The Peaceful Parenting Podcast

You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.
In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I interview Jessica Slice, a disability activist and the author of Unfit Parent, a Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World. We discuss the effect of Jessica’s disability on her life and parenting, and what non-disabled parents can learn from her about parenting.
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We talk about:
* 00:00 — Intro + Jessica Slice and her book
* 00:02 — Jessica’s disability story and diagnoses
* 00:05 — Wheelchair, identity shift, and living as disabled
* 00:06 — The disability paradox explained
* 00:08 — Perfectionism, capitalism, and happiness
* 00:11 — Disability culture vs. hustle culture
* 00:13 — Becoming a parent unexpectedly (foster → newborn)
* 00:14 — Why early parenting can be easier for disabled parents
* 00:18 — Skill overlap: disability + parenting
* 00:20 — Myths about disabled parenting
* 00:26 — Fear of care, aging, and needing help
* 00:27 — Parenting and interdependence
* 00:29 — Community support and parenting
* 00:30 — Letting go of control and certainty
* 00:32 — Everyone needs help
* 00:34 — Advice to younger parent self
* 00:35 — Where to find Jessica
Resources mentioned in this episode:
* Yoto Screen Free Audio Book Player
* The Peaceful Parenting Membership
* Evelyn & Bobbie bras
* Jessica’s books
* Jessica’s Substack
* Jessica on A Slight Change of Plans
Connect with Sarah Rosensweet:
* Instagram
* Facebook Group
* YouTube
* Website
* Join us on Substack
* Newsletter
* Book a short consult or coaching session call
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Podcast Transcript:
Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Jessica Slice. She is a mother, a writer, and a disability activist, and the author of Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World. I love this book and I’ve been telling everyone about it. I highly recommend you pick up a copy. We will link to it in the show notes. Until then, have a listen to my interview with Jessica, where we talk about disability and parenting and what non-disabled parents can learn from her about parenting. Whether you are interested in learning more about disability culture, or want some new and somewhat startling answers to the question, “Why is parenting so hard?” I think you’ll have a lot to think about after listening to this episode. Let’s meet Jessica.
Sarah: Hi Jessica. Welcome to the podcast.
Jessica: Thanks so much for having me.
Sarah: I’m so glad to have you here. If you wouldn’t mind just starting out by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Jessica: Of course. My name’s Jessica Slice, and I’m really happy to be here. I am an author and a speaker and just write in general about disability and perfectionism and our shared fragility. I live in Toronto with my two kids and my husband, and we have a dog named Honey Puppy, and I’m, yeah, really happy to be here.
Sarah: It’s so good to have you here. So your book about parenthood and disability—I was so surprised that I know so little about disability. So maybe you could tell us about your disability and then your journey to becoming a parent.
Jessica: Yeah, of course. So I became disabled at 28. And so I have this real before-and-after story, and I also feel like because I don’t have a congenital disability—or I didn’t have a disability until 28—that I have a perspective from that specific position. You know, I grew up having a body that was generally accepted, generally welcomed, that I didn’t have accommodation or accessibility issues.
But when I was 28, I was on a hike. I developed heat exhaustion, and I just became extremely sick. So the day before the hike, I was active. I went for a seven-mile run. I was on vacation, and then the day after the hike, it was hard to even walk down the hallway. I just had this range of debilitating symptoms: extreme dizziness, nausea, this sense of kind of like floating above myself, unexplained fevers. My legs were going numb.
And I saw doctors and, well, I assumed I just needed to recover from the heat exhaustion. But then I didn’t. And so I just started seeing doctors and no one knew what was wrong. They said maybe I was just stressed. And this went on, and I ended up not recovering ever. Like I still have many of those symptoms now.
But about two years into that, I finally saw someone who diagnosed me with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, which—at that time, it was 2013 that I got diagnosed—it was not very well known. It’s better known now because it comes along with long COVID in a lot of patients, and so more people are talking about it.
But then two years after that—or one year after that—my little sister developed the same symptoms that I had, and it seemed rare that two people would have this exact same sudden onset. And so our doctor at Duke sent us to a geneticist at Duke, and that geneticist diagnosed us with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which is a genetic connective tissue disorder. And so that causes a lot of widespread pain, a lot of dislocations, some vascular issues—well, not as severe as certain types of EDS, but can cause POTS. And so I have, I sort of have two disabilities that are connected, and in a lot of people with EDS, they end up developing POTS.
And then in 2018—so for a long time, for those first seven years I was disabled—I just sort of shrunk my life to fit my body’s needs, which I, which was okay. But I, I just didn’t go anywhere where I would need to stand or walk or be upright.
And then seven years in, when my child—and I’ll, I’ll explain meeting her—but when she was one, I was like, I think I wanna go more places. And so then I got my first power wheelchair, and that made it so I could go on walks and go to stores and go to restaurants, or go to her ballet classes, or just be in the world a bit more.
And so, and it was around that time that I really started identifying as disabled and not just sick. Mm-hmm. And that was a real transformation for me. It was a switch from feeling like I had this body that worked and stopped working to having a body that had switched from one identity to a different identity. What a trip that—yeah.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Because you had experienced life as both disabled and non-disabled, you have a particular insight into something that I, that you wrote about, which is the disability paradox. Mm-hmm. Can you talk about that? Because I think if somebody had been disabled their whole life, it might be harder for non-disabled people to believe that the disability paradox is true. But because you’ve been—no, I’m serious. Like, it is kind of funny, but because you’ve had both types—mm-hmm—of lives, can you explain what the disability paradox is and any—just any thoughts on what you think listeners should know about that?
Jessica: Yeah, I mean, God, I could talk about this all day. I’ll try not to be too long-winded about it. But the disability paradox is this philosophical phenomenon where disabled people are far more satisfied with our lives than people would expect. And in fact, when you measure satisfaction, disabled people are equal to or more satisfied than non-disabled people. But that really goes against sort of our collective assumptions, which is that the very worst thing is to be disabled.
You know, even from the time someone gets pregnant, you say, “Well, I don’t care if it’s a boy or girl, as long as it’s healthy.” And I don’t wanna, like, take away from how hard it is to have a sick child, but the irony is: being a disabled person doesn’t end up diminishing life satisfaction across the board.
There are disabled people who don’t like their lives. There are non-disabled people who don’t like their lives. There are parts of disability that bring suffering. There are parts of kind of every person’s life that brings suffering. And so it’s not that disability never has hard parts, but it’s that it’s overly reductive. It overly flattens a person to say that being disabled is worse than non-disabled.
In my experience, before I was disabled, I had this kind of overly shiny and successful life. I stumbled into a career in my twenties where I was making a ton of money. I was married to my high school sweetheart. I was out with friends every weekend. I sort of like, there were all these things you should try to achieve, and I was just like, I had done.
Sarah: And you were on a cruise in Santorini when you got sick. Like, I mean, that’s like a perfect example of how shiny your life was, right?
Jessica: Yeah, it was. And earlier that year I had been celebrated in Chicago for being one of the best realtors in the country. Like, I just had—It was like someone had, you know, set up these things that we’re told will make us happy, and I was checking them off. And I had this really deep sense of—it was dissatisfaction or suffering, or kind of like rottenness inside me. And it was because I felt like I never was getting to the place I needed to go. Like there was this level of perfection, this level of joy, enjoyment that I couldn’t quite access. Like every trip was not quite good enough. Every accomplishment was not quite enough. It was like I was so hard on myself.
And I think part of that was being so proximate to what the world says we should be. And then when I became disabled—I mean, there were many excruciating years. There were the two years looking for a diagnosis, when I was getting sicker and sicker and sicker. There was the falling apart of my first marriage. There was losing an income. You know, I went for years without reliable income, living on very little a month. I mean, there was real suffering there.
But what it also did: it took me off this track I had been on, and then I had to form something else there. And I was forced to be still with myself. I was forced to tell the truth to myself for the first time. I just had a lot of time like knocking around my own brain.
And for me, once—especially once I was able to have money to live on and have a life, have a diagnosis, you know, have a life that felt like I could survive it—once I was there, it was wild, but I found myself so much happier than I had been before.
And I think a lot of that was because I liked myself and knew myself for the first time. And I had just sort of jumped off the track. I had, like, leapt from—or been forced off, pushed off—the track from this thing that I was almost good enough at to whatever was true for just me in my life. And there was such honesty there that even the hard parts felt survivable. It was like I was knocking up against something—(I shouldn’t clap on the mic)—but I was knocking up against something solid in myself. And that felt like a way I could live.
And so the disability paradox makes sense to me. Not that everyone has to have this wild change that I did or totally change their mindset, or I don’t mean to overly silver-line what can be a very difficult experience. But I think the real thing is: we do a very, very, very bad job of predicting what will make us happy. And the thing that often ends up working is just honesty and getting to know ourselves and being stuck with our own stillness. And that sometimes disability—or often disability—fosters a truthfulness that can feel like getting free.
Sarah: I love that. In your book you talk a lot about—I mean, it would be so easy for me to go off on this tangent, but I’m not going to—about capitalism and our culture of individualism. And do you think that part of the disability paradox is that you step away when you’re disabled, you need to step away from that? You said you stepped off the track and I immediately thought of the rat race of getting more. Mm-hmm. Having more, producing more, and not needing anybody else—that is capitalism.
Jessica: Absolutely. I mean, if we believe that more money and more purchases and more perfection in ourselves will bring happiness, then we never get there and we end up just spending a lot of money, which feeds a system that wants us to spend a lot of money. But disability culture as a whole fosters community, fosters creativity, fosters, you know, like a “crip time,” like a slower different pace of life. It’s like there’s all these kind of anti-capitalist sentiments inherent in disability culture, which I think really pushes against that. And I think that’s a huge part of it. I mean, as you know, my book—I sort of like, I say that over and over and over again. I think it’s massive. Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a, it’s such an interesting—it’s a good segue, too, to talking about parenting. Because I think a lot of the things that make—and this is what your book is a lot about—a lot of the things that make parenting hard and not enjoyable also come from the same source of capitalist and individualist culture and society. Mm-hmm.
And in your book you have a chapter called “The First Week.” You were a foster parent and you unexpectedly got a newborn who is now—Mm-hmm—your child now. But you weren’t expecting a newborn, so you weren’t prepared for a newborn, and you had to kind of scramble and get everything together in that first week. Mm-hmm. It was a bit of a shock and surprise, I think, for you.
But even with that, you talked about how your first week was pretty relaxing and nesting and beautiful. And then as you started to talk to people—maybe you could take it up from here—you sort of talked to non-disabled people about their first week with their newborn and saw quite a contrast.
Jessica: Yeah. You know, I started that chapter not knowing what I would find. I thought there might be a difference between the struggles of the first week between disabled and non-disabled people. And I mean, a major caveat is that each person has their own unique experience. Painting with too wide a brush is never great.
But in my interviews, and what I have found since, is that in many cases disabled people have an easier time adjusting to parenthood than non-disabled people, at least at the beginning. And I think a lot of that is because the first week sort of brings to the surface realities that disability has already brought to the surface.
When you—particularly people who give birth—so if you give birth and you suddenly have a fragile body for the first time, and you’re taking care of a fragile baby, and like the baby’s fragility is just so evident—I don’t know if you felt this way, but with both of my kids, it’s like you’re watching them breathe like a maniac. Like they breathe so fast and slow and pause and they turn color—beat through the top of their head.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jessica: Oh, yeah. Horrifying. And you’re just sort of confronted with these bodies and how fragile we all are. And you’re also confronted with how much we need other people.
And you know, one of my favorite disability scholars, Jennifer Fink, talks about how fear of disability is fear of needing care and/or fear of giving care. The first week is like: you need care. Particularly if you’ve given birth, you are giving constant care to this baby. And you’re sort of in—it’s like you are transported into this other world of fragility and interdependence and uncertainty.
And if you’re disabled, that’s sort of where you’ve already been living because of your own body and because of navigating the world. And if you’re not disabled, I think it can feel particularly jarring. And it can feel like, “How will I ever survive this? How can I ever get to the other side of this? Who am I now? Will I ever find solid ground again?”
And I think that disability is a protective factor there. I think it really helps you.
Whether those changes—I know with my daughter, she had some health issues at the beginning and I just had this sense like, “She’ll be fine.” We also didn’t know if she was going to be a—like how long she would be with us. It could have been weeks or months, and I sort of found myself okay with that. At first it was this weird sense of: all I need to do is love her and be here. And I know that sounds overly shiny.
And in the book I interview this woman who had volunteered to help us adjust. So I posted on the neighborhood listserv, said we needed supplies. This woman, Renee, replied and said, “I’m a doula in the neighborhood,” or a night nurse. “Can I come help you with your first night and help you get set up?” It’s—yeah—amazing.
And so she came and set up a bottle station, and she came in. And then my husband’s mom ended up paying for a couple nights a week of Renee to come and help us for those first few months, which I know not everyone gets. But you still have a lot of nights without help. Yeah.
But so she was there a lot during those early days. And so I interviewed her for the book and I was like, “Was it really as magical as I remember?” And I was sort of afraid she’d be like, “No, you were a disaster.” But she said, “No, I have never seen anything like it.” She said coming into your house was like just walking into—there was like—you were just like reading poems and so calm and happy and in love. And she said she really couldn’t wrap her mind around how different it was.
And that made me feel good that my recollection had been accurate.
Sarah: You weren’t rose-coloring it. You had a great quote on Maya Shanker’s podcast—which, what a great podcast to be on. That’s one of my favorite podcasts that I listen to.
Jessica: Oh, she’s the best. We’ve become friends since.
Sarah: Have you?
Jessica: She’s really—
Sarah: Oh, she seems lovely from listening to her podcast. We’ll put a link to the episode in the show notes for anyone who wants to listen to it. Great. But you said something on her podcast—so I’m gonna quote you back to you—that you said that you thought the first week, and parenting in general, was easier for—or could be. I know we’re making a lot of generalizations, but could be easier in general for disabled people because you said the bodies and minds of babies and kids are needy and unpredictable, and a disabled body and mind is also needy and unpredictable, and that you saw there was a practical overlap in skills. I thought that really distilled down the idea that you’re talking about just now.
Jessica: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think it’s kind of like we’ve just been practicing for this without realizing it.
Sarah: And I think that’s the thing that’s so hard: for parents, that needy and unpredictability is what makes the adjustment to parenting so hard for non-disabled people who aren’t used to—again, to the capitalist and individualistic structure—Mm-hmm. We think we can control everything. Mm-hmm. And perfectionism is another theme in your book too, right? Mm-hmm. Of like, we can control everything and we can make it all perfect. Mm-hmm. And if you’re disabled, you’ve probably had to let go of that idea of control and perfection.
Jessica: I get maybe one email a week from a person whose parent was disabled, or is disabled. And the one I got this week said, “Everyone thinks their mom is the best. But, Jessica, if I may, my mom was the best. She was patient, kind, and smart. She would happily read to me or listen to silly stories or let me sit on her lap for as long as I wanted.” And then she said, “As an adult and mother, I have always had the feeling that my mom was a better mother somehow because of her disability, but I have also always felt guilty even thinking that, like I was somehow celebrating her having MS—a disease that took her from us. The way you describe disabled parenting and its creativity, resourcefulness, and necessary rejection of capitalist hustle reads at some points to me like a love letter to my own mom.”
Sarah: Aw, that is so sweet. Incredible. So lovely. Yeah. That’s really lovely.
Jessica: And it feels—’cause there’s this feeling writing the book of like, “What if my kids hate having a disabled mom?” And I’m like, “No, it’s actually great having me as a mom.” And getting these emails from people saying, “No, this is what I experienced,” mm-hmm, that there’s something in the way disability forces a rejection of hustle culture for many of us that allows us to be the kind of present and slow and flexible parents—or at least that I could have never been before.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. There’s so much in your book too about the challenges with the medical system and Child Protective Services, that people who are disabled get their kids taken away at way higher rates than people who are not disabled, and have trouble accessing good medical care, reproductive services. You know, there’s a long list of things that are harder for disabled people. So I’m glad that there’s something that feels like you’ve got a boost in that, that you’ve—Yeah. It’s like a short circuit to things that I hope parents in our community slowly start to figure out in terms of the perfectionism, mm-hmm, and the slowing down. You were forced to do all of that.
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. I do sometimes feel self-conscious when I see the way my peers parent—when I see them making these perfect little lunches and these divided-up lunch boxes, or doing elf on the shelf, or these kind of versions of parenting that I just—I don’t have the energy or capacity to have as part of our lives. And I can feel like, “Are my kids missing out from this type of parenting?” And maybe in some ways they are. You know, nothing simple.
