260: How the World’s Toxic Systems Live Inside Our Parenting

There are obviously some people who are really doing terrible things, mostly by using their power over everyone else. And I almost imagine them like they're at the center of a circle. But around that circle are people who inactively enable that person at the center. And then if we imagine the next circle out, around those people are the ones who know it's happening and they just kind of pretend it's not happening. And then the outer layer of the circle is the rest of us who make decisions every day that make it more or less likely that all those people further into the concentric circles are going to be able to use that power. And that happens at all different scales.

Hi, I'm Adrian in suburban Chicagoland, and this is Your Parenting Mojo with Jen Lumanlan. Jen is working on a series of episodes based on the challenges you are having with your child. From toothbrushing to sibling fighting, to the endless resistance to whatever you ask, Jen will look across all the evidence from thousands of scientific papers across a whole range of topics related to parenting and child development to help you see solutions to the issue you're facing that hadn't seen possible before. If you'd like a personalized answer to your challenge, just make a video if possible, or an audio clip if not, that's less than one minute long that describes what's happening and email it to support@parentingmojo.com and listen out for your episode soon.

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. You might have noticed if you're a longtime listener that over the last year or so I've talked less explicitly about the bigger forces that shape our lives, how racism and sexism and money show up for us. And I pulled back on this because I was getting a lot of pushbacks, things like reviews that these social systems have nothing to do with parenting, and people don't want to hear about them on a parenting podcast. But with everything that's happening now, things like ICE raids, family separations, bombs falling on schools in Iran, and really powerful men talking about women and girls' bodies like they're property, it's time for me to start pretending that parenting happens in a bubble. I've really stopped myself from saying a lot of things publicly over the last year, at first on regular podcast episodes and then I tried to bridge the gap by creating shorter episodes with minimal editorializing from me for public release and longer episodes with more of my ideas for folks who are in the Parenting Membership. But I've been holding my tongue in a lot of areas of my life over the last year to the extent that when I got a massage a few months ago, I actually cried out in pain when the therapist massaged the muscle that connects my jaw to my cheekbones.

Not saying anything was literally showing up in my body. So I don't know exactly what I'm going to do about all this moving forward, but yesterday I had two separate conversations in a 12-hour period where listeners told me maybe this is the right time to start talking about this stuff again. I want to be authentically me and it's hard for me when listeners who love me and support my work have told me that they sometimes feel judged by my words and or my tone. Part of this is my responsibility to share ideas in ways that I hope will land for you and I'm going to try and name things as clearly and kindly as I do. And if something does land hard for you, I'm inviting you to just kind of stay curious about why rather than thinking that I'm attacking you. So I'm going to try and do my part and be careful and I'm asking you if you're willing to do your part as well. Because honestly, releasing this episode feels pretty scary to me. I have no problem with people disagreeing with me, but I'm still practicing being comfortable with conflict. That's really the kind of leading edge for me.

And I'll talk more in this episode about how the world is not kind to women with opinions and ideas. And this one definitely has opinions and ideas in it. But it's also really exhausting holding it all in. So I'm taking a risk and I'm going to go for it. So today I want to share with you some of the things that I'm thinking about these topics and make an explicit connection between these awful things happening in the world and parenting. These aren't just a few bad actors doing bad things to everyone else. From my perspective, this is deeply embedded in our entire culture. There are obviously some people who are really doing terrible things, mostly by using their power over everyone else. And I almost imagine them like they're at the center of a circle. But around that circle are people who inactively enable that person at the center. And then if we imagine the next circle out, around those people are the ones who know it's happening and they just kind of pretend it's not happening. And then the outer layer of the circle is the rest of us who make decisions every day that make it more or less likely that all of those people further into the concentric circles are going to be able to use that power.

