\u2019ve [Yannick and she] been together for 32 years and have had a lot of dry time and we have been able to have those conversations to make sure that we can keep the relationship healthy.\u00a0 Let\u2019s be honest, sex is one of the best parts of life when you are doing it right.<\/p>\n

Finally, if moms can only remember one lesson from your book, what would you like that to be?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Take it easy on yourself.\u00a0 You are doing great.\u00a0 You are awesome.\u00a0 Put your phone down and stop comparing yourself.\u00a0 Your journey is your journey and your kid are different than anyone else\u2019s kid.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shantelle Bisson\u2019s debut non-fiction book: Raising Your Kids Without Losing Your Cool will guide you through the anxieties and burdens of raising a family, all while helping you keep your…<\/div>\n
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