But I know I would have done those things. The version of me in my twenties would have done those things, but she would’ve also been a lot less patient. She would’ve had a lot less time for just sort of wasting hours and being together. And I don’t know that there—I have an ability to be present with my kids that I wouldn’t have had before.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think you—I heard you say on Maya Shanker’s podcast that you and your husband one weekend were like, “Oh my gosh, it was such a busy weekend,” but then you realized that you had only gone to the park and met some friends or something. But I think that’s amazing. Like, I think that kids would trade more time with their parents and more connection time, whatever that looked like, for all of the activities and all of the stuff. Like, I really do.
Jessica: Thanks. Yeah. We don’t do very much. Our kids are in no activities, and who knows what they’ll end up being mad about as adults.
Sarah: So what myths about disabled parenting do you want to dispel? You said a lot of non-disabled parents think that disabled parenting would be like—they’re just who they are, but without being able to see, was an example you said in your book, right? And so—I don’t know—maybe in that direction: what do you—yeah.
Jessica: Oh, that’s great. So yeah. And I found myself feeling this way. You know, when I interviewed blind parents for the book, I was imagining my life, but without vision. Mm-hmm. And when people imagine me as a wheelchair user, as a parent, they probably imagine their life, but just adding a wheelchair, and that’s not really how things work. We adapt based on who we are and our needs and our whole life is sort of built around that.
And so there’s a level of creativity. There’s a level of building from the ground up. I think people really underestimate our ability as humans to build and to create and to problem-solve in community. You know, I have a lot of close relationships with other disabled parents and we problem-solve together, and I think that—I think it’s more possible than people imagine.
I was watching a friend of mine, Jessica, do a reel recently where she went through her face cream nighttime routine, and she is a quadriplegic and so she has some use of her hands but can’t rotate in certain ways. And she was walking through which bottles she can open and that she puts them on her sink and then dips her thumb in and kind of puts it on her face and then—and it took a very long time.
And I also—I don’t have a very complex face routine. So in that way it was like, I was like, “I would never do that.” But I thought, “Oh my gosh, she must be so tired doing that every night.” And I found myself thinking about her routine through my body. But then I thought, “No, I’m doing the thing.” It’s not her routine through my body; it’s her routine through her body, which she lives in.
And we all just live in the bodies we have and get used to it. You know, like when you’re walking around your house, you’re not like, “This would be easier to clean up if I could fly,” or, “If I had wheels on my feet,” or whatever. We just live in our own bodies. And I think it’s a different way to think about disability.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. I’m so glad I read your book because I didn’t know how much I didn’t think about disability. Do you know what I mean? And that just reminded me when you said, “We live in our own bodies,” and it’s so useful to be able to see the world in a different way through somebody else’s eyes a little bit.
I was actually reading your book at a cafe yesterday and I got up to go to the bathroom and I realized that the bathroom had a handicap sign on the door, but it had a piece of furniture that was outside the doorway that was blocking the door. Yeah. So that somebody in a wheelchair wouldn’t have been able to get through the doorway.
Jessica: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: You know, I don’t know. It’s just stuff like that. It’s so good to—
Jessica: Oh my gosh, that’s constant. Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jessica: Or you go into a bathroom like that and there it’s where they store all the supplies for the restaurant, so you can’t actually put your wheelchair inside.
Sarah: Right. It’s too crowded. Yeah.
Jessica: Yeah. And the thing about disability is it’s coming for us all. The only way you live a life without disability is if you die tragically one day. Otherwise your body—all of our bodies—change at some point. Yeah. And we, and our needs and capacity shift. I mean, you know, even you—like, I would imagine at this point your needs, your capacities are different than they were 20 years ago. And I think our discomfort with that ends up hurting ourselves too, because we have such fear of aging, such fear of need, such fear of all the ways we change, and that’s just part of being a human with a body.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And you talk about that fear of disability, and I think it’s the same with fear of aging, fear of care, right? Mm-hmm. Fear of needing care. Mm-hmm. And, mm-hmm, can you talk about the care aspect—talk a little bit about parenting and how you see non-disabled parenting as people are suffering because of that lack of care that we have?
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think for all parents there’s this sense that you should be able to provide what your kids need without assistance, and that there is a distinction between people who give care and people who need care. And that a mom in particular is a person who gives care and doesn’t need it.
And I think what disability forces to the surface—particularly those who have some care needs like me—is: I give care and I need care, and that is part of my daily life. And needing care does not hinder my ability to be a valuable member of my family or a good mom. And I think it dispels that myth, I guess, that you have to be one or the other.
But I think if all parents could reject that binary of caregivers or care receivers, then it would mean that parenting didn’t feel as impossible, or didn’t have such an impossible standard, that weakness were allowed, or dependence were allowed, or interdependence.
And I think it would just change how we think about parenting in general because there’s this feeling, I believe, that particularly moms have to be all-powerful and limitless and perfect—and that it is a failure in the very definition of what it is to be a parent to start to need support and care.
Sarah: That’s so true. I live in a community of about 700 people and our houses are all very close together and we all know way more about each other than perhaps you might want your neighbors knowing about you. Mm-hmm. But at the same time, it is a community of care.
And I was reflecting on how my first week didn’t feel that hard, but I also had neighbors who organized dinners brought to us hot at six o’clock every night. And my in-laws lived down the street, and I had friends who lived nearby who could come over and help and hold the baby. What a difference it is to live in a community where people help each other.
We lived temporarily in Vancouver for a year, and the night before we were moving back, we realized that we had gotten—in trouble—with being packed and ready for the moving truck to come and called the one person that we knew who was in town and said, “Can you come over and help us? Like, we’re in trouble. The packing—we’re really behind.” And he said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m watching a movie. I can’t come.”
And I realized: back in our old community, I could have put something out on our E-group for our neighborhood, and I would’ve had 30 people—I kid you not—people who I don’t even really know very well who would’ve been like, “I’ll help you. I’ll help you.”
For me, I don’t think that my motherhood was as lonely or as difficult because I live in a community. And people generally don’t live in a community like that anymore.
Jessica: No. Oh, that’s an excellent point. I think disability forces interdependence. But I mean, the point I try to make with my book is you don’t have to be disabled to have these values of creativity and interdependence and rejection of hustle culture. And it sounds like those are some of your inherent values too.
And yeah. I mean, community eases so many of those burdens. And not seeing the need for your neighbors as evidence that you’re not suited for motherhood, but just that you’re a person with limits.
Sarah: Yeah. I would get, sometimes I would feel lonely and just go out with the baby in the baby carriage. Yeah. Find someone to talk to. Just—yeah. Yeah.
And I think that can be one of the answers too: how to make non-disabled parenting easier is to try to find and make community if possible. But are there any other things that you can think of that you think would be helpful?
Jessica: I think reckoning with your own fragility and the uncertainty of life is a huge part of it, I think. So much of parenting heartache comes from this feeling that there’s a way it should be with your kids, a way it should be with yourself. And then when you veer off of that, it feels intolerable.
And you know, there’s kind of the early parts of it. Like you don’t know what your kids’ educational needs will be, or their physical needs, or their sleep needs, or their anything needs, or their food sensitivity. You know, you don’t know any of that. But then that keeps going all the way to what is very hard to swallow, which is: we don’t know that our kids will be okay, and we don’t know that we will be okay. And that is terrible. And it is also true.
And I think so much of what we do in life and in parenthood is this desperate attempt to pretend that we’re not mortal and pretend that we’re not fragile. And to act like if we try hard enough, we can insulate our kids from suffering and from pain or from illness, or from, God forbid, death.
And I think there are ways we protect ourselves and protect our kids, but a lot of it is not protection. A lot of it is like this desperate attempt to close our eyes to what is true. And I think one of the most important—and one of the hardest—things I’ve done is confront that. Confront how little I control in my kids’ lives. Mm-hmm.
And there are ways we—and some of that’s just internal. Some of it’s poetry and journaling and just looking at it. And then some of it is actions we take.
Sarah: Just before we close, I was looking at my notes just to make sure that I asked you everything that I wanted to ask you. And I came across this really beautiful quote from your book that I had written down that I think really encapsulates something that we’ve just been talking about. And you said: “The problem isn’t that disabled people need too much help to parent safely. The problem is that society refuses to admit that everybody does.”
And I think that’s really beautiful to think: we all need help, and so many people are struggling because they think they should just be able to do it all themselves. And that we were not—we weren’t made to parent in isolation.
Jessica: No. And we weren’t made to solve our parenting problems with purchases. Mm-hmm. Or just working harder, or sleeping less, or optimizing our days or being more efficient. Like that—there is no there, there when you’re looking for the answer down that path.
Sarah: Yeah. And that’s what I mean—capitalism sells us that idea that if you have the—
Jessica: Yeah.
Sarah: You know, the perfect tool or stroller or whatever it is, then life is better and easier.
So thank you for your book. It’s a question that I ask all my guests, which is: if you could go back in time to your younger parent self, what would you tell yourself? What piece of advice would you give yourself back in those early days?
Jessica: It would be to get a wheelchair sooner. Yeah. Gosh, I missed that first year out in the world with her. Mm-hmm. And I wish I had had it sooner.
Sarah: What made you not get it sooner?
Jessica: I never considered it. Mm-hmm. Not once did I consider a wheelchair. I thought: whatever I could do with my own body was what I deserved to have access to.
Sarah: So—
Jessica: And I remember—yeah. And then I said to my husband at one point, “If only there was like a chair that I could be on that could recline and was cushioned and I could move around on it.” And he’s like, “I think that’s just literally a wheelchair.”
Sarah: I love that. Yeah. So, yeah. So you were still holding onto the “I can do it all.” Even with your disability, you’re still holding onto “I can just do it and grit through it and”—
Jessica: Well, no. So it wasn’t even—’cause I didn’t do any, like, I didn’t go places. Mm-hmm. I thought—not that I can do it all. I accepted my limitations, but then I made my life only as small as what I could handle with my own body. Right. I hadn’t considered that there are tools that would open up the world to me again.
Sarah: Well, I’m glad you got a wheelchair. And, me too, I’m glad you wrote your book. I really recommend it to everyone. And where’s the best place for people to go and find out more about you and what you do?
Jessica: My website is jessicaslice.com. I’m on Instagram and post when I can convince myself to. But I do write very regularly on my Substack, which you can find under my name, Jessica Slice, on Substack. And I write about parenting and about disability and about the poems I’m reading, and I really love that community there.
Sarah: Do you write poetry?
Jessica: No, I’ve never tried, but I read poetry every day and it’s a huge anchoring point in my day.
Sarah: Maybe when you have more—when you’re not in the thick of parenting small children—you should give it a try.
Jessica: Maybe. It sounds so daunting.
Sarah: Well, I mean, you’re a wonderful writer, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were poems in there also.
Jessica: Thanks.
Sarah: Thank you, Jessica.
Jessica: Thank you.



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You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.
In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, Corey and I talk about modeling the person you want your child to be—instead of trying to force them into having good character or good values. We discussed the difference between being a gardener or a carpenter parent, raising kind and helpful children, and how to trust the modeling process. We give lots of examples of what this has looked like for parents in our community as well as in our own homes.
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We talk about:
* 00:00 — Intro + main idea: be the person you want your child to be
* 00:02 — How kids naturally model what we do (funny real-life stories)
* 00:04 — When modeling goes wrong (rabbit poop + shovel story)
* 00:06 — Not everything kids do is learned from us (fight/flight/freeze)
* 00:08 — Gardener vs. carpenter parenting metaphor
* 00:10 — Why “don’t do anything for your child” is flawed advice
* 00:12 — Helping builds independence (adult example + kids stepping up)
* 00:17 — Hunt, Gather, Parent: let kids help when they’re little
* 00:19 — How to encourage helping without power struggles
* 00:23 — Family team vs. rigid chores
* 00:26 — Trust, faith, and “I’m sure you’ll do it next time”
* 00:29 — Respecting kids like people (adultism)
* 00:31 — Living values without preaching
* 00:36 — It’s the small moments that shape kids
* 00:38 — Don’t be a martyr: let some things go
* 00:40 — When this works (and when it doesn’t)
* 00:42 — Closing reflections on trust and nurturing
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Podcast Transcript:
Sarah: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. I have Corey with me today. Hi, Corey.
Corey: Hey, Sarah.
Sarah: I’m so happy to be talking about what we’re going to be talking about today because it’s something that comes up a lot—both with our coaching clients and in our membership.
Today we’re talking about modeling the person you want your child to be—being the person you want your child to be—instead of trying to force them into having good character or good values.
Corey: This is one of my favorite topics because people don’t really think about it. There’s that phrase that’s so rampant: “Do as I say, not as I do.” And we’re actually saying: do the exact opposite of that.
Sarah: Yeah. And I think if people did this, that phrase wouldn’t have to exist. Because if you’re being the person you want your child to be, then you really can just say, “Do as I do.”
I guess that “Do what I say, not what I do” comes up when you’re not being the person you want your child to be. And it shows how powerful it is that kids naturally follow what we do, right?
Corey: Yes.
Sarah: Yeah. We both have some funny stories about this in action—times we didn’t necessarily think about it until we remembered or saw it reflected back. Do you want to share yours first? It’s so cute.
Corey: Yeah. When I was a little girl, my favorite game to play was asking my mom if we could play “Mummy and her friend.” We did this all the time. My mom said she had to do it over and over and over with me.
We’d both get a little coffee cup. I’d fill mine with water, and we’d pretend we were drinking tea or coffee. Then we would just sit and have a conversation—like I heard her having with her friend.
And I’d always be like, “So, how are your kids?”—and ask the exact things I would hear my mom asking her friend.
Sarah: That’s so cute. So you were pretending to be her?
Corey: Yes.
Sarah: That is so cute.
I remember once when Lee was little—he was probably around three—he had a block, like a play block, a colored wooden block. And he had it pinched between his shoulder and his ear, and he was doing circles around the kitchen.
I said, “What are you doing?” And he said, “I’m talking on the phone.”
And I realized: oh my gosh. I walk around with the cordless phone pinched between my shoulder and my ear, and I walk around while I’m talking on the phone. So for him, that was like: this is how you talk on the phone.
Corey: That’s such a funny reference, too. Now our kids would never—my kids would never do that, right?
Sarah: No, because they never saw you with a phone like that.
Corey: Right.
Sarah: That is so funny. It’s definitely a dated reference.
You also have a funny story, too, that’s sort of the opposite—less harmless things our kids copy us doing. Do you want to share your… I think it’s a rabbit poop story.
Corey: It is. We’re just going to put it out there: it’s a rabbit poop story. This is how we accidentally model things we probably don’t want our kids doing.
So, if you were listening this time last year, I got a new dog. She’s a lab, and her favorite thing is to eat everything—especially things she’s not supposed to eat, which I’m sure a lot of people can relate to.
Our area is rampant with rabbits, so we have this problem with rabbit droppings. And my vet has informed me that despite the fact that dogs love it, you need to not let them eat it.
So I’m always in the backyard—if you’re hearing this, it’s really silly—having to try and shovel these up so the dog’s not eating them.
Listeners, we’re looking into a longer-term solution so rabbits aren’t getting into our backyard, but this is where we’re at right now.
Whenever I noticed I’d be shoveling them up and I’d see her trying to eat something else I hadn’t shoveled yet, I’d say, “Leave it,” and then give her a treat to reward her.
One day, my little guy—little C—who loves taking part in dog training and is so great with animals, he saw our dog eating something she shouldn’t. He ran and got his little sand shovel and went up to her holding it—kind of waving it at her—like, “Leave it.”
And I was like, why are you shaking a shovel at the dog? Totally confused about what he was doing.
And he’s like, “Well, this is how you do it, Mommy.”
And I was like… oh. I shake a shovel at the dog. You just say, “Leave it,” and then you give her the treat—not the shovel.
Not an hour later, I’m shoveling again, she’s trying to eat something she shouldn’t, and I’m like, “Leave it, leave it.” I look at my hand and I’m holding the shovel up while saying it to her.
Sarah: Right?
Corey: And I was like, “Oh, this is why he thinks that.” Because every time I’m saying this to her, I’m holding a shovel mid-scoop—trying to get on top of the problem.
Sarah: That’s so funny. And when you told me that the first time, I got the impression you maybe weren’t being as gentle as you thought you were. Like you were frustrated with the dog, and little C was copying that.
Corey: Yeah. Probably that too, right? Because it’s a frustrating problem. Anyone who’s tried to shovel rabbit droppings knows it’s an impossible, ridiculous task.
So I definitely was a bit frustrated. He was picking up both on the frustration and on what I was physically doing.
And I also think this is a good example to show parents: don’t beat yourself up. Sometimes we’re not even aware of the things we’re doing until we see it reflected back at us.
Sarah: Totally.
And now that you mentioned beating yourself up: I have a lot of parents I work with who will say, “I heard my kid yelling and shouting, and I know they pick that up from me—my bad habits of yelling and shouting.”
I just want to say: there are some things kids do out of fight, flight, or freeze—like their nervous system has gotten activated—that they would do whether you shouted at them or not.
It’s not that everything—every hard thing—can be traced back to us.