And that happens at all different scales, right? One example, there's Trump at the top sexually harassing women and setting policies to deliberately separate families and bombing people in other countries, even if sometimes, you know, we get out of it by getting somebody else to do the dirty work. And all the officials like Hegseth and Noem and the thousands of people who just signed up to join ICE, at a moment when raids and family separations are very publicly part of the job description, they actively enable him. They're in that second circle. None of this is especially secret, but there are still a lot of folks who work in jobs where it's kind of possible to ignore it. And I did that myself, right? I worked at a global consulting company that has a lot of contracts with the federal government and with defense contractors. And this company was known for outsourcing jobs to India and making the person who was getting laid off train their replacement who was getting paid a tenth of their salary. And so then there's everybody else, right, in the outer layer of that concentric circle, who's making decisions every day in our families and our communities that say, this is okay, and this is not okay. And I think the important point is these are often not conversations that have anything to do with Trump or immigration or any of the other big sort of social topics. These are conversations that seem like they're about discipline, because that is when we use power over our kids. That is when our kids learn who has power and who doesn't have power.

And right now, especially if they're on the younger side, they don't have much power, but eventually they get big enough that they don't have to do what we say anymore. And what happens then? When I work with parents, I often see they either have taken one or two paths. Either they turn to the bad crowd, they got into drinking, drugs, or worse, or they toe the line during their teenage years, during their 20s, because they've internalized our ideas about power. And from our perspective, it seems like everything's okay, but those are the parents who show up in my Taming Your Triggers workshop because they explode when their kid says no, because they were never allowed to say no when they were kids. All comes back to power. Okay, so I want to go into three of these examples in some more depth to make the connections that I'm talking about making between the big social issues and parenting. Okay, so let's start with the Epstein files. When we talk about the Epstein files, we're talking about the documents that have been released that have described through emails how Jeffrey Epstein, who was a super-rich, well-connected white man, abused girls and young women for years, while other people who had a lot of power either helped or just looked away and pretended it wasn't happening. And there was an investigation in Florida and some transcripts from that show that prosecutors knew that he had sexually abused underage girls for years, and they gave him what's been called a sweetheart deal that kept him out of real accountability. So they knew he'd paid for sex with girls as young as 14, and they let him do jail time that involved working in his office for up to 12 hours a day. And then after that period was over, he was just, you know, he just had house arrest.

And so survivors describe being recruited as teenagers to massage him, and then when they got to his house, they were pressured into sex acts, and then they were offered money to bring more girls. And the younger, the better was a phrase that was used. And so, again, to tie this back, right, I want to point out that I don't see this as an anomaly, right? It's really easy to say, well, he was a monster. He was unique. He was a one-off. But advocates who've worked with folks who have been raped, folks who have been sexually abused, and the survivors of rape and abuse keep telling us he's not unique. This is not unique. He's a very visible example of a pattern where powerful men treat girls' and women's bodies as disposable, and the whole system backs them up. So what Epstein doing was hardly a secret, right? I didn't know about it at the time, you probably didn't know about it at the time, but lots of people did know about it. And they either enabled him, or they just kind of turned a blind eye, because they wanted to be closer to his power and his influence. Most of these people were men, almost exclusively White men. One exception was a Goldman Sachs' top lawyer, Catherine Ruemmler, and she traded advice on how to rehabilitate his reputation after his two thousand eight convictions for a fancy handbag and a watch and some boots. And an example of how this is not a unique pattern, there's data coming out of the UN that shows about 70% of women's journalists, activists, and human rights defenders have experienced online violence.

More than 40% have faced offline attacks that they connect to that abuse, more than double the rate of just a few years ago. PEN America reports that roughly three quarters of women journalists globally experience online abuse, everything from rape threats and stalking to deepfake sexual images and doxing, aimed at scaring them into silence, right? Remember, these are women who are putting ideas and opinions out in the world, and they are being silenced for that. A recent survey of over five thousand women in the US found that about one in four have experienced online abuse, things like cyberbullying, sexual harassment, doxing, stalking, and more than half of those women said it seriously harmed their mental health and their daily lives. Globally, UN data suggests that billions of women and girls don't have any legal protection from online harassment or digital abuse. And even when there is legal protection, that doesn't stop it from happening, right? This isn't something that just happens to famous women, it's part of the everyday landscape that our kids are growing up in. Research on gendered online hate finds the people doing this are usually men, and when they're interviewed, they describe or their behavior makes clear that their goal is to dominate, to enforce, to put women back in their place, and to silence women who step outside the role that they expect. So, to sort of replicate the structure, right, we've got Epstein at the middle, and Maxwell and all the assistants and all the people involved in logistics who actively enabled this in the first concentric circle.