Kids will get aggressive, and I’ve seen this: kids who are aggressive, who have not ever seen aggression. They’ve never seen anyone hitting; they’ve never been hit. But they will hit and kick and spit and scream because that’s the “fight” of fight, flight, or freeze.
So it’s not that they learned it somewhere.
And often parents will worry, “What are they being exposed to at school?” But that can just be a natural instinct to protect oneself when we get dysregulated.
Also, kids will think of the worst thing they can say—and it’s not necessarily that they’ve heard it.
I remember one time Asa got really mad at Lee. They were like three and six. And Asa said, “I’m going to chop your head off and bury you in the backyard.”
Oh my goodness—if I hadn’t known it wasn’t necessarily something he learned, I would’ve been really worried. But it was just a reflection of that fight, flight, or freeze instinct that he had.
So I guess it’s: yes, kids can learn things from us, and I’m not saying they can’t. Your example—with the dog, the rabbit poop, and the shovel—of course kids can pick up unsavory behavior from us.
But that doesn’t mean that every single hard thing they do, they learned from us. And also, they have good natures. There are things that come from them that are good as well, that they didn’t learn from us.
Corey: That’s right.
Sarah: I want to ground this conversation in a great metaphor from a book by Allison Gopnik. I think the title is The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children.
To really embrace what we’re talking about—being the person you want your child to be—you have to believe in the gardener metaphor of parenting.
The gardener metaphor is: your child is like a seed that has within it everything it needs to grow into a beautiful plant. You provide the water, sunlight, proper soil, and then the plant does the work of growing on its own.
The carpenter metaphor is: you have to build your child—make your child into who they’re going to be.
This idea we’re talking about—be the person you want your child to be—that’s the soil and the light and the water your child needs to grow into a beautiful plant, or a beautiful human being.
It’s not that we’re doing things to them to turn them into good humans.
And honestly, most parents, when you ask them what they wish for their child, they want their kid to be a good person when they grow up.
I want to say to parents: it’s easier than you think. The most influential thing you can do to help your child grow up to be a good person is to be the person you want them to be.
This goes up against a lot of common parenting advice.
One phrase I wish did not exist—and I don’t know where it came from, but if anyone knows, let me know—is: “You should never do anything for your child that they can do for themselves.”
Such a terrible way to think about relationships.
Can you imagine if I said to your partner, “You should never do anything for Corey that she can do for herself”? It’s terrible.
I make my husband coffee in the morning—not because he can’t make it himself, but as an act of love. For him to come downstairs, getting ready for work, and have a nice hot coffee ready. Of course he can make his own coffee. But human relationships are built on doing things for each other.
Corey: Yes. I think that’s so profound.
I think about how I was just telling you before we started recording how we’ve been spending our weekends skiing. When I first started skiing with my husband—even though I’d grown up skiing—I’d never done it as much as him. He helped me so much. He did so much of the process for me so I didn’t have too much to think about.
Now that we do it all the time, he said to me the other day, “Look at how independent you’ve gotten with this. You can do so much of this yourself. You’re managing so much more on the hill.”
He was so proud of me, and I was thinking: imagine if he hadn’t done that for me. If he had been like, “Just figure it out. We’re on the ski hill. You’re an adult.”
I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it very much. But he did lots of things for me that I could have done for myself, and that love and support helped nurture the shared love we had.
Sarah: Yeah.
And I think it’s tough because our culture is so individualistic. Hyper-individualistic—everyone should stand on their own two feet and do things without help and make it on their own. And that has really leaked into our parenting.
One of the major fears I hear from parents is that their kid won’t be independent.
So a lot of parents push kids to be independent—and what that ends up looking like is the opposite of what we’re talking about.
Part of the reason there’s pressure for individualism is because we see it as a way for kids to turn into “good people.”
But so many qualities of being a good person are about human interconnectedness: caring about other people, being kind, being helpful, being conscientious, thinking about what’s the right thing to do.
All of that comes from how we’re modeling it—the gardener metaphor.
But there’s always this tension: wanting your kid to be helpful, caring, kind, and thinking you have to make them be those things instead of letting that gardener process develop.
I’m on the other side of this because my kids are grownups, so I’ve seen it develop. One of the things I realized a couple years ago is this progression I saw with Maxine.
One time we were on our way out the door. My husband happened to be leaving for work at the same time we were leaving for the school bus. Maxine was probably around seven, and I was carrying her backpack for her.
My husband—who also has that individualism thing—said, “Why are you carrying her backpack? She’s seven. She can carry her own backpack.”
And I was like, “I know, but she likes me to carry it, and I don’t mind.”
And I really knew that someday she would want to carry her own backpack.
Sure enough, a couple years later, she’s carrying her own backpack, doesn’t ask me anymore. I didn’t think about it for a while.
Then one day we were coming from the grocery store and had to walk a little ways with heavy groceries. She insisted on carrying all the groceries and wouldn’t let me carry anything.
I was like, “I can carry some groceries, honey.” And she’s like, “No, Mom. I’ve got it.”
She’s carrying all the heavy groceries by herself. This full-circle moment: not only was she helping, she wanted to do it for me. She didn’t want me to have to carry the heavy groceries.
I just love that.
Corey: Yeah. And I love when we have these conversations because sometimes it feels like a leap of faith—you don’t see this modeled in society very much. It’s a leap of faith to be like, “I can do these things for my children, and one day they will…”
But it’s not as long as people think. I’m already seeing some of that blooming with my 10-year-old.
Sarah: Yeah.
And Sophie in our membership shared something on our Wednesday Wins. Her kids are around 10, eight or nine, and seven. She’s always followed this principle—modeling who you want your kid to be.
She said she always worried, “They’re never going to help.” And whenever you hear “never” and “always,” there’s anxiety coming in.
But she shared she had been sick and had to self-isolate. Her kids were making her food and bringing it to her. She would drive to the store, and they would go in and get the things needed.
She was amazed at how they stepped up and helped her without her having to make them. They just saw that their mom needed help and were like, “We’re there, Mom. What do you need?”
Corey: Oh—“What do you need?” That’s so sweet.
Sarah: I love that.
One more story: this fall, my kids are 20—Lee’s going to be 25 next week—21, and 18.
My husband and I were going away for the weekend, leaving Maxine home by herself. It was fall, and we have a lot of really big trees around our house, so there was major eavestroughs—gutters—cleaning to do, getting leaves off the roof and bagging all the leaves in the yard. A full-day job.
My husband had been like, “I have so much work to do. I don’t want to deal with that when I come home.”
So I asked the boys if they could come over and the three of them could do the leaf-and-gutter job. And they were like, “Absolutely.”
They surprised their dad. When we came home, they had done the entire thing. They spent a day doing all the leaves and gutter cleaning. None of them were like, “I don’t want to,” or “I’m busy.” They didn’t ask me to pay them—we didn’t pay them. They just were like, “Sure, we’ll help Dad. We know he has a lot of work right now.”
I just love that.
Corey: Oh, I love that. When they’re so little, they can’t really help take the burden off you. But knowing that one day they will—it’s such a nice thing to know.
Although this brings us to that good point about Hunt, Gather, Parent.
Sarah: Yeah. If people haven’t listened to that episode, we’ll link to it in the show notes.
Let’s talk about some things you can do to actively practice what we’re talking about—modeling who we want our kids to be.
One idea is really encapsulated by Michaeleen Doucleff, who wrote Hunt, Gather, Parent. She traveled in Mexico, spent time with Mayan people, and saw kids doing household stuff without being asked—helpful, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, taking care of younger siblings in this beautiful way that was pretty unrecognizable by North American standards.
She went down and lived with them and studied what they did. She found it started with letting kids help when they were little.
The two- or three-year-old who wanted to help a parent make food or do things in the garden—rather than the parents doing it without the kid around, or giving them something fake to help with, or not letting them do it—those parents let kids do it.
Even if it took longer, even if the parent had to redo it later (not in front of them). They let their kids be imperfect helpers and enthusiastic helpers.
That’s an impulse we’ve all seen: kids want to help. And we often don’t let them because we say they’re too little or it takes too much time. And we end up thwarting that helping impulse.
Then when we really want them to help—when they’re actually capable—they’ve learned, “Helping isn’t my role,” because it got shut down earlier.
Corey: Exactly. And I really feel that for parents because schedules are so busy and we’re so rushed.
But you don’t have to do this all the time. It’s okay if there are sometimes where there’s a crunch. Pick times when it’s a little more relaxed—maybe on weekends or when you have a bit more space.
Sarah: Totally.
And while we’re talking about helping: this comes up a lot with parents I work with and in our membership. Parents will say, “I asked my kid to set the table and they said, ‘Why do I always have to do it?’”
This happened the other day with a client. I asked, “What was your child doing when you asked?” And she said, “He was snuggled up on the couch reading a book.”
And I was like: I can see how that’s frustrating—you could use help getting the table ready. But let’s zoom out.
Modeling might look like: “Okay, you’re tired. You’ve had a long day at school. You’re snuggled up reading. I’ll set the table right now.”
Being gracious. Even if they refuse sometimes, it’s okay to do it. But also, in that specific helping piece, we can look at the times when they help without being asked.
When I give parents the assignment to look for that, every parent says, “Oh, I won’t find any.” And then they come back and say, “Oh, I did find times.”
So when they do help—carry groceries, help a sibling—how can you make them feel good about it?
“Thank you. That saved so much time.” “I was going to help your brother but my hands were full—thank you.”
Pro-social behavior is reinforced when it feels good.
If you want them to help more, ask: “What would you like to do to help the family team?”
Not, “This is your job forever.” More like, “I’ve noticed setting the table isn’t a great time for you. What are some other things you could take on?” And if they don’t have ideas, brainstorm what’s developmentally appropriate.
Often there are things kids would like to do that you’ve just never thought of.
Corey: It’s true. It’s kind of like how adults divide jobs at home—often according to who likes what. But with kids we think, “I should just tell them what to do, and they should just do it.”
It makes sense to work with what they like.
Sarah: And also the flow of the family and schedule.
That’s why we never had chores in the strict sense. My kids helped out, but it was never “one person’s job” to do the dishwasher or take out the garbage.
Because inevitably I’d need the dishwasher emptied and that person wasn’t home, or they were doing homework. And if I said, “Can you do the dishwasher?” someone could say, “That’s not my job—that’s my brother’s job.”
So instead, if I needed something done, whoever was around: “Hey, can you take the garbage out?” I tried to keep it relatively equal, but it wasn’t a rigid assignment. And I think that helped create the family team idea.
Corey: Yes.
Sarah: And that “it’s someone’s job” thing is that individualism again.
You hear this: “Can you clean that up?” and if you haven’t been modeling cleaning up messes that aren’t your own, you might hear, “Well, I didn’t make that mess.”
But if you model: if they make a mess and you say, “Can you pick up your crayons?” and they’re like, “No,” then you can say, “Okay, sure, I’ll pick up the crayons for you,” and they have the experience of seeing someone clean up a mess that isn’t theirs.
They’re more likely to absorb: “Oh, yeah, I can help with messes that aren’t mine.”
Corey: I’ve really seen this play out in my house this winter. One child loves shoveling. The second there’s any snow, he’s like, “Time for me to shovel.” It doesn’t matter if it’s early morning or dark out—he’s out there shoveling.
And I’ve been blown away, because first of all, I do not like shoveling. It’s genuinely helpful.
But he’ll also be looking out for when the plow comes by—this doesn’t happen where you live on the island, but for lots of people: the plow makes a wall at the end of the driveway. Even if you already shoveled, you have a new wall.
He’ll keep looking: “Just watching out for the plow.” Like a little old man. The second it happens, he’s out there so everyone can leave the house as needed.
And he’s even admitted, “There are lots of jobs I don’t like, but I really love doing this. This is something I can do for everybody.”
Sarah: That’s so great. That’s a perfect example of letting them choose something that helps the family.
In terms of flexibility—doing things for them—how have you seen that play out? Because for me, when my kids were small, they did very little. We’d do “Let’s all tidy up,” but maybe they’d pick up three things and I’d pick up most of the things. We’d do a 10-minute tidy.
Mostly I did dishes, setting and clearing the table, all of that. But then I found that as they got older, they just started doing it.
And I never got into power struggles because, honestly, it was often easier to do it myself. Maybe that worked out because I didn’t have a grand vision—I just lived it, and then I saw them grow into doing a lot as they got older.
What about you? How are you seeing that balance between what you do for them and how you see them growing?
Corey: I’d say this is where you really have to have faith. Something that maybe wasn’t modeled for us.
This comes up with clients all the time: they get anxious—“They’re never going to clean up, they’re never going to be helpful, they’ll be entitled.” They get stuck in “never” because it’s not happening right away.
So when I tell people: invite them, and if they don’t want to do it, say something like, “You don’t want to do it this time. I’m sure you’ll do it next time.”
But mean it—not passive-aggressive. Not “I’m sure you’ll do it next time” as a threat. Actually mean: “I’m sure you’ll do it next time,” and then go about it with trust that they will eventually do it.
You’re holding space. You’re not being anxious about it.
Sarah: Yes—holding space, having faith.
Corey: And I think it’s giving ourselves—and the parents we work with—a permission slip.
You can tidy up for them without being angry about it. If you’re doing this like, “No one helps me,” that’s not going to work.
You have to truly trust the goodness of your children—that they’ll want to be like this.
Sarah: Yeah.
And I think some of it comes down to how we treat other adults.
If your partner normally does the dishes and says, “I’m exhausted from work,” hopefully there’s give-and-take. You pick up slack when they’re tired.
A lot of this is: how do you want to be treated? How do you treat other adults? And how can you work on treating kids the same way?
So often we don’t treat kids the way we treat adults. And sometimes that’s appropriate. But often it’s just a lack of respect.
I saw a comedy skit once where these moms were sitting around drinking wine, and at first it was normal, and then one goes to reach for the bottle and another slaps her hand: “You haven’t finished what you have in your glass. Finish what you have first.”
Someone interrupts, and the other says, “I was still speaking. Wait until I’m done speaking.”
And you’re like: oh my gosh, that’s what people do to kids all the time. If you see an adult do it to another adult, it’s funny—but it’s also jarring because it’s considered normal when people do it to kids.
Kids aren’t always seen as having the same rights or deserving the same respect as adults.
Corey: Yes. And I think Iris Chen talks about this. You did a podcast with her back in season one—adultism.
Sarah: Yes, adultism—like racism or sexism, but adultism: prioritizing adults’ needs and rights over children’s.
Corey: And that really stood out to me. If we treat them like the beautiful little people they are—not “just children,” but people—that goes a long way in what we’re talking about today.
Sarah: Yeah.
And the last big point is how this works with values.
Corey: We hear this a lot: parents get worried about values. They really value the environment and worry their kids aren’t living those values.
Like a parent who was upset their kids were buying candy made with palm oil because of how it’s harvested. “Why don’t my kids care?”
If we get preachy—“We can’t buy candy with palm oil,” “We only buy thrifted clothes”—it can turn into, “You’re trying to control me,” and then kids push the other way.
Versus if we live those values and give them room to play with them and figure out where they land, they tend to be more open—and more interested in the why.
A strange example from this weekend: I don’t really like those disposable hand warmers because you can only use them once. I prefer things we can use multiple times.
It was supposed to be really cold, so I was like, “Okay, I guess I’ll buy them.” I didn’t say anything weird about it. We used them.
At the end of the day, he had to throw them out, and he goes, “I don’t feel great about this. It was helpful, but I don’t know if it was helpful enough that we have to throw this in the garbage now.”
And I was like: that’s exactly how I feel. But I didn’t get preachy. He was able to think about it himself.
So even with values, we live them. If kids aren’t agreeing with our values, sometimes we have to give space and pull back. When someone’s pushing something on you, you often feel like not complying.
Sarah: Yeah. It becomes a power struggle.
And I do think there’s a difference between pushing and educating. You can give them information in an age-appropriate way, and you can say, “You can buy that with your own money, but I don’t want to support that, so I’m not going to.”
Not in a way that makes them feel terrible. Just: “These are my values.”
I’ve said this to my kids. Maxine was maybe 14 and said, “My phone’s broken. I need a new phone.”
I said, “What’s wrong?” She said, “My music library keeps going away and I have to download it.”
I started laughing and said, “That’s not enough to get a new phone.” I said, “My values are we use electronics until they’re broken. We don’t get a new phone because of a little glitch.”
You should see our minivan—it’s scraped up and old-looking. Maxine actually said we’re going somewhere with her boyfriend and his mom, and she said, “Can you please ask my boyfriend’s mother to drive?”
I said, “Why?” And she said, “Our car is so embarrassing.”
And I’m like, “It works great. We drive our cars into the ground.” That’s our family value.
And then last year, Maxine’s phone screen actually broke. She wanted a new phone, and I said, “My values—because of e-waste—are that I’d get it fixed if I were you. But I promise I won’t judge you if you want a new phone. Do what feels right for you.”
No guilt-tripping. And she chose to fix the screen instead of buying a new phone.
So these are examples—like your hand warmers—where we can give the information without being heavy. And they usually absorb our values over time.
Corey: Because it’s not just that moment—it’s hundreds of interactions.
And that’s actually empowering: you don’t need one big conversation. You get to show them these little things throughout life.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Corey: I mean, if we’re talking about phones, goodness gracious—how long have I needed a new phone?
Sarah: I know. I’ve been wanting you to get a new phone so you can post Reels for me.
Corey: They’re like, “Corey, maybe you’ve taken this too far.” But I don’t know—the modeling I’ve given my children is that you can make a dead phone last for two extra years.
Sarah: And I like your point: it’s all of these interactions over and over again.
The opposite of what we’re talking about is you can’t tell your kids not to be materialistic if you go out and buy things you don’t need. You can’t tell them people are more important than phones if you’re on your phone all the time.
You really have to think about it. That’s why that “Do as I say, not as I do” sometimes gets used—because it’s hard. It’s hard to be the person you want your kids to be.
And it keeps us honest: who do we want to be? Who do we want them to be?
Corey: I mean, it’s that moment when I stood there holding the shovel and I was like, “Ah. I see.”
So we can see this as a beautiful thing for our own growth, too, because we’re going to keep realizing how much it matters.
Caveat, though: I don’t want parents to listen and feel pressure—like every moment they’re being watched and they must be perfect.
Because this is also a chance to model messing up and making repairs. So don’t take this as: you have to be perfect.
Sarah: And the other thing: if you’re listening and you’re like, “Why do I have to do everything around here? Sarah and Corey are saying clean up your kids’ messes, carry things for them, do the chores…”
I’m not saying every parent should be a martyr and never get help.
Remember what I said: where can your kids help? What are they already doing? What could they choose?
And I think I also let a lot of stuff go. My parents once came to visit and said, “Sarah, we really admire how you choose to spend time with your kids instead of cleaning up your house.”
I was like, I think that was a backhanded compliment. And also them noticing it was kind of a mess.
It wasn’t terrible or dirty. It was just: I didn’t have a perfect house, and I did everything myself.
I did a lot myself, but I didn’t do all the things some people think they need to do.
Corey: That totally makes sense. You’re basically saying: what can you let go of, too?
Sarah: Yeah. For the sake of the relationship.
And I think the last thing I wanted us to talk about is: does this ever not work?
You and I were thinking about objections.
If you’re living this way—gracious, helpful, flexible, modeling who you want them to be—you’re putting deposits in the Goodwill Bank. Your connection increases. They care what you think because that Goodwill Bank is nice and beefy.
The only time you could say it wouldn’t work is if you didn’t have a good relationship. But if you’re doing all this, it builds relationship—so I don’t even think you can say, “This doesn’t work.”
Nobody’s perfect. There were plenty of times I asked my kids to do things and they were grumpy, or I had to ask 10 times. It wasn’t like, “Of course, Mom, let me empty the dishwasher.” They were normal kids. But in general, if you trust the process and maturation, your kids move in that direction.
Corey: I’d add one other thing: it wouldn’t work if this is all you’re doing, with nothing else.
Sometimes people think peaceful parenting is passive, and what we’re saying can sound passive: “Just be who you want them to be.”
But there are also times you need to do something. Like we said: if you’re being the person you want to be and they’re never helping, there’s also a conversation: “What do you like to do?” There are collaborative steps.
This is the big philosophy—embodying who you want them to be—but there are also practical supports and conversations that help them be successful.
Sarah: Totally.
And the last thing is: remember this happens over time. Trust the growth process and maturation and brain development.
Remember that when they’re little, their agenda is not your agenda. And as they get older, they start to see the benefits: “Oh yeah, it is nice when the living room’s tidied up.”
When they’re little, they don’t have the same agenda as you. That’s a lot of why you get, “No, you do it.”
And I actually can’t believe I didn’t say this earlier, but a lot of times when we’re doing things for kids, they feel it as nurturing.
So sometimes when they don’t want to help, it’s their way of saying, “I want to make sure you’re taking care of me.” Sometimes that can look like refusal or not wanting to do things themselves.
Corey: Yeah, absolutely.
Sarah: Thanks, Corey.
Corey: Thank you.


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You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.
In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I speak with Katie Kimball of Raising Healthy Families. We discussed getting kids in the kitchen and getting them to love cooking, raising teenagers and why they are wonderful, managing screens at different ages, and what kind of skills kids need to become independent, well-rounded and self-sufficient once they leave our homes.
Make sure to check out Katie’s course Teens Cook Real Food!
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We talk about:
* [00:00] Introduction to the episode and guest Katie Kimball; overview of topics (cooking, teens, life skills, screens)
* [00:01] Katie’s background: former teacher, mom of four, and how her work evolved into teaching kids and teens to cook
* [00:04] Why the teen years are actually great; what teens need developmentally (agency and autonomy)
* [00:08] Beneficial risk and safe failure; how building competence early reduces anxiety later
* [00:10] Getting kids into cooking: start small, build confidence, and let them cook food they enjoy
* [00:16] Cooking as a life skill: budgeting, independence, and preparing for adulthood
* [00:21] Screen time: focusing on quality (consumptive vs. creative vs. social) instead of just limits
* [00:25] Practical screen strategies used in Katie’s family
* [00:28] Motivating teens to cook: future-casting and real-life relevance (first apartment, food costs)
* [00:33] Teens Cook Real Food course: what it teaches and why Katie created it
* [00:37] Fun foods teens love making (pizza, tacos)
* [00:39] Where to find Katie and closing reflections
Resources mentioned in this episode:
* Teens Cook Real Food Course https://raisinghealthyfamilies.com/PeacefulParenting
* Evelyn & Bobbie bras: https://reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/bra
* Yoto Screen Free Audio Book Player https://reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/yoto
* The Peaceful Parenting Membership https://reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/membership
* How to Stop Fighting About Video Games with Scott Novis: Episode 201 https://reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/how-to-stop-fighting-about-video-games-with-scott-novis-episode-201/
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Podcast Transcript:
Sarah: Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Katie Kimball of Raising Healthy Families. She has been helping parents feed their kids and, more recently—in the past few years—teach their kids to cook. We had a great conversation about getting kids in the kitchen and getting them to love cooking, and also about raising teenagers and what kind of skills kids need to become independent. We also talked about screens, because any parent of a teenager who also supports other parents—I want to hear about what they do with getting kids to be less screen-focused and screen-dependent.
Katie had some great tips in all of these areas, including cooking, feeding our families, and screens. In some ways, we’re just talking about how do we raise kids who are independent, well-rounded, and have the skills they need to live independently—and those things all come into play.
I hope that you really enjoy this conversation with Katie as much as I did. Let’s meet Katie.
Hi, Katie. Welcome to the podcast.
Katie: Thank you so much, Sarah. I’m honored to talk to your audience.
Sarah: I’m so excited to talk to you about teenagers, raising teenagers, life skills, screens—there are so many things to dive into. You seem like a very multifaceted person with all these different interests. Tell us about who you are and what you do.
Katie: I do have a little bit of a squirrel brain, so I’m constantly doing something new in business. That means I can talk about a lot of things. I’ve been at the parenting game for 20 years and in the online business world for 17. I’m a teacher by trade and a teacher by heart, but I only taught in the classroom for about two years before I had my kids. I thought, “I can’t do both really, really well,” so I chose the family, left the classroom, and came home.
But my brain was always in teacher mode. As I was navigating the path and the journey of, “How do I feed these tiny humans?”—where every bite counts so much—I was really walking that real-food journey and spending a lot of time at the cutting board. My brain was always going, “How can I help other moms make this path easier?” I made so many mistakes. I burned so much food. There’s so much tension around how you balance your budget with your time, with the nutrition, and with all the conflicting information that’s flying at us.
So I felt like I wanted to stand in the middle of that chaos and tell moms, “Listen, there’s some stuff you can do that does it all—things that are healthy, save time, and save money.” That’s kind of where I started teaching online.
Then I shifted to kids’ cooking. For the last 10 years, I’ve been sort of the kids’ cooking cheerleader of the world, trying to get all kids in the kitchen and building confidence. It’s really been a journey since then. My kids currently are 20, 17, 14, and 11, so I’m in the thick of it.
Sarah: We have a very similar origin story: former teacher, then mom, and a brain that doesn’t want to stop working. I went with parent coaching, and you went with helping parents with food and cooking, so that’s exciting.
I can tell from what I’ve learned about you offline that you love teenagers—and I love teenagers too. We have people in the audience who have teenagers and also people who have littler kids. I think the people with littler kids are like, “I don’t want my kids to grow up. I’ve heard such bad things about teenagers.” What do you want people to know about teenagers? What are some things that you’ve learned as the mom of younger kids and then teens?
Katie: It’s such a devastating myth, Sarah, that teens are going to be the awful part of your parenting career—the time you’re not supposed to look forward to, the time you have to slog through, and it’s going to be so difficult.
It’s all difficult, right? Don’t let anyone tell you parenting’s easy—they’re lying. But it’s so worth it, and it’s so great. I love parenting teens. I love conversing with them at such a much higher level than talking to my 11-year-old, and I love watching what they can do. You see those glimpses of what they’ll be like when they’re a dad, or when they’re running around an office, or managing people. It’s incredible to be so close. It’s like the graduation of parenting. It’s exciting.
That’s what I would want to tell parents of kids younger than teens: look forward to it.
I do think there are some things you can do to prepare for adolescence and to make it smoother for everyone. I like to talk about what teens need. We want to parent from a place of what teens developmentally need, and they really need agency and autonomy at that stage. They’re developmentally wired to be pushing away—to be starting to make the break with their adults, with that generation that we are in. Sometimes that’s really painful as the grown-up. It almost feels like they’re trying to hurt us, but what they’re really doing is trying to push us away so it doesn’t hurt them so badly when they know they need to leave.
As parents, it helps to sit with the knowledge that this is not personal. They do not hate me. They’re attempting to figure out how to sever this relationship. So what can we do to allow them to do that so they don’t have to use a knife? If we can allow them to walk far enough away from us and still be a safe haven they can come home to, the relationship doesn’t have to be severed. It just gets more distant and longer apart.
When they want independence and autonomy, we need to make sure we give it to them. My tip for parents of younger kids is that, especially around ages 8, 10, 11—depending on maturity level—where can we start providing some agency? My team will say, “Katie, don’t say agency. It sounds like you’re talking about the FBI or some government letters.” But it’s the best word, because agency isn’t just choices—it’s choices plus control, plus competence to be able to make change in your own life, in your own environment.
We can’t have agency unless we give our kids skills to actually be able to do something. The choice between “Do you want the red cup or the blue cup?” is for toddlers. That’s not going to be enough once they’re in the stage where their mind is growing and they can critically think. We want to give our kids skills, responsibilities, choices, and some ownership over their lives. That starts in upper elementary school, and it gets bigger and bigger.
Sarah: I would argue it starts even earlier. Toddlers can make the red cup or blue cup choice, and as they keep going, you can give them more and more agency.
One of my favorite parenting people, Alfie Kohn, says that kids should have the power to make decisions that make us gulp a little bit.
Katie: Oh, I love that.
Sarah: I think that’s true. We come up against our own anxiety too: What if they make the wrong decision? But it’s incremental, so the decisions become bigger and bigger as they get older. That’s how they practice being able to make good decisions—through experience.
Katie: We know statistically that anxiety right now is spiking massively that first year out of high school—where young adults are heading into the world, either to university or for a first job. One theory—one I would get behind—is that everything of adulthood, all the responsibilities, are crashing on their shoulders at once, and they haven’t experienced that level of responsibility. Sometimes they haven’t had opportunities to fail safely, and they don’t know what to do.
Sometimes we think we’re pushing problems out of their way and that it’s helpful, but we’re really creating bigger problems down the road. So with that long-term perspective, I love that “gulp.” We’ve got to let them try and fail and hold back.
Sarah: Do you know Lenore Skenazy, who started the Free Range Kids movement? She has a TED Talk that came out recently where she talks about how she attributes the rise in anxiety to the fact that kids never have any unwatched time by adults. They never have room and space to figure out their own way to make things work. Of course, I don’t think anyone’s saying we should inappropriately not supervise our kids, but they need more freedom. If they don’t have freedom to figure things out on their own, that’s where the anxiety comes in.
Katie: For sure. When Lenore and I have interacted, she likes to call it “beneficial risk.” Climbing the tree is the classic example, but because I love to get kids and teens in the kitchen, we got to talk about the beneficial risk of using sharp knives and playing with fire—literally returning to our ancestral roots.
The way I see it, and the way I’ve seen it played out in my own home: I taught my now 20-year-old to use a chef’s knife at age 10. He built competency. He took risks. He discovered how he wanted to navigate in the kitchen. So when he was 15 and getting his driver’s permit, I felt pretty peaceful. I thought, “He’s so mature. I’ve seen him make good decisions. He’s practiced taking beneficial risks.”
I felt confident handing him the driver’s license. When it came time for him to get a cell phone—first a kid-safe phone and then a fully unlocked smartphone—I felt like we had been building up to it because of our work in the kitchen. I think he did better than his peers with taking appropriate risks driving a car and having a smartphone in his pocket, because he’d had practice.
Sarah: And that was in the kitchen for your family.
Katie: Yes.
Sarah: Cooking is one of my special interests. I love to cook. My kids love baking. They were never that interested in cooking, although they all can cook and they do cook for themselves. My 21-year-old who has his own apartment has started sending me pictures of the food that he makes. He made some baked chicken thighs with mushrooms the other day, and a green salad. He sent me a picture and I said to my daughter, “Do you want to see a picture of Asa’s chicken?” And she said, “Asa got a chicken?” She was picturing it running around. We all laughed so hard because I wouldn’t put it past him, honestly.
When my kids were younger, they weren’t that interested. Maybe I could have gotten them more interested in the cooking part, but I always felt like that was my thing. What tips do you have—for any ages—about how to get kids interested and involved? You said your son was using a chef’s knife at age 10. What are some ways to involve kids and get them interested in that skill?
Katie: Knives are a great start because they’re scary and they’re fun—especially for guys. You get to use something dangerous. My second son, John, asked to learn to use a chef’s knife, so he learned to use a sharp paring knife at age four and asked to level up to a chef’s knife at age seven.
For parents of kids who are still in that intrinsic motivation phase—“I want to help”—the good news is you don’t have to try. You just have to say yes. You just have to figure out what can my brain handle letting this little person do in the kitchen. If it’s “I’m going to teach them to measure a teaspoon of salt,” then do it. Don’t let cooking feel like this big to-do list item. It’s just one teaspoon of salt.
Can I teach them to crack an egg? Can I teach them to flip a pancake? Think of it as one little skill at a time. That’s what cooking is: building blocks. If it’s something like measuring, you don’t have to have them in your elbow room. You can send them to the table; they can have a little spill bowl. Then you can build their motivation by complimenting the meal: “This meal tastes perfect. I think it’s the oregano—who measured the oregano?” That’s how we treat little ones.
The medium-sized ones are a little tougher, and teens are tougher yet. For the medium-sized ones, the best way to get them involved is to create a chance for authentic praise that comes from outside the family—meaning it’s not you or your co-parent; it’s some other adult. If you’re going to a party or a potluck, or you’re having people over, figure out how to get that kid involved in one recipe. Then you say to the other adults, “Guess who made the guacamole?” That was our thing—our kids always made the guac when they were little. And other adults say, “What? Paul made the guacamole? That’s amazing. This is awesome.” The 10-year-old sees that and blooms with pride. It makes them more excited to come back in the kitchen, feel more of that, and build more competency.
Sarah: I love that. That’s an invitation, and then it makes them want to do more because it feels good. We talk about that in peaceful parenting too: a nice invitation and then it becomes a prosocial behavior you want to do more of.
I started cooking because I wanted to make food that I liked. I’m old enough that I took Home Ec in middle school, and it was my favorite class. I think about my Home Ec teacher, Mrs. Flanagan, my whole adult life because I learned more from her that I still use than from any other teacher. I remember figuring out how to make deep-fried egg rolls in grade seven because I loved egg rolls. You couldn’t just buy frozen egg rolls then. So I think food that kids like can be a good way in. Is that something you find too?
Katie: One hundred percent. If you’re cooking things they don’t like, you get the pushback: “Mom, I don’t like…” So it’s like, “Okay, I would love to eat your meal. What do you want to eat?” And it’s not, “Tell me what you want and I’ll cook it.” If you meal plan, you get to make all the choices.
My kids have been interviewed, and people often ask, “What’s your favorite thing about knowing how to cook?” My kids have gotten pretty good at saying, “We get to cook what we like.” It’s super motivating.
Sarah: When I was growing up, my sister and I each had to make dinner one night a week starting when I was in grade five and she was in grade three. We could make anything we wanted, including boxed Kraft Dinner. I can’t remember what else we made at that young age, but it was definitely, “You are cooking dinner, and you get to make whatever you want.”