There are the Peter Attias of the world who claim they knew nothing but strategically ignored what they didn't want to see. And then all around them are the rest of us who knew nothing about Epstein, but who created the environment in which he operated. Epstein and Maxwell groomed girls by promising modeling jobs and clothes and glamorous trips and sometimes $200. As I was putting this episode together, there were photos coming to light of girls' bodies with passages of Vladimir Nabokov's book Lolita written on them. And I want to think really seriously about the kind of environment we create where girls would see this as a valid choice. And at its root, I think this is about the transition that pretty much every girl makes, where they stop seeing their body as a part of themselves that enables them to do things, and they start seeing it as something that should be groomed for the male gaze. So, if we've ever tried to be thinner, or we've removed body hair, or we've changed our bodies in some other way to make ourselves more attractive to men, and to be clear, I've done these things, we've participated in this culture. If we've watched movies or TV shows or read books where the point of the movie is the girl getting married to the guy, and we fantasized about our wedding even as a child, and if we notice in the books our kids are reading that all the girls end up partnered by the end, and we haven't discussed that with our kids, we've been part of that culture. And many women can actually remember the moment when they made that mental shift from my body is mine to my body is an object that you get to judge.

I actually remember reading about one woman, I can't remember where I heard this story, but she was wearing a skirt while playing a physical game with younger kids, and a male relative told her she shouldn't let her underwear be seen. And I had a very similar moment myself. I remember when I was probably about 11 in high school, and I forgot my gym skirt one day, my whole gym kit, and I went to the PE teacher to ask for something from the lost and found, and she said, well, how big is your waist? And I was like, I don't know, 26 inches, I guess. And this woman was fairly amply endowed, and she just kind of gave me a look, and she's like, I remember when I had a 26-inch waist. And that was the first time that I thought, oh, the number that represents how big my waist is important. So that was a real shift for me, and I am actively trying to postpone the moment when Carys has that realization herself, and so far I think I've been successful. And as an example of how this kind of plays out, a couple of years ago we were at the beach, and we were actually going for our anniversary dinner, and she didn't realize that this wasn't a kind of excursion where we go to the beach and we strip off naked, which is what she often does when we go to the beach. And there were some teenage boys walking on the beach, and my husband was really uncomfortable with that.

And he said, well, what if they look? What if they take pictures? And I was watching them. They didn't seem to be paying particularly close attention to her. They certainly weren't taking any pictures. And I didn't require that she put her clothes back on. And he and I had a long conversation about this later that night, and I kind of heard his perspective and why that was important to him. And then I explained to him about the shift that I've been talking about, and that from my perspective, every moment that she gets to live in her body and enjoy her body for what it does, instead of seeing how she has to shape and present her body so that it looks more appealing to men, is a win in my book. And he hadn't thought of it from that perspective before, right? He had no idea that I was coming from that perspective. And so I think it's really on all of us, right? Not just women, but on men as well, to see that these transitions happen, and to make our world a place where girls don't have to shape their bodies to be acceptable to men. So when we zoom out on this topic, I see that our kids are growing up in a world where the overall message is that powerful men can hurt girls and women, and they can get away with it. And if women speak up, a mob is going to shut them down. Most often, those people are men, but there are also plenty of women who've torn other women apart when they report sexual abuse, right?

Look at what happened to Christine Blassey Ford, Amber Heard, Anita Hill, for goodness’s sake. And again, the focus when we think about these cases is on the one bad man at the center, but the rest of us play a role in creating that environment where this woman has to make an incredibly difficult decision about whether to even report what has happened to her. Canadian actor Sarah Polley wrote in her autobiography she'd wanted to corroborate accusations against musician Jian Ghomeshi by reporting her own sexual assault, but eventually she decided the backlash would be just too severe and she couldn't do it. So why do we even have to worry about that, right? What is it that makes us minimize women's experiences and feelings? Unfortunately, we often learn this at home. Think back to when you were a child. Many of us were told we're too emotional. Our feelings were dismissed. People would make jokes that would hurt and then they'd laugh at our reaction, tell us our reaction was too big, that it was just a joke. Some of us had to give hugs to people we didn't want to hug or we had to accept kisses from people we didn't want to be kissed by. And if we ever said no, our needs were overridden.

It's the same story, right? Their feelings and needs and bodies mattered more than ours. And I don't want to imply this is something only parents of girls should be thinking about. Because when one in six women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in their lives and one in five women attended college, we also have to consider the other side. That's a lot of men who are raping women. It's not a few bad actors and it's not just happening to adults. Depending on the study, one in seven to one in six students roughly say they've sent a sexual image and around one in four to one in three say they've received one. Even middle school and high school students know that girls' bodies are to be commented on and approved of by boys. We grew up in this toxicity. Even if we wanted to do things differently, when we are stressed, we as parents often default back to the same patterns that our parents used over us. They use their power to get us to change our behavior. And when the poop hits the fan, we often don't know what else to do, right? We have no other model. We know we don't want to do what they did, but what other option is there when we have to get out the door in the morning? And then another generation grows up learning that using power is the way to get things done.

Okay, so let's shift and talk a little bit about Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is abbreviated to ICE for those of you who are outside the U.S. and not hearing about this as much. So recently, there have been a lot of raids, a lot of enforcement actions where parents are arrested or deported, and kids are left terrified and separated from their parents. During Trump's first presidency, when my daughter Carys was about four, we were in the car and the radio was talking about the government shutdown that was happening then, and the fight was over whether or not to fund a wall at the border. And she asked me, what's happening? And I remember saying something like, well, there are people who are trying to come here because they need help, and our government is arguing about building a wall to keep them out instead of helping them. And she didn't get it. Like, it was clear she didn't get it. She asked me again, I explained it again, and it took about three tries before she really understood that there were people in danger, people who needed help. And instead of helping, we were building a wall to keep them out. She thought we were building a wall to help them, to get them in and protect them, but we were building a wall to keep them out, and she could not get her head around that. And, you know, I have to say I'm not an immigration policy expert, right? I don't know what the perfect answer is on borders. There probably isn't one. And from an idealistic standpoint, I can imagine a world with no borders at all, right? But I don't know how to get from where we are to there.

But I do know that ripping families apart and locking people up is not the answer. And in his first presidency, Trump repeatedly talked about migrants as criminals. He called them rapists and animals. And that language makes it easier to justify the cages and the family separation and the walls. And when our leaders use words like that, our children hear that some families are less human, some families are less deserving of safety and care. And I've been seeing a lot of these guides floating around recently for parents who say that, well, children are going to hear about this, whether we like it or not, so we have to help them make sense of it in honest and age-appropriate ways. And so these guides are sort of giving a structure for parents to talk with about their kids. And they kind of assume the person reading it isn't actually being affected by the raids, because I haven't seen one yet for kids for what to do when their parent is deported. And for many of us listening, you know, we're on what we think of as the right side of the politics, right? We oppose the ICE raids, and we really hate that dehumanizing rhetoric. Maybe we've signed letters, we've sent money, we've shown up at protests, perhaps. But our kids are still watching this world where some families are so scared that soccer practices and holiday celebrations and after-school programs are cancelled so that the kids attending them can be safe. And the biggest inconvenience that my family might face is the cancelled soccer practice, right? Many of our kids never have to consider of those policies beyond that impact, which is a privilege that often goes unrecognized. So even if we never say out loud, right, those people are the problem, which doesn't fit with our values, our children can still learn that some families are always on the edge of being torn apart, while others are basically safe by default.

And at home, that same pattern can show up when we use power when we're overwhelmed. So when we're scared, when we're tired, when we're flooded, it's easy to unconsciously decide that our need for ease, for calm, for order is more important than our child's need to feel safe. And so, totally get, right, yelling, shaming, withdrawing affection is not equivalent to family separation. These are not the same level. But it teaches the same basic lesson. The person with more power decides whose feelings matter and whose feelings don't. And that's an unconscious lesson, right? It's not something that I am consciously deciding, yes, I am more important. It's a tool that I fall back on when I don't know what else to do. Okay, the final topic I want to look at is Iran, which is a rapidly developing topic as I pull this episode together. So it may be out of date by the time that you hear this. But at the moment, we're seeing reports of US and strikes by allies, people who we think of on the same side as us that are hitting Iranian targets, including in cities where civilians are living.