Katie: Why didn’t you do that with your own kids, out of curiosity?
Sarah: It just seemed like it would take too much organization. I think we tried it a couple times. Organization is not my strong suit. Often dinner at our house—there were lots of nights where people had cereal or eggs or different things for dinner. I love to cook, but I like to cook when the urge hits me and I have a recipe I want to try. I’m not seven nights a week making a lovely dinner.
Also, dinner was often quite late at my house because things always take longer than I think. I’d start at six, thinking it would take an hour, and it would be 8:30 by the time dinner was ready. I remember one night my middle son was pouring himself cereal at 6:30. I said, “Why are you having cereal? Dinner’s almost ready.” He said, “Mom, it’s only 6:30.” He expected it later—that’s the time normal people eat dinner.
My kids have a lot of freedom, but nobody was particularly interested in cooking. And, to be honest, it felt a bit too early as a responsibility when my sister and I had to do it. Even though I’m glad now that I had those early experiences, it was wanting to make egg rolls that made me into a cook more than being assigned dinner in grade five.
Katie: That push and pull of how we were parented and how we apply it now is so hard.
Sarah: Yes.
Katie: I’m thinking of an encouraging story from one of the families who’s done our brand-new Teens Cook Real Food. The mom said it was kind of wild: here they were cooking all this real food and it felt intensive. Over the years she’d slid more into buying processed foods, and through the class, watching her teens go through it, she realized, “Oh my gosh, it’s actually not as hard as I remember. I have to coach myself.” They shifted into cooking with more real ingredients, and it wasn’t that hard—especially doing it together.
Sarah: It’s not that hard. And you hear in the news that people are eating a lot of fast food and processed food. I’m not anti-fast food or processed food, but you don’t want that to be the only thing you’re eating. It’s actually really easy to cook some chicken and rice and broccoli, but you have to know how. That’s why it’s so sad Home Ec has gone by the wayside. And honestly, a whole chicken, some rice, and broccoli is going to be way cheaper than McDonald’s for a family of four. Cooking like that is cheaper, not very hard, and healthier than eating a lot of fast food or processed food.
Katie: Conversations in the kitchen and learning to cook—it’s kind of the gateway life skill, because you end up with conversations about finances and budgeting and communication and thinking of others. So many life skills open up because you’re cooking.
You just brought up food budget—that could be a great half-hour conversation with a 16- or 17-year-old: “You won’t have infinite money in a couple years when you move out. You’ll have to think about where you spend that money.” It’s powerful for kids to start thinking about what it will be like in their first apartment and how they’ll spend their time and money.
Sarah: My oldest son is a musician, and he’s really rubbing his pennies together. He told me he makes a lot of soups and stews. He’ll make one and live off it for a couple days. He doesn’t follow a recipe—he makes it up. That’s great, because you can have a pretty budget-friendly grocery shop.
I also don’t want to diss anyone who’s trying to keep it all together and, for them, stopping by McDonald’s is the only viable option at this moment. No judgment if you’re listening and can’t imagine having the capacity to cook chicken and rice and broccoli. Maybe someday, or maybe one day a week on the weekend, if you have more time and energy.
Katie: The way I explain it to teens is that learning to cook and having the skills gives you freedom and choices. If you don’t have the skills at all, you’re shackled by convenience foods or fast food or DoorDash. But if you at least have the skills, you have many more choices. Teens want agency, autonomy, and freedom, so I speak that into their lives. Ideally, the younger you build the skills, the more time you have to practice, gain experience, and get better.
There’s no way your older son could have been making up soups out of his head the first month he ever touched chicken—maybe he’s a musician, so maybe he could apply the blues scale to cooking quickly—but most people can’t.
Sarah: As we’re speaking, I’m reflecting that my kids probably did get a lot of cooking instruction because we were together all the time. They would watch me and they’d do the standing on a chair and cutting things and stirring things. It just wasn’t super organized.
That’s why I’m so glad you have courses that can help people learn how to teach their children or have their kids learn on their own.
I promised we would talk about screens. I’m really curious. It sounds like your kids have a lot of life skills and pretty full lives. Something I get asked all the time is: with teens and screens, how do you avoid “my kid is on their phone or video games for six or seven hours a day”? What did you do in your family, and what thoughts might help other people?
Katie: Absolutely. Parenting is always hard. It’s an ongoing battle. I think I’m staying on the right side of the numbers, if there are numbers. I feel like I’m launching kids into the world who aren’t addicted to their phones. That’s a score, and it’s tough because I work on screens. I’m telling parents, “Buy products to put your kids on screen,” so it’s like, “Wait.”
I don’t look at screens as a dichotomy of good or bad, but as: how do we talk to our kids about the quality of their time on screens?
Back in 2020, when the world shut down, my oldest, Paul, was a freshman. His freshman year got cut short. He went weeks with zero contact with friends, and he fell into a ton of YouTube time and some video games. We thought, “This is an unprecedented time, but we can’t let bad habits completely take over.”
We sat down with him and said, “Listen, there are different kinds of screen time.” We qualified them as consumptive—everything is coming out of the screen at you—creative—you’re making something—and communicative—you’re socializing with other people.
We asked him what ways he uses screens. We made a chart on a piece of paper and had him categorize his screen time. Then we asked what he thought he wanted his percentage of screen time to be in those areas—without evaluating his actual time yet. He assigned those times, and then we had him pay attention to what reality was. Reality was 90 to 95% consumptive. It was an amazing lightbulb moment. He realized that to be an agent of his own screen time, he had to make intentional choices.
He started playing video games with a buddy through the headphones. That change completely changed his demeanor. That was a tough time.
So that’s the basis of our conversation: what kind of screen time are you having?
For my 11-year-old, he still has minute limits: he sets a timer and stops himself. But if he’s playing a game with someone, he gets double the time. That’s a quantitative way to show him it’s more valuable to be with someone than by yourself on a screen. A pretty simple rule.
We’ll also say things like, “People over screens.” If a buddy comes over and you’re playing a video game, your friend is at the door.
That’s also what I talk to parents about with our classes: this isn’t fully consumptive screen time. We highly edit things. We try to keep it engaging and fun so they’re on for a set number of minutes and then off, getting their fingers dirty and getting into the real world. We keep their brains and hands engaged beyond the screen. The only way I can get a chef into your home is through the screen—or you pay a thousand dollars.
We can see our screen time as really high quality if we make the right choices. It’s got to be roundabout 10, 11, 12: pulling kids into the conversation about how we think about this time.
Sarah: I love that. It sounds like you were giving your kids tools to look at their own screen time and how they felt about it, rather than you coming from on high and saying, “That’s enough. Get off.”
Katie: Trying.
Sarah: I approach it similarly, though not as organized. I did have limits for my daughter. My sons were older when screens became ubiquitous. For my daughter, we had a two-hour limit on her phone that didn’t include texting or anything social—just Instagram, YouTube, that kind of stuff. I think she appreciated it because she recognized it’s hard to turn it off.
We would also talk about, “What else are you doing today?” Have you gone outside? Have you moved your body? Have you done any reading? All the other things. And how much screen time do you think is reasonable? Variety is a favorite word around here.
Katie: Yes. So much so my 11-year-old will come to me and say, “I’ve played outside, I’ve read a book, my homework is done. Can I have some screen time?” He already knows what I’m going to ask. “Yes, Mom, I’ve had variety.” Then: “Okay, set a timer for 30 minutes.”
I have a 14-year-old freshman right now. He does not own a phone.
Sarah: Oh, wow. I love that.
Katie: In modern America, he knows the pathway to get a phone—and he doesn’t want one.
Sarah: That’s great. I hope we see that more and more. I worry about how much kids are on screens and how much less they’re talking to each other and doing things.
I had a guest on my podcast who’s a retired video game developer. His thing is how to not fight with your kid about video games. One thing he recommends is—even more than playing online with someone else—get them in the same room together. Then they can play more. He has different time rules if you’re playing in person with kids in your living room than if you’re playing alone or playing online with someone else.
Katie: Nice. Totally. My story was from COVID times.
Sarah: Yes, that wasn’t an option then. Someone I heard say the other day: “Can we just live in some unprecedented times, please?”
Katie: Yes, please.
Sarah: You mentioned the intrinsic motivation of somebody admiring their guacamole. What are your tips for kids—especially teens—who think they’re too busy or just super uninterested in cooking?
Katie: Teens are a tough species. Motivation is a dance. I really encourage parents to participate in future casting. Once they’re about 15, they’re old enough. Academically, they’re being future-casted all the time: “What are you going to be when you grow up?” They’re choosing courses based on university paths. But we need to future-cast about real life too.
Ask your 15-year-old: “Have you ever thought about what it’ll be like to be in your first apartment?” Maybe they haven’t. That helps reduce that first-year-out-of-home anxiety—to have imagined it. Then they might realize they have gaps. “Would you be interested in making sure you can cook some basic stuff for those first years? When you’re cooking at home, it’s my money you waste if you screw up.” That can be motivating. “I’m here to help.”
Sometimes it comes down to a dictate from above, which is not my favorite. Your sister and you were asked to cook at third and fifth grade. I agree that might be a little young for being assigned a full meal. We start around 12 in our house. But by high school, there’s really no reason—other than busy schedules. If they’re in a sport or extracurricular daily, that can be rough. So what could they do? Could they make a Sunday brunch? We come home from church every Sunday and my daughter—she’s 17, grade 12—she’s faster than I am now. She’ll have the eggs and sausage pretty much done. I’m like, “I’m going to go change out of my church clothes. Thanks.”
If we’re creative, there’s always some time and space. We have to eat three times a day. Sometimes it might be: “You’re old enough. It’s important as a member of this household to contribute. I’m willing to work with you on really busy weeks, but from now on, you need to cook on Saturday nights.” I don’t think that has to be a massive power struggle—especially with the future casting conversation. If you can get them to have a tiny bit of motivation—tiny bit of thinking of, “Why do I need this?”—and the idea of “If I cook, I get to make what I want,” and the budget.
Sarah: The budget too: if you’re living in your own apartment, how much do you think rent is? How much do you think you can eat for? It’s way more expensive to order out or get fast food than to cook your own food.
Katie: I feel so proud as a fellow mom of your son, Asa, for making soups and stuff. In Teens Cook Real Food, we teach how to make homemade bone broth by taking the carcass of a chicken. It’s a very traditional skill. On camera, I asked the girls who did it with me to help me figure out what their dollar-per-hour pay rate was for making that, compared to an equal quality you buy in the store. Bone broth at the quality we can make is very expensive—like $5 a cup.
They did the math and their hourly pay was over $70 an hour to make that bone broth. Then they have gallons of bone broth, and I call it the snowball effect: you have all this broth and you’re like, “I guess I’ll make soup.” Soup tends to be huge batches, you can freeze it, and it snowballs into many homemade, inexpensive, nourishing meals.
Sarah: I love that. You’ve mentioned your course a couple times—Teens Cook Real Food. I’m picturing that as your kids grew up, your teaching audience grew up too. Were there other reasons you wanted to teach teens how to cook?
Katie: Yes. We’ve had our kids’ cooking class for 10 years now. It just had its 10th birthday. The most often requested topic that’s not included in the kids’ class is meal planning and grocery shopping. It wasn’t something I felt like an eight-year-old needed.
For 10 years I had that seed of, “How can I incorporate those important skills of meal planning and grocery shopping?” Then my teens got older, and I thought, “I’ve told parents of teens that our kids’ cooking class will work for them, but it’s not enough. It wasn’t sufficient.”
It was so exciting to put this course together. Even just the thinking—the number of index cards I had on the floor with topics trying to figure out what a young adult needs in their first apartment, how to connect the skills, and how to make it engaging.
We ended up with eight teens I hired from my local community—some with cooking experience, some with literally none. We had on-camera accidents and everything. But they learned to cook in my kitchen, and it’s all recorded for your teens to learn from.
Sarah: I love that. What are some of the recipes that you teach in the course?
Katie: We have over 35. We spent a whole day with a chef. He started talking about flavor and how seasonings work, and he taught us the mother sauces—like a basic white sauce, both gluten-free and dairy-free, a couple ways to do that, and a basic red sauce, and a couple ways to do that.
My favorite cheeky segment title is “How to Boil Water.” We have a bunch of videos on how to boil water—meaning you can make pasta, rice, oatmeal, hard-boiled eggs, boiled potatoes. There’s a lot of stuff that goes in water.
Then we built on that with “How to Eat Your Vegetables.” We teach sautéing, steaming, and roasting. The first big recipe they learn is a basic sheet pan dinner. We use pre-cooked sausage and vegetables of your choice, seasonings of your choice. It’s one of those meals where you’re like, “I don’t need a recipe. I can just make this up and put it in the oven.”
Then, to go with pasta and red sauce, we teach homemade meatballs. We get them at the grill for steak and chicken and burgers. Of course we do French fries in a couple different ways.
Choice is a huge element of this course. If we teach something, we probably teach it in two or three or four different ways, so teens can adapt to preferences, food sensitivities, and anything like that.
We use the Instant Pot a lot in our “How to Eat Your Protein” segment. We do a pork roast and a beef roast and a whole chicken, and that broth I talked about, and we make a couple different soups with that.
Sarah: You almost make me feel like I haven’t had lunch yet.
Katie: I’m starving, actually.
Sarah: I’m quite an adventurous eater and cook, but I’m going to ask you about my two favorite foods—because they’re like a child’s favorite foods, but my favorite foods are pizza and tacos. Do you do anything with pizza and tacos in your course?
Katie: We do both pizza and tacos.
Sarah: Good!
Katie: Our chef taught us, with that homemade red sauce, to make homemade dough. He said, “I think we should teach them how to make a homemade brick oven and throw the pizzas into the oven.” Throwing means sliding the pizza off a pizza peel onto bricks in your oven. I was like, “We’re going to make such a mess,” but they did it. It’s awesome.
Then we tested it at home: can you just make this in a normal pizza pan? Yes, you can—don’t worry. You don’t have to buy bricks, but you can. Again, there are different ways.
Sarah: I think teenagers would love making pizza on bricks in the oven. For us we’re like, “That seems like so much work.” But teenagers are enthusiastic and creative and they have so much energy. They’re wonderful human beings. I can see how the brick oven pizza would be a great challenge for them.
Katie: It’s so fun. My kids, Paul and John—20 and 14—they’ve both done it at home. As adults we’re like, “It’s such a mess,” but we’re boring people. Teenagers are not boring. So yes—definitely pizza.
Sarah: That’s awesome. We’ll link to your course in the show notes. Before we let you go, where’s the best place for people to go and find out more about you and what you do?
Katie: Definitely: raisinghealthyfamilies.com/peacefulparenting. We’re going to make sure there’s always something about teens at that link—whether it’s a free preview of the course or a parenting workshop from me. There will always be something exciting for parents there.
Sarah: Amazing. It’s been such a pleasure. I thought maybe I didn’t do all this stuff, but considering how both of my sons who are independent cook for themselves all the time, I think I must have done okay—even if it was just by osmosis.
Katie: That’s the great thing about keeping your kids near you. That was your peaceful parenting: they were in the kitchen and they were there, as opposed to you booting them out of the kitchen. There are lots of ways.
Sarah: My daughter is an incredible baker. She makes the best chocolate chip cookies. I have this recipe for muffin-tin donuts that are amazing, and she’s a really great baker. She can find her way around a quesadilla, eggs, and ramen for herself. I think once she moves out, if she doesn’t have mom’s cooking anymore, she’ll probably also be able to cook.
Katie: Yes. And so many parents need that bridge. They’re like, “My kids love to make cookies. They bake, but they won’t shift to cooking.” I would hope that future-casting conversation could be a good bridge.
Sarah: Yeah. You can’t live on cookies—or you might think you can for a little while, but then you’d start to feel gross.
Katie: Exactly.
Sarah: Thanks a lot, Katie.
Katie: Thank you so much, Sarah.


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You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.
In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I speak with Katie K. May, a licensed therapist and author of the book You’re On Fire. It’s Fine: Effective Strategies for Parenting Teens With Self-Destructive Behaviors.
We discussed children/teens who are “fire feelers”, why intense emotions can lead to risky behaviours, how to respond to self-harm urges, how to stay connected or rebuild your connection with your teen, and what parents of younger children can do now to prevent challenges in their teen years.
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We talk about:
* 00:05 — What Is a Fire Feeler?