And at the same time, leaders are talking about defending freedom and protecting the interests in the United States. The news stories are talking about taking out threats, even as civilians, including hundreds of children are being killed or injured. And I think it's important to remember, Iran hadn't done anything to provoke this attack, right? These strikes were carried out because the US perceived a threat that Iran might have weapons that they might one day use against the US when oh gosh, do we remember Trump boasted about completely destroying said weapons capabilities last summer. On the other hand, the US has a long history of directly meddling in other countries' affairs by supporting insurgents who want to install leaders who would be more sympathetic to the United States interests by bombing people who do things we don't like and by kidnapping and enabling the murder of foreign leaders. The US was directly involved in overthrowing the democratically elected leader in Iran in nineteen fifty-three. And this is on my mind an awful lot lately, right? Could you imagine what it would be like if these things were to happen in the US? Could you imagine if we lived under the constant fear that someone on a military base in another country might think that there was a terrorist hanging out in the same park as our kid's birthday party, and we get hit by a drone strike?

Could you imagine living with that fear? Because I don't think I can. We manipulate other countries' elections and their insurgencies when elections don't go the way we want. And we impose tariffs to get what we want. And we pressure countries to create markets for our products that undermines their own markets and producers. And then we ask why are they so unstable? Why don't they just get their act together? Why do they need so much help from us? And Trump has threatened to halt trade with Spain because Spain won't let us use their military bases to launch attacks. He said Spain doesn't have to give permission. And now Spain actually said we can't use their bases. And that's all right. We don't want to do it. We could just use the base if we want. We could just fly in and use it. Nobody's going to tell us not to use it, but we don't have to. So coming back to parenting, right? The story our children are hearing is it can be acceptable to kill some people's children to keep our children safe.

Violence can be framed as protection. Ultimately, our children's bodies are more valuable than their children's bodies. And this same logic shows up in our families in smaller ways. This is for your own good when we hit or yell or threaten. I only do this because I love you. Many of us heard our parents say that to us. Maybe we haven't said it directly, but that idea is still there, right? There's an implicit or explicit rule. The person at the top of the hierarchy, which is usually dad, couldn't be inconvenienced in any way. Dad had to be protected from everybody else's feelings and needs so his needs could be met first. And our moms, if our parents were in a cis-het relationship, they were not innocent victims here. They actively drew on dad's power when they said things like, you better stop doing that before your dad sees, or just wait until your dad gets home. When I was in Vancouver for my book tour, Carys and I were sitting outside an outdoor sporting goods store. Her dad was getting rain pants because we were in Vancouver. And we had the windows open because it was actually a nice day that day. And there was a kid in the car next to us and dad was sitting in the front in the driver's seat and mom was trying to get the kid in the car seat. And the kid was resisting getting in the car seat. And mom said, you better get in that car seat before dad gets really angry.

And so she's drawing on dad's patriarchal authority to get the kid into the car seat. And at the end of the day, our parents were trying to shape us to be successful in a world where White bodies are seen as better than Black and Brown ones, where men are better than women, where people who have money are better than those who don't. And whether they realized it or not, our parent’s kind of made this decision, well, it's better that I hurt you a little bit now so that you don't get hurt more later by the cruel hard world that's out there, right? In other words, they did it for our own good. But whenever I ask parents, I work with who are triggered by their kid's behavior today, what did you actually need when you were a kid? They invariably respond acceptance. They needed to be seen and known and understood and loved for who they really were and are. And with that foundation, they could have coped with anything the world threw at them. We might see that now and we might want to show our children unconditional love. But again, we don't know what to do in those stressful moments. Many parents tell me that they catastrophize in those moments. They see this thing their child is doing and they panic that their child won't succeed in the world if they keep doing that behavior. They won't do well in school. They won't get a place in the right college, get the right kind of job, get married, buy a house, have kids on their own, and so they panic. And in that panic, they yell at their child. They try to get their child to change their behavior. And that creates disconnection and shows the child you're not truly acceptable. You're not truly lovable as you are.