* 00:06 — What Emotional Dysregulation Really Means
* 00:07 — Fire Feelers Often Have Fire-Feeler Parents- Genetic and Environmental Components
* 00:10 — Why Teens Are So Easily Overwhelmed
* 00:12 — What Fire Feelers Do When Overwhelmed
* 00:20 — How Parents Should Respond to Self-Harm Urges
* 00:22 — When to Get Professional Help
* 00:24 — Why Depression Looks Different in Teens
* 00:25 — Teens Still Need Their Parents
* 00:26 — How to Stay Connected to Teens
* 00:28 — Judgment vs Validation
* 00:31 — How to Rebuild Connection When Things Are Broken- Katie’s Hierarchy of Connection
* 00:34 — Sensitivity & Impulsivity
* 00:35 — What Parents of Younger Kids Can Do Now
* 00:37 — Why Control Works When Kids Are Young — and Fails Later
* 00:38 — Why “Tough Love” Doesn’t Work
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Podcast Transcript:
Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Katie May. She’s a therapist and the author of You’re On Fire. It’s Fine: Effective Strategies for Parenting Teens With Self-Destructive Behaviors. We talked about why some teens are what she calls “fire feelers,” and about how best to support them—and ourselves—when emotional dysregulation is common, troubling, and can be destructive.
If you don’t have a teen yet, but you have a kiddo with big feelings, have a listen, because Katie also talks about what she wishes parents of younger kids knew so they didn’t end up with these sorts of challenges down the road. Let’s meet Katie.
Sarah: Hi, Katie. Welcome to the podcast.
Katie: Hey, Sarah. I’m glad to be here. Excited to talk about teens and parenting today—stuff I’m jazzed to share.
Sarah: Me too. Yeah. And I loved your book. I’ll ask you about that in a second—or maybe you can tell us who you are and what you do.
Katie: Yeah. My name is Katie K. May. I’m a licensed therapist in Pennsylvania, and I lead a team of other therapists. We all specialize in working with high-risk teens and their parents. So every day, we’re in the trenches working with teenagers who are suicidal, self-harming, have eating disorders, are not going to school, and we’re helping them learn skills while also teaching their parents how to respond effectively—so the whole family is working together as a system in harmony.
Sarah: And your book’s called You’re On Fire. It’s Fine. I like it. My book—
Katie: Go ahead.
Sarah: No, it’s a great title.
Katie: Yeah. So I came to that title from this idea of biologically sensitive teens—or very sensitive teens—often feeling like they’re on fire with their own emotions. And I can dig into any part of that. But the idea is that parents who are well-meaning will many times say things like, “You’re fine. It’s okay. Go take a nap. Go get a snack.” And it feels like a little squirt gun trying to put out this big fire of emotion. So I thought that title captured those two points initially, to bring people into the framework that I teach.
Sarah: I love that. And it’s funny—I had a different interpretation of the title, and my interpretation, now that you said what you meant it to be, I can totally see that. But my interpretation was more like, “You’re on fire. You can handle these big feelings. It’s fine.” Like, this is just—let’s get used to feeling the feelings. So I guess it could be read either way.
Katie: I like both interpretations, and I think your interpretation speaks to probably how you support and parent. It’s nurturing and supportive of the process.
Sarah: Yeah. So tell us: what is a fire feeler?
Katie: A fire feeler is someone who is biologically sensitive. And what I mean by that is this is a kid who feels things very deeply. Their emotions are big and oftentimes overwhelming for them. And not just that—these are your zero-to-sixty-in-ten-seconds-flat kind of kids. They’re reactive, they’re easy to trigger, and when they’re triggered and they’re feeling their emotions in these very big ways, it also takes them a very long time to calm down or get back to their baseline.
And this is important because if you think about that slow return to feeling settled or centered again, oftentimes they’re being triggered again before they get back to that place of calm. And so they have a nervous system that’s constantly in a state of dysregulation—constantly triggered and upset. And it is very hard to access safety or calm or feeling okay because of that.
Sarah: And you mentioned emotional dysregulation, and in your book you have a very specific definition of emotional dysregulation. I thought it was a little more helpful and also a little bit more unusual. Can you give us your definition of emotional dysregulation?
Katie: So when someone is emotionally dysregulated, when they are triggered, it sets off this chain of emotions for them. Again, we go back to this idea that they feel on fire with their emotions. They’re often at this skills-breakdown point where it’s difficult to access skills or to calm down. And when you’re feeling on fire with your emotions, it makes sense that your brain comes up with escape strategies—things like self-harm, suicidal ideation, substance use—because it’s so big and hard to hold that the brain would do anything to make those emotions go away.
Sarah: I love that. And you also mentioned that people are biologically predisposed to be fire feelers, so I’m guessing that usually a teen’s one or both parents are also fire feelers, which would add a complication to the mix.
Katie: I would say so. I often find myself telling parents: some kids are born naturally good at sports. Some kids are born naturally good at music or art. And some kids are born naturally good at emotions—which means they’re very attuned to emotional states or nuances in the emotions of others.
And when we think about that as a genetic trait or a biological trait, it also makes sense that at least one of their parents carries this trait and is passing it down. And I think when I start to describe fire feelers—who they are and what it looks like—I regularly have at least one parent saying, “Oh, that’s me,” or “That’s you, honey.” They recognize it.
Sarah: Totally. Yeah. So I guess that makes home more complicated too when you’ve got a fire feeler and a fire feeler trying to find their way together.
Katie: It’s almost like if you yawn and it’s contagious—and the other person catches it. So if you have two people that are both biologically sensitive and they’re in the same room, one of them is triggered, one of them has a high state of emotional activation, it’s hard in general for another person in the room not to respond to that.
So there’s something that I teach. It’s called the transactional model. So let’s say a teenager is boiling over with frustration, and they’re exhibiting it. They’re bawling their fists. They’re snapping back at their parent. The parent then absorbs that emotion and they’re snapping back: “Don’t talk to me like that,” or, “It’s not okay for you to say that,” or “Don’t walk away from me.” Which then influences how the teen responds. And then the teen will continue to push or yell back, which then influences how the parent responds.
So we’re always looking at: How is it that I am influencing how you respond? How is it that you are influencing how I respond? And if everybody feels their emotions in these very big ways, it’s going to make that escalation that much bigger or faster because everyone’s overwhelmed in their emotions.
Sarah: So hard. I’m sure a lot of people listening can relate even when their kids aren’t teenagers yet—because that happens with little kids too.
Katie: Absolutely. It applies to all ages. I just happen to work with teenagers and parents.
Sarah: Speaking of teens, you mentioned in your book that teenagers are more prone to overwhelm. Can you briefly explain why that is? Because I talk about that too. I always say, “The drama is real.”
Katie: The drama is real. Thank you for saying that. So the way I look at it: teens are in this developmental state when so much is happening for them. They have unfully formed frontal lobes, which helps to regulate their emotions. They’re also dealing with hormonal changes, developmental changes, social stressors, peer stressors. They’re in school six hours a day, five days a week. There’s so much stress that’s placed on our teens.
And so if we think about a stress cup holding stress, it’s oftentimes just this one little extra drop that makes them lose control or makes them feel overwhelmed in their emotions. And I would say that’s probably true for everyone—that we’re all holding a lot, and it only takes a little to push us over the edge—but I think it’s the brain development that makes it even more challenging.
And then I’ll add to that the lack of control or agency over their own lives. They don’t have a lot of choice about what they do each day or what they have to do or who’s telling them what to do. So there’s a lot that’s outside of their control, and that makes it even harder to control or manage their emotions.
Sarah: I’m so glad you work with teenagers. You have such an empathetic view of what it’s like to be a teenager, and I think a lot of people—just a little sidebar—teens get such a bad rap in our culture and they’re so wonderful. I love teenagers. And also, I would never in a million years choose to go back to those years.
Katie: I wouldn’t either, but I do feel like I have a strong connection with the teen population. It’s interesting—we run parent groups at my center, and that’s a question that we’ll ask: Do you remember being a teenager?
And I think it’s hard for a lot of adults to empathize with the teen experience. But being able to do so—being able to put yourself in a teenager’s shoes—is going to help you support them so much more. Which is one of the things that I talk about in my book and in my work often: acceptance or validation before change. We always want to be understanding of the experience before we’re trying to problem-solve or change that experience.
Sarah: I want to ask you about validation a little bit later in our conversation, but before we get to that: what are some common reactions of fire feelers to overwhelm?
Katie: Yeah. Some of those common reactions tend to be self-destructive because, again, if we think about this idea that fire feelers are overwhelmed with their emotions—the big, fiery, painful experience for them—it’s not a conscious decision, but they would do anything to make that fire go out.
So this could be self-harm. This could be thinking about suicide. This could also be lashing out at parents. It could be numbing out in front of the TV or scrolling on social media for hours because it hurts too much to feel and I need to numb myself from that. It could be cutting themselves off from friends because the experience of relationships is so painful.
So a fire feeler will have a strong attunement to nuance and facial expressions and tones of voice. And so what might feel okay for one person, for a fire feeler might be interpreted as rejection or might be interpreted as “I did something wrong,” or “There’s something wrong with me.” And so the natural response of a fire feeler is to do whatever it takes to protect themselves from being on fire.
Sarah: I don’t even know if I totally understand it—but how do, and I know a lot of people don’t, how does self-harm bring relief to those feelings of overwhelm?
Katie: So there’s a biological response to it: when you self-harm—when one engages in a self-harm or self-destructive behavior—there is short-term relief. So if you think about emotions rising, rising, rising, what happens is it either blocks the escalation of those emotions, or it makes the emotional state come down quickly. It’s body physiology.
In addition to that, there are two parts to it. The first part is that it’s called negative reinforcement, and that doesn’t mean that something negative happens; it means it’s the removal of something that’s difficult. So that’s what I just described. You self-harm, you start thinking about suicide—it becomes an escape. It helps you to feel a sense of relief.
The second part of that is positive reinforcement, and that’s the social piece. A parent finds out that I self-harmed, and all of a sudden I am given warmth. You’re sitting on my bed. We’re having a heart-to-heart. You’re emailing the teacher to say that I don’t have to go to school tomorrow.
So there’s this one-two stack of: I feel better in the moment because it brings my body physiology back into a state of balance or regulation. And then on top of that, I’m getting my social needs met. And therefore it makes it really hard to break that cycle because there are all of these—this chain reaction of things that happen—that make me go from feeling awful to okay, and sometimes even more supported than before.
Sarah: That was such an interesting thing to read about in your book because I thought, “Oh man.” If I were a parent and had a teen that was self-harming, it would be so hard not to do that second part—the positive, what you call the positive reinforcement. So how do you support a teen without making it, “I self-harm and then I get a lot of really lovely warmth and attention”?
Katie: Yeah. So it’s not about removing the warmth and attention. It’s about changing where you put that warmth and attention. Instead of it being directly after self-harm, maybe it’s in structured and measured doses throughout the day.
So maybe we’re having a heart-to-heart in the morning. Maybe we’re going out and spending time together or watching TV together just because—and not because I self-harmed.
The other thing that I like to make sure that parents are familiar with and practiced with is how they respond when a teen shares an urge to self-harm or an urge for suicide. Because the way that it typically plays out—at least the first time a parent finds out about urges or that a behavior has happened—they’re crushed. Of course. Their face falls. They’re hurt. It hurts them to see that their child is hurting. They might cry. They might feel really anxious or helpless.
But a teen that’s witnessing that is interpreting that as, “My parent can’t handle this information, and therefore I can’t go to them with this information again.”
And so the practice for parents is minding your tone—being calm—minding your face, being more like, “Thank you for trusting me,” than, “I’m going to fall apart right now,” and minding your pace—staying calm and regulated and not rushing forward or feeling frantic.
And when we do this, what we communicate to our teens is: “I can handle this information. Therefore, in the future, you can come to me when you’re having an urge and we can handle it together, rather than you taking care of it by acting on it—and then me finding out afterwards.”
So that’s how we change the cycle: structured and measured warmth, consistent support, ongoing—not just after an event—and also being able to handle the information, even if you’re falling apart inside, because that is completely valid. But showing to your teen: “You’re not going to freak me out. I’m not going to fall apart if you tell me the hard stuff. I’m here for you. Come to me and we’ll handle it together.”
Sarah: And find your own support elsewhere.
Katie: One hundred percent. Yeah. Parents—I think any parent is going to need support, whether that’s their village, their people, their partner, their friend, a therapist. Parenting alone is tough stuff, and I wouldn’t recommend it.
Sarah: And I should have asked you this earlier in the interview, but when—are there any signs? A parent finds out your kid is self-harming or telling you they have the urges—is it straightaway “get help,” or are there early stages you can handle it yourself as a parent? When is this 911 getting help, and when is it, “Okay, we’re going to figure this out”?
Katie: It’s somewhere in the middle of “911” and “we’re going to figure this out.” The stance would be: if your teen has already self-harmed, they need to be in therapy. It’s beyond the point of handling it on your own.
When you’re noticing—it’s such a tough line because on one hand there are these typical teen behaviors: “I’m going to spend more time in my room.” Teens are moodier. They’re more irritable. They want less to do with parents. They’re more private. They don’t want to talk to parents. And so I don’t want there to be an overreaction to typical teen behavior.
But if we’re starting to see a duration, intensity, and frequency of that behavior that’s beyond typical—which, again, is going to look different depending on the child—my measure is usually: if my teen for two weeks is more tearful, more self-critical, more hopeless, not enjoying or engaging in activities that they used to—these are signs of depression. And that would be the point when I would want to engage more professional help to support in the process, because that’s where we’re going to start being proactive and head off escalation of crisis.
What happens is—and especially for teenagers—the symptoms of depression can lead to self-harm because there’s an overwhelm of that emotion. There’s a sense of hopelessness. Suicidal thoughts are one of the descriptors of the diagnosis of depression. We don’t want it to get to that point. We want to put help in place sooner.
Sarah: That makes sense. I read something the other day that in teenagers depression can look different than adults and sometimes it looks like irritability.
Katie: It really depends on the person. So I always go back to—we’ve all heard “nature and nurture,” but I think of it as biology and environment. Same idea, different words. But for some people, their environment can feel really safe to be vulnerable. It can feel really natural to express emotions, to cry, to be in that more vulnerable state. And for others, it doesn’t.
Or for others, they’ve learned that being vulnerable isn’t safe for them. It isn’t manly enough for them. It really depends on the culture and environment. And so it can come across as irritability. It can come across as anger—different dispositions as to whether someone internalizes their emotions or externalizes them or sends them outward to others.
Sarah: That makes sense. I think it’s good for parents to have an eye on things that maybe look different than they expect, just to keep track.
Katie: Yeah. And parents and teens don’t always express emotions the same way. I’m a very expressive and emotional person. I’m a therapist. I’ve also spent my whole life figuring out how to express my emotions. And I would say that my child is probably the opposite of that and doesn’t like being vulnerable in front of other people. So what you think makes sense may not make sense to the brain of another person.
Sarah: You were talking before about warm connection with parents, and you mentioned that it is normal for teens to want to spend more time by themselves or with peers. But one thing I wonder—and I wonder if you come across this too—parents often think that means, “My kid doesn’t want to spend time with me anymore,” or, “My kid doesn’t need me.” And my experience with my kids as teenagers was that wasn’t true at all—that even as they were moving away and differentiating, they still did like to spend time with their parents, and they still did like to do stuff with us and be close to us. What are some ways that you find are helpful ways for parents to connect? And how do you assure them that, “Yeah, you still are important”?
Katie: Yeah. As a child is growing and gaining more independence, it is such a natural experience for parents to feel grief and loss in that process because the relationship is changing. Teens do need parents less. Teens are more independent. They don’t want as much time spent with parents.
And so it’s important, one, to recognize that as a developmental milestone, and two, to recognize that means the way that you interact and respond to your teen changes as well. And so you’re not expecting the same attention or response from them as you did before.
But this is a grief process because you’re grieving the relationship as it used to be. You’re grieving your teen as they used to be. But you’re also—and this is the part we don’t think about—grieving yourself as you used to be because you have to become a new version of yourself to show up for your teen in a new way.
And so all of that is to say that it requires a lot of flexibility, openness to evolving, willingness to change how you see, interact, and speak with your teen. And so in thinking about that, it’s helpful to think about: What is it that my teen needs from me now?
They might not need me to cut up their food or call their teacher for them or set up their playdate for them. They might need me to drive them somewhere and listen to the music that they like and not be the one leading the conversation. They might need me to sit on the couch with them while they watch The Office and notice the parts they laugh at and just be there with them.
And both of those examples really nicely illustrate that your teens need less from you, but they don’t not need you. They need you to be more of a partner and less of a doing-for.
Sarah: When my husband and I both had pretty stable teenage years, we also had parents who were working a lot and not home when we were home. And I’m not saying this to make anyone feel guilty who isn’t home after school, but we really tried to structure our lives so that somebody would be home after school even when the kids were teenagers. Because our joke was: even if it’s just somebody who’s there that they can ignore.
Katie: It’s so true. But they know that you’re there.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. So you talked a little bit about validation before. Can you talk a little bit about validation and its opposite—judgment—maybe starting with judgment: what to avoid when our teens are having big feelings? I mentioned before that I often say the drama is real. I think that’s where some of the judgment comes in with parents sometimes. Like, “Oh, come on, you can’t be that upset that the jeans you were hoping to wear are still wet in the washing machine.” Where do parents make mistakes in terms of that judgment?
Katie: For me, I see judgments as the fuel to the emotional fire. So when we are seeing our teen act in certain ways, judgments are our interpretation of their experience. One of those examples might be: a teen is having a hard time getting up and going to school because they’re really depressed, and they’ve been white-knuckling every single day, and today is just the day that they can’t. They can’t do it.
And so judgments from a parent might look like, “Why can’t you just go? Everyone else is going. Just get up. Here’s the list of coping skills that your therapist gave us. Use your coping skills.”
So it’s this judgment that they can, and they’re choosing not to.
Other judgments that I hear regularly are: “They’re manipulative. They’re doing this on purpose to upset me. They’re attention-seeking.”
Oftentimes our judgments are because if we weren’t judging and casting blame, we would be having to hold a really frustrating or painful reality. So if I’m not judging my teen and saying, “Why can’t you just get up and go to school? Just use your coping skills. It’s not this bad,” then what I’d be having to hold is: my teen is really struggling right now. My teen—the person that I love the most in the world—is thinking about wanting to die right now. And that’s awful for me.
And so judgments are a way of pulling ourselves out of this emotional pain, but also shifting that blame to the other person. And instead of being able to hold their experience.
And if we’re not judging, we’re able to first just notice and name and sit with the experience, which is kind of what I described: “My teen is in a lot of pain right now. They’re struggling to get out of bed and even function in their day, and that’s really hard.” And when I can name that, I can feel that for myself, and it feels really hard and painful and difficult.
And then the outward version of that is validating them: being able to say, “I see how hard you’re struggling right now. I see the pain on your face. I hear the lack of energy. This is really hard for you right now.”
So we can name the experience for ourselves with our notice-and-name, and then we can validate the experience for our teen by noticing and naming their experience.
And when we do this, it does often make the emotion feel more painful because we’re naming it. I think a common experience of that is: if you’ve ever been struggling and then someone in your life, in passing, says, “What’s wrong? You look like you’re going to cry right now,” and then all of a sudden the tears come because someone has named the experience. The experience was there all along, but having someone see it—having someone tell you, “This is real, this makes sense,” or “I notice what you’re going through”—it makes it come to the surface.
It’s actually a helpful experience, because if we don’t name what’s happening, we’re judging it, we’re stifling it, we’re ignoring it. And that’s like holding a beach ball under water. Eventually it’s going to pop out, but we can’t control what happens when it does. Someone’s going to get hit in the face.
So we want to take ownership, we want to validate, we want to notice and name what we’re experiencing, and these are the ways that we move toward acceptance of what is, so we have an ability to move toward problem-solving.
Sarah: Where would somebody start who’s listening to this and hearing all of the examples that you’re giving of communication—if they’re not even at a point where their teen is communicating with them? Like, things have gotten so fraught and feel so broken. Where would somebody start with that?
Katie: It’s what I call my hierarchy of connection. Oftentimes there is this big rift in the relationship because it’s not just one time that something has happened—it’s years or multiple experiences that have gotten them to this point, of this rift in the relationship.
So the hierarchy of connection is our blueprint and our path back to connection. It starts with parent and teen being in the same room together—not interacting, but also not criticizing, not having this tension or conflict happening.
The example I give often is: I’m in the kitchen putting groceries away. Teen is sitting on the couch scrolling social media or watching YouTube. But I’m not saying, “Hey, did you do your homework? Did you take your medicine? Did you do this?” I’m just existing and they’re just existing. And we need to practice being in the same space together without that criticism or nagging happening.
When that can happen, we can move into shared activities. This would be watching a movie together, watching TV together, driving somewhere, listening to music. Again: no tension, no conflict, no criticizing. Doing the same thing together without any of those things happening.
And this could take a very long time. It’s not one, two, three. It could be six months of doing the same thing at the same time before you’re moving on.
The final step is moving back to interactive activities. This could be something like playing a board game and talking to each other, having an actual conversation at the dinner table, or a deeper conversation about something that’s a bigger experience. It could be the ability to do this within the context of therapy, so you’re able to have some of those scarier conversations.
But there needs to be a level of trust, and an ability not to act on urges to criticize or lead the conversation to nag or check off the to-dos. You have to be able to hold the space—to be in the space with your teen—before that can happen.
Sarah: One thing that you mentioned in the book is that there’s a link between sensitivity and impulsivity. Can you talk about that? I found that really interesting. Why is that?
Katie: When someone is more biologically sensitive—again, there’s this urge to make those emotions go away. And so when you are more overwhelmed with emotions, the idea of impulsivity makes more sense, because the desire and need for short-term relief is higher than it may be in others.
And so when my emotions are really big, I also have really big urges to make those emotions go away, and it’s harder for me to hold these big emotions.
Sarah: That was really helpful. If you could have the parents and teens that you work with currently—if you could have had them ten years ago, because a lot of people who listen to the podcast have younger kids and they don’t have teenagers—what would you like them to be practicing or working on? Is there anything preventive that you’ve noticed, that if people had an awareness earlier on, when their kids were younger, they might not get to this point with teenagers?
Katie: Absolutely. What I find myself saying often is: parents go first. And what I mean by that is that it is a parent’s job to learn emotion regulation skills, to learn how to notice and name emotions, to learn how to validate—essentially to model all of the ways that we handle really big emotions.
So that when our teen is having this experience—or our child growing into our teen is having this experience—we have the skills to manage our own emotions and we know how to respond to their emotions, because that validation helps the emotion go down more quickly.
When I’m working with younger children—and I don’t anymore—but that is part of the process: we’re working with parents first for many weeks to give them the skills before we even start working with the child.
So that would be my biggest piece of advice for parents of younger children: practice the skills, know how to manage your own emotions, have your own support.
And I will add to that: if you had the experience of being parented in a way that was painful for you as a child, address those issues, because they’re going to show up in the teen years. In the opposite way, you’re going to feel like it’s karma, but it’s really just generational patterns continuing—and you want to be able to change those patterns and rewrite stories that were painful for you so they don’t repeat with your own teen.
Sarah: I love that. It’s interesting because I think when kids are little, fire feelers don’t develop as teenagers, right? Like a fire feeler is a fire feeler whether they’re five or whether they’re fifteen. But a five-year-old—you can put them in their room and hold the door shut. Not that I’m advocating that. You can pick them up and move them places. I think parents probably—unless they’re more aware of emotions and being, in my brand, a peaceful parent—they probably rely on things that then, as their kids get older, just don’t work. But they maybe have missed opportunities to practice all the things that are effective as teenagers because they were relying more on external control when their kids were younger.
Katie: I one hundred percent agree. I think coercive control is easier to implement when your child is younger. But practicing validation, direct communication, emotion regulation is going to pave the way for more success as a teen.
And what I would say is: I think most parents recognize, when I talk about this idea of fire feelers, when they have a three-year-old. I have a sister who has two toddler girls, and she’ll say, “I think they’re fire feelers,” and they are.
And so you know your kid. You know their disposition. You know when they’re more sensitive or they’re a deep feeler. And so knowing that now can help you pave the way for what’s to come.
Sarah: Can you speak briefly on—when I was a teenager in the eighties, there was a “tough love” approach for teens who were having a hard time: drugs and alcohol, not going to school. And the approach was like: crack down. Kick them out if they don’t follow your rules. I’m pretty sure that’s not what you would advocate for.
And I do think there has been a shift because people recognize that doesn’t work. So maybe if you could speak to that for a few minutes—why getting more strict and more controlling with a teenager who’s having a hard time isn’t going to be an effective strategy.
Katie: I have two thoughts on that: one is about the teen, and one is about the relationship.
So when we think about a teenager who’s struggling, who has these big emotions, if the message in the family is, “You’re too sensitive. Just suck it up. Just get it together. Why can’t you do this like your siblings can?”—what happens over time is they internalize that message as, “There must be something wrong with me, that everyone else around me can do this and I can’t.”
And so they begin to lose trust in their own emotional experience, in their own emotion meter. And that is one of the contributors to self-harm behaviors, because then when an emotion shows up for them, their brain thinks, “Well, this must be wrong.” Everyone keeps telling me that my emotional state is the wrong thing or it’s too intense, so let’s make that go away quickly so that I can continue to function in my life.
What I’ll say is: at my center, we see hundreds of kids every week—teens and families. A lot of them are these high-achieving, perfectionistic, private-school kids, and they’re self-harming and they’re suicidal. And one of the reasons is that that’s a strategy that keeps them going in this life that is expected of them.
So I want to be really intentional about broadening the picture that we may have of the type of teen who engages in self-harm.
The other side of that—the relational piece—is that when the parent is consistently giving this message of, “Just get it together. Suck it up and keep going,” it creates a rift in the relationship. The parent is no longer a safe person to come to when a teen is struggling, because they’re not going to get what they need.
And so if it’s important for a parent to have a strong relationship with a teen—and I think that is for most parents—we need to learn the strategies that welcome open communication, that are able to hold that struggle, so that teens come to us with the little stuff and the big stuff.
And I’ll add to that: so that teens want to stay connected to us after they leave home.
Sarah: Yeah, that makes so much sense. Before I let you go, there’s a question I ask all my guests, which is: if you could go back in time to your younger parent self, what advice would you give yourself?
Katie: To my younger parent self? I think what I would say is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. And that’s something that I learned through my own education and the theory of good-enough parenting: that you only really need to get it right twenty percent of the time, and the rest of the time it’s how you repair, how you respond, and how you keep moving forward in the most loving and compassionate way for both you and your child. So that would help take the pressure off—both for younger me and also for probably a lot of other parents out there—that you don’t have to get it right all the time. You just have to want to keep going and want to keep trying to get it right.
Sarah: Nice. Where’s the best place for folks to go and find out more about you and what you do?
Katie: Yeah. To grab a free chapter of my book, You’re On Fire. It’s Fine, you can go to youreonfireitsfine.com. And for a therapist or media listening, katiekmay.com has all of my other projects and my counseling center and endeavors there.
Sarah: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Katie.
Katie: Thank you


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👉 Before we get started- On Wednesday, I’m hosting a live workshop called When You Know Better, but Still Yell, where we focus on understanding what happens in those moments and how to interrupt yelling and repair without shame.
If that sounds supportive to you, you can find more information at reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/workshop.
Now the episode!! You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.
In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I speak with Hunter Clarke-Fields, the host of the Mindful Mama Podcast and author of the book Raising Good Humans.
We discussed taking care of difficult feelings including how blocking our feelings can backfire and the role mindfulness plays in accepting and working through our own and our children’s feelings.
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We talk about:
* 00:00:35 — Guest intro: Hunter Clarke-Fields (Raising Good Humans, Mindful Mama Podcast)
* 00:01:00 — Big feelings as the root of so many parenting struggles + why willpower isn’t enough
* 00:04:00 — Hunter’s background: mindfulness, sensitivity, and parenting an intense child
* 00:10:00 — Two common coping patterns: blocking feelings vs flooding (and why both backfire)
* 00:21:00 — Mindful acceptance: what it is + how allowing feelings helps them move through
* 00:27:00 — Reflective listening + “name it to tame it” (why labeling feelings lowers intensity)
* 00:31:40 — Co-regulation in action: a real-life story of staying steady with a dysregulated teen
* 00:38:10 — Takeaways + where to find Hunter + workshop reminder + closing
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* Hunter’s website
* Raising Good Humans
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Podcast transcript:
Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Hunter Clark Fields. She’s a mindfulness teacher and parenting expert, host of the Mindful Mama Podcast, and author of the book Raising Good Humans. We focused our conversation today around taking care of difficult feelings—both yours and your child’s.
So often, big feelings are the cause of parenting challenges and friction in our families. Hunter shared some great strategies for how to make these moments that happen every day more tolerable, and even how our lives get better when we learn to accept our own feelings and our child’s feelings.
And don’t worry if you’re like me and you sort of shut down when someone starts telling you that you should have a mindfulness practice. You can use Hunter’s suggestions even if you know that meditation isn’t necessarily in your future.
Interestingly, one thing Hunter and I spoke about is that you can’t stay calm or not yell in difficult situations just by willpower. It’s not just a choice we make—how to react in difficult situations. If you’re listening to this and recognizing yourself, especially that gap between knowing what you want to do and what actually happens when things get intense, I want you to know that you’re not alone.
On Wednesday, I’m teaching a live workshop called When You Know Better but Still Yell. We’ll focus on regulation and repair in real, everyday parenting moments—without shaming yourself or forcing calm. You can find the link in the show notes, or you can go to reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/workshop.
Okay, let’s meet Hunter.
Sarah: Hi, Hunter. Welcome to the podcast.
Hunter: Thanks for having me, Sarah. I’m glad to be here.
Sarah: It’s nice to connect. I loved your book, Raising Good Humans. I was going to hold up mine—yours is behind you there. There’s some really valuable stuff in it around being the peaceful parent that we want to be. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do before we get started?
Hunter: Sure. I’m a mom of two daughters and a podcaster. I’ve been podcasting the Mindful Mama Podcast for a long time. I guess I like to talk, and I’m fascinated by people. I’ve been a student of mindfulness for many, many years, and a student of parenting because it was something I was very much struggling with.
So that’s me in a nutshell. I’m also really passionate about Scottish country dance. We used to have paintings and galleries, and I was a passionate painter—so there are lots of different things happening.
Sarah: I love that. Are you Scottish?
Hunter: A little bit by heritage, yeah.
Sarah: Yeah.
Hunter: Hunter is actually a Scottish last name. My maternal grandfather’s maternal grandfather’s last name was Donald Hunter.
Sarah: Oh, that’s cool. What came first—the mindfulness? Were you already a student of mindfulness when you became a parent, or did you turn to mindfulness when you found parenting to be challenging?
Hunter: Both. I was already a student of mindfulness. I started reading about mindfulness when I was a teenager, because I’ve always been a highly sensitive person. So I would have big ups and downs, and corresponding pits that I would fall into. I started reading about mindfulness, and I kept reading and reading, and it did help to read.
Then, maybe about ten years into my reading journey, I started an actual sitting meditation practice, and lo and behold, that helped a lot more than just reading about it. It really changed things for me. I used to fall into these pits of feeling like the world was overwhelming and feeling like I couldn’t handle life. That stopped happening. I had difficult feelings, but I wasn’t floored by them, grounded by them, or left incapacitated by them. That was a big change for me.
That happened maybe two years before I got pregnant with my first child. I remember being pregnant with Maggie and sitting in a meditation group with my big pregnant belly, patting myself on the back and thinking, “Oh, this is going to be great. This child is going to be so calm. Everything is going to be so awesome because we’re doing this meditation practice.” And it’s like—ugh. Right. Life kind of slaps you in the face and says, “You think you know what’s going to happen? That’s right. No, you don’t.”
Sarah: And the best parents are always the ones who don’t have kids, right? You always think, “This is how I’m going to do things when I’m a parent.” I remember when I was in my twenties, I was a Montessori assistant, and I remember thinking, “Oh my God, these parents are so crazy and intense.” I couldn’t understand it. And then I had my first kid and I was like, “Oh, I suddenly get it.” That love—and the triggering, too—that you probably never felt in any other ways.
Hunter: Yeah. And there are so many other factors as well. I remember taking Maggie to her Montessori preschool and dropping her off with a teacher I’d become friends with and got to know and love. I would get her in the door, turn around, and just cry out of relief to have three hours where I wasn’t “on”—where I wasn’t there to take the intensity of this child.
Sarah: For sure. So it sounds like at least your older daughter is on the more intense side of things.
Hunter: Yeah. She’s a lot like me. She’s very highly sensitive. She was always very intense from the beginning. Her birth was intense. Her babyhood was intense. Everything is intense about her—very sensitive.
And about a year and a half into her being born, I realized I needed something to help me weather this intensity: the anxiety, her emotional storms. I was getting myself to the YMCA, and I got her to tolerate—just barely—the YMCA childcare. But I was like, “I need more.” I needed to really turn to my mindfulness and bring it back, because it was so triggering for me.
Sarah: Wow. I’m glad you found it, and that you’re sharing it with everybody else. When you were talking before about big feelings being a challenge in your life—managing the feelings, I guess is a fair thing to say—that was actually one of my favorite chapters of your book: “Taking Care of Difficult Feelings.”
I was hoping we could focus on that today, because I think so much of our parenting struggles come from difficult feelings—either our child’s difficult feelings, or our own difficult feelings, or both. I love how you frame working with those feelings.
You talk about two common responses to difficult feelings that are the flip side of the same coin: blocking and becoming flooded. Can you talk about those two responses—what they are, what they look like, and how we might notice if those things are happening? And to be clear upfront: those are the things you want to move away from—either blocking or becoming flooded by difficult feelings. So maybe ground us in what those are first.
Hunter: Sure. I think blocking is something a lot of us are familiar with. That’s the “Don’t cry, go to your room,” right? It’s basically the instruction to not have those feelings. So we’re blocking those feelings out in some way.
And like anything, it’s not completely black and white. Sometimes there are times in life where it’s helpful to block feelings temporarily. We know that. But in general, we try to avoid feeling our feelings, because difficult feelings are uncomfortable.
So we block them. Blocking can include: I remember the chocolate stash in my pantry was pretty robust when Maggie was little. It can include drinking. It definitely includes the phone and the scrolling as a way of blocking our feelings. Anything we’re doing to distract ourselves or stuff down and not look at those feelings. Shopping. Doing things to distract ourselves.
Sarah: Or being too busy, too.
Hunter: Yeah. Over-busyness is certainly one—the endless to-do list. The sad thing about over-busyness is that we’re rewarded for that so much in our society. We’re rewarded for getting things done and productivity. And for women, it can be like being a good girl or being a strong independent woman is to get stuff done and to be busy.
And yet it has this insidious side where, especially with our feelings, we’re pushing through. We’re not feeling our feelings. We’re training ourselves to not be present. We’re training ourselves to always be in the future.
The sad side of that is: when we’re always in this to-do list—“I’m gonna go, I’m gonna do, I’m gonna go, I’m gonna do”—then we think, “Oh, I’m gonna get to our beach vacation and I’m gonna be really present with my kids.” And then you can’t, because you’ve trained your brain and your heart to always go and do. It feels unbearably restless to stop when you finally try to stop.
So blocking can look like all of those things.
And then the flip side is: the blocking builds up. You block and block and block. It becomes overwhelming. You have no tools to deal with and process these feelings. You’re just trying to push them away, and then suddenly they’re overwhelming. You drown in them. You’re completely flooded by them.
Flooding can look like completely drowning in sadness, misery, shame. It can also look like anger—your temper. There’s a bunch of stuff coming out that you can’t stop, because you’re completely flooded by these feelings and you have no way to deal with them.
A metaphor I like is that the feelings are like a big hamburger—a big juicy hamburger with cheese, and it’s gooey and disgusting. You’re eating this big emotional hamburger, but you have no digestive system because you’ve tried to shove it away. And then when you can’t, it becomes a big, disgusting mess. That’s my disgusting metaphor for not having the tools to digest and process those feelings.
Sarah: Do you ever listen to Anderson Cooper’s podcast? I can’t remember the name of it now. I know who he is, but it’s about grief. He has a podcast about grief—it’s called All There Is. It’s a really wonderful podcast. He talks a lot about how he never processed the grief of his father dying, and then his brother dying. And then his mother died, and he realized he’d gone his whole life without processing any of this grief, and it had really robbed him of the ability to feel other things.
Like joy. He’s a father with a couple of young kids, and it wasn’t until he started to process his grief that he was able to access the other, more beautiful emotions. And I think that’s— for people like me, where I admit I have a hard time feeling my feelings sometimes—I try to remind myself: you have to feel the hard things to also feel the good things.
Hunter: Yeah, it’s true. There’s the research by Brené Brown, and it comes out pretty unequivocally that you can’t selectively numb. You’re either numbing everything, or you’re feeling your feelings. And if you’re feeling your feelings, you’ve got to be able to process it.
For me, I was never unable to feel my feelings. I felt everything too much. I was never able to block out much. So I felt like I had no choice but to learn how to process these feelings. And when Maggie came along, the thing that was coming out for me was my temper.
I felt very ashamed of it. This is exactly how I decided not to parent. My brain, my choice, my willpower was that I would be this peaceful parent, gentle—and I was not. I was scaring her. I was aggressive. I was loud. I could see I scared her multiple times, and it was exactly what I didn’t want.
So I could really see: this isn’t like, “Pause and choose X, Y, Z instead.” It’s not that simple. I would say, “How do you pause?” It’s a process of changing bit by bit over time, and making a different kind of habit—energy in your body—learning how to tolerate the difficult things. It’s so much more than willpower.
It gave me a lot of compassion for myself and for other people who struggle, especially moms who couldn’t even say they had any anger—who felt so ashamed of even having it. Because it isn’t a choice. Nobody listening to this podcast or my podcast is thinking, “I think I’ll wake up on Tuesday and scream at Joey.” That’s not happening.
It’s much more than a choice. So I really had to understand it and understand how to be the parent that Maggie needed me to be. She clearly needed somebody steady—steadiness, a lot of steadiness, a lot of rhythm. She was not a go-with-the-flow kid, and I needed to become the parent she needed me to be.
Sarah: I’m lucky—for all the parents you’ve helped out there—that you had that experience. If you had a really easy kid, you might not ever have had to learn all of these lessons that you now share with other people. So it’s a blessing for everyone else that you had to go through the hard time.
Hunter: Yeah. Sometimes I joke that I had just the right amount of trauma: enough that I was able to deal with it in a way that I could break it down, understand it, and deal with it.
But it is really helpful to understand: there’s so much more than, “Here’s how you respond to your kid.” Those skillful ways to respond are wonderful to know, but they go completely out the window as soon as you’re activated—when your stress response is triggered—because your brain is in limbic fight, flight, or freeze mode.
It’s important to understand: this is a biological nervous system response. It’s not your fault. There’s not something wrong with you. This is innate—baked into every single human who is alive. There are tools to deal with it, but we have to stop shaming and blaming ourselves for it in order to take the necessary steps to study ourselves.
Sarah: One of the necessary steps you talk about is that instead of blocking or becoming flooded, we can learn mindful acceptance when we have difficult feelings. Can you talk a bit about what mindful acceptance is for those difficult feelings?
Hunter: Sure. This is really where a formal mindfulness practice shines. It gives us an incredible skill and tolerance, because as we sit—say we take up a sitting meditation practice—we sit there for five minutes or ten minutes. Our mind goes to other things. Our emotions happen. All this stuff happens. And we practice accepting it, observing it. We’re not really doing anything about it except accepting it and observing it. We watch it come, and we watch it go, because nothing stays around forever.
This builds a muscle of non-reactivity. Normally, when we feel a feeling in our body—the tension in our throat, the tightness in our shoulders, the “I’ve gotta get outta here” feeling—we act from it. That’s what our nervous system designed us to do. We’re designed to act on a threat or anxiety. We’re designed to move forward.
So it’s a weird, anti-evolutionary, slightly unnatural thing to sit and feel the thing you’re feeling. But paradoxically, as you sit with the “I’ve gotta get outta here” feeling, it lessens enormously and sometimes completely goes away.
Mindful acceptance is what happens when, for me, I’m practicing my meditation practice on a daily level in little bits—when I’m not quite so activated. There are little bits of: “I’m accepting this thought. I’m accepting these feelings. I’m noticing what’s arising. I’m seeing there’s some anxiety today.” I’m accepting it, and I’m sitting with it.
That means I’m not trying to push it away. I’m opening myself up. I’m saying, “Okay, yes, you are here. Yes, it’s okay that you’re here,” and I’m going to be curious about it.
Instead of saying, “What’s wrong with me for having this feeling?” I’m going to say, “What does this feel like?” This feels like some tension right in the middle of my chest, underneath my collarbones. It feels like a tickly feeling and a little discomfort—maybe slight queasiness. I’m going to observe it with curiosity, as if I’m an alien beamed down into my body. Like, “What is this?” Just curious: “Okay, yes, this is here.”
And as we say yes to this, we stop that instinctive blocking and pushing away.
In the Mindful Parenting Teacher Training program, when we work on this, I invite people to think of a difficult feeling and first try to say no to it—say in their heads, “No, no, no, no, no.” You can watch their faces tighten and their bodies tense up. Then I invite them to say, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” And you can see everyone relax. You can see the unclenching. It’s paradoxical: as we accept, “Okay, this is here—this anger, this sadness, this anxiety, whatever it is,” it lessens enormously just with that acceptance, and often can go away completely.
It loosens the grip to say yes—to open our arms wide and say yes to the difficult feelings, as much as we don’t want to.
Sarah: I love that. And I just want to point out: if you’re listening and you’re like, “I’ve made it to this age and I’ve always intended to have a mindfulness practice, but I don’t”—like me, raising his hand—I think you can still use everything you just said, even if you’re not going to start a daily mindfulness practice. In the moment, accepting the feelings you’re having, and everything you were saying, sounds so helpful to say about your child’s feelings too.
Hunter: Exactly. When we practice accepting our own feelings, then we can accept our child’s feelings. We want to accept their difficult feelings—maybe not the behavior, but the feelings. We may say the words out loud, but our bodies might tell a different story: that we’re not really accepting those feelings. Like, “Yes, it’s okay. I need to be mad at your brother.” And kids have incredible BS meters. They can see right through that.
So for us to really accept them, we have to first accept ourselves. We have to be able to accept our own feelings in order to truly accept our kids’ feelings. Because if we’re secretly judging our own humanity—shaming ourselves for our difficulty—if we’re harsh and mean to ourselves, that’s eventually going to come out. It won’t stay hidden. Those parts of ourselves come out. We live with our kids for at least eighteen years, and it will come out. You can’t fake it. Kids will see the faking it, if we’re trying to—
Sarah: One thing you talk about—I understood it as one of the practices you can put in place to move toward mindful acceptance—is that reflective listening piece with our children. That reflective listening is a tool to help you with more acceptance of feelings. Is that how you look at it, or how do you see those as related?
Hunter: Yeah, they’re totally related. When we practice reflective listening—like, “I see you look really frustrated”—say our kid comes to us and they’re mad at their brother. Instead of saying, “You shouldn’t be hitting your brother,” or being defensive, or trying to make the problem go away, we say, “Oh, wow. You are really upset right now. I can see this was really important to you.” Then they say, “Yeah, because he did this,” and blah, blah, blah. “Oh my gosh. Okay. Wow. This was really upsetting for you. Hold on. I’m going to listen to your brother too.”
As soon as we acknowledge those feelings in our kids, it takes the temperature down. It takes stress hormone levels down in the body—that’s what the research shows.
It’s similar for us. As soon as we’re acknowledging—this is what Dr. Dan Siegel calls “name it to tame it”—when we name something, it’s like magic happens. The left brain and right brain come together. The verbal part of the brain helps take down the temperature in the emotional part of the brain just by recognizing out loud the feelings.
In the same way we’re naming it with our children, we’re naming it with ourselves. That may be out loud with our children, or it may not be out loud within ourselves, but either way it provides release to name it.
Sarah: In my coaching, I’ve heard lots of parents say, “When I do that, it makes my child more upset,” or “It makes them aggressive.” If I say, “I can see you’re really upset right now,” or “really mad at your brother,” do you think that’s because they’re not really acknowledging their child’s feelings and they’re just saying a script? Or is there something about having feelings acknowledged that makes a child go further into the feelings? Or neither, or both? What’s your experience with that?
Hunter: It’s interesting, and it’s really hard to tell when we’re not there in the moment and we’re hearing from one parent’s point of view. I have heard that. And I think being acknowledged is helpful—but it depends on the form the acknowledgement takes.
Maybe it’s, “Oh honey,” with your arms open—communicating acceptance: “I see you and I hear you,” with your body and your mind.
Sometimes we can practice a tool like reflective listening with a script, but without congruence of mind and body—where inside we’re panicked: “The ship is going down and I’ve got to do something. I’m going to do that tool that Sarah and Hunter said to do.” We’re saying the words, but behind it is the panic of, “Oh my God, my kid’s out of control,” and our own nervous system is starting to freak out, like it’s an emergency.
That’s an incongruent message between your mind and your body. It has to be honest and real, otherwise it can’t really work.
That’s why foundation is so important. It can’t just be scripts on the outside. It has to be the foundation of some kind of practices, some kind of intention, that helps you steady and calm your nervous system on a daily basis—so you can access it in a moment like that.
I was with my daughter Maggie not that long ago. She must have been sixteen. She was really mad at me and my husband for something. I think it had to do with swimming scheduling. I forget what it was. She was really mad at us, and she was saying this to us near our living room entryway area.
At first I was listening, and I could feel the agitation in my body. So I got a broom and started to sweep the entryway while she was mad and upset with us. And I was like, “Oh, look at what I’m doing.” I could see myself. So I put it down. I sat down on the ottoman and practiced feeling what I was feeling—feeling the discomfort—without trying to say anything. I didn’t say anything. I was just there, practicing being present in myself with my sensations and my feelings, with what was going on, with this kind of verbal assault that was happening.
Within about thirty seconds of me sitting down and practicing this, she also sat down right next to me on the ottoman and slumped her body against mine. She started to wind down. Nothing special or miraculous was said. It was just the practice of being present—being steady—listening to her, taking in what she was saying, feeling the feelings.
Kids can feel that. We can feel when someone is congruent with what they’re feeling and doing and saying, and when someone isn’t.
So I often encourage parents: reflective listening is an incredible tool and it really can help a lot. But with some kids it doesn’t mean you’re going to say a lot of words. It means you’re going to practice the number one thing about reflective listening: mindfully being present. “I am present in my body. I am seeing and hearing you.” And then offering empathy—whether it’s even just a sound that isn’t a word. It doesn’t have to be a ton of words.
Sarah: I love that. The anecdote you shared with your daughter was a perfect example of co-regulation.
Hunter: Yeah.
Sarah: And being that nervous system anchor—you focused on your own nervous system, and it helped her too.
Hunter: Exactly. I wish I could have figured that out when she was two, but at least I figured it out when she was sixteen.
Sarah: So true. Was there anything you think would be helpful to add about taking care of difficult feelings that I haven’t asked you about? There’s so much great stuff in your book, but just for the sake of keeping the focus on what we’ve been talking about today.
Hunter: It’s important to remember that we have a lot of resistance to doing the practices of taking care of difficult feelings. I offer the RAIN practice and different things for looking at our difficult feelings. We have a lot of resistance to that, and that’s very natural.
But it really does help our kids. Just like in that anecdote I shared with Maggie, for us to model how to do that as a human. For every skill you want your kid to have in life, you have to do it first. You have to model it first. Kids are terrible at doing what we say, but they’re great at doing what we do. They’re great at imitating our behavior and seeing the way we live our lives as a model for how to live life.
So regardless of how old your kid is, it’s an incredible practice for you to do. And it’s a two-for-one: you help yourself, and you help your kid. It makes things less scary. I have less negative anticipation of things because I practice being present most of the time—and because I know that when I get into the present moment of something, I’ll survive it.
I’ve survived a lot of difficult feelings. I’ve felt a lot of difficult feelings, and I’ll be okay. I can tolerate a lot of different difficult things. And it makes me more present for the positive things. It makes me more able to fully feel joy and excitement, and to join in their joy and excitement. So it has a lot of benefits.
Sarah: I love that. You were just talking about resilience—knowing that you can handle difficult feelings. A lot of parents mistake resilience for not getting upset, but I always tell parents: no, it’s not that you don’t get upset, it’s that you get upset and you recover. And the path to that is always going through the upset first.
I love when you talk about reflective listening and the empathy piece. In peaceful parenting we always talk about welcoming feelings, and I think that’s the key to taking care of difficult feelings: welcoming them, and knowing that every time you survive it, you become a little bit more resilient.
Hunter: Absolutely. There are a couple different ways to welcome them. One thing I want to point out—because I think it’s so beautiful—is that I studied mindfulness for many years, and my main teacher was the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, who has since passed.
What he used to say about difficult feelings is that we want to imagine ourselves holding them in our arms like a baby: “Oh, hello, my anger. I’m going to take care of you. It’s okay that you’re here. My anxiety, I’m going to take care of you. I’m here for you.”
That’s such a beautiful image of how to accept and take care of our feelings. We’ve got to take care of these feelings. They’re kind of like toddlers tugging at our legs, and they’re not going to go away until they are seen and heard.
So you’ve got to get some kind of process.
Sarah: I love that. Thank you so much. There’s a question I ask all my podcast guests: if you could go back in time to your younger parent self, what would you tell yourself?
Hunter: I would tell myself to slow down. I don’t have to get it all done. I can give myself time to figure out this experience, and not rush forward.
Sarah: Love that. Where’s the best place for folks to go and find out more about you and what you do?
Hunter: You can find Raising Good Humans anywhere books are sold, and the Mindful Mama Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. I’m at mindfulmamamentor.com, and there are lots of freebies there, and podcasts and articles, et cetera.
Sarah: Great. We’ll link to all those in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us.
Hunter: Thank you, Sarah. It’s been really fun.
Sarah: If this episode brought up that familiar feeling of “I know what to do—why is it still so hard?” I want to pause and say that this struggle is incredibly common, and it doesn’t mean you’re failing. On Wednesday, I’m hosting a live workshop called When You Know Better, but Still Yell, where we focus on understanding what happens in those moments and how to interrupt yelling and repair without shame. If that sounds supportive to you, you can find more information in the show notes or go to reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/workshop.


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