And the cycle continues. Another book that I think about a lot is by Tyson Yunkaporta. It's called Sand Talk. And he writes about a really different way of understanding violence and justice than I had thought about before I read his book. And he tells a story about watching a street fight between two Aboriginal women. And they're really small. They're like half his weight, but they fight like champions. But nobody else is getting hurt. There's no collateral damage, even though there's a crowd gathered, including the partner of one of the women who's fighting and her baby. People are watching not just for entertainment, although that is part of it, but to witness and adjudicate the fight. It's really carefully controlled. There are no serious injuries. No one's left bleeding on the ground. Apparently, often in these fights, there isn't even a clear winner or loser, because that's not the point. And Yunkaporta explains that in his tradition, these fights are part of a community justice system where everybody has some agency. They're a modern version of an older participatory way of keeping relationships and governance in balance. And in the end, when the dispute is resolved, both women walk away with their heads held high. And one of Yunkaporta core ideas is it's always better to keep violence in the public eye where everyone can see it and understand it and limit it and have it be distributed throughout the system, rather than letting it be hidden and centralized in the hands of a few.

He goes on to develop this idea in a way that's so important that I want to read directly from the book. So he says, “the damage of violence is minimized when it's distributed throughout a system, rather than centralized into the hands of a few powerful people and their minions. If you live a life without violence, you are living an illusion, outsourcing your conflict to unseen powers and detonating it in areas beyond your living space. Most of the southern hemisphere is receiving that outsourced violence to supply what you need for the clean, technological, peaceful spaces of your existence. The poor zoned into the ghettos of your city are taking those blows for you, as are the economically marginalized who fill your prisons. The invisible privilege of your technocratic one-sided peacefulness is an act of violence. Your peace medallion bling is sparkling with blood diamonds. You carry pillaged metals in your phone from devastated African lands and communities. Your notions of peaceful settlement and development are delusions peppered with bullet holes and spears”. And I know I found that hard to read when I first read it, and maybe if this is the first time you've heard it, it's hard for you to hear as well. And it just really struck with me how if our families aren't directly affected by the challenges that are going on in the wider world at the moment, even though some of them are happening very close to our homes, and we might now be seeing them for the first time, for the most part, we've been insulated, right? It's not our kid's birthday party that is at direct risk of being bombed.

Our kid's school is not at direct risk of being bombed. Yes, there's the threat of gun violence in this country because of other choices that we've made, but it's not at the same level. It's not at the same scale, because we have outsourced a lot of that violence to other countries so that we can live in relative peace. And I think that that's a really powerful and compelling argument. And I think that has a really direct connection to our families, because if our homes look calm on the surface, because our kids have learned to shut down, to stop crying, right? To stop arguing, stop bringing us the hard truths. It's not really peace. It's kind of fake peace. It just means the conflict has gone underground. And usually that means it's gone into our children's bodies, because they haven't stopped needing connection with us, or autonomy, or boisterous play. They've just learned to stuff it down inside themselves. And where we love our kids, but we're overwhelmed, and our broader culture basically sees kids as a nuisance, we tend to think of them learning to stuff it down as a good thing, because it makes our lives easier, right? When we say, I don't want conflict. I just want a peaceful household. But we get that by using fear, or shame, or control. We're doing that same thing that Yunkaporta describes. We're outsourcing the cost of that fake peace to the least powerful people in our family system, which is our kids. And so I don't think that if our household is peaceful, that we're automatically doing this, right?

The important part is how we get to the peace. So do we get there by seeing and meeting everyone's needs? Or do we get there by using power, even if we might be thinking to ourselves, I don't have any power. My kid runs the show. We are using our power if we're trying to change their behavior to get the child to do what we want. So let's draw this together, right? Across all of these examples, Epstein, ICE, Iran, Tyson Yunkaporta’s story, there's kind of one question I think that's really important. Who pays the price for other people's comfort and power? And our kids are watching how power is used out there in the world, and in here as well. And they're learning whether bodies and boundaries matter, and whether some families are disposable, and whether people who say they love you are allowed to hurt you for your own good. So what can we do, right? I can't single-handedly stop ICE raids. I can't end the war. I can't prevent powerful men from abusing girls and women. And frankly, probably you can't either. I don't know the perfect solution to borders. I also don't have a single stance on what you should tell your kids and at what ages, because I don't think there's one answer for all kids in all families. I've seen Black and Brown parents say, I don't have the luxury not to talk to my kids about this stuff, because they have to know what to do if I don't come home one night.

And I've seen other Black and Brown parents say, I'm also disabled, and I'm Muslim, and my kids do not need to know about what's happening on the other side of the world, because what happens around us, right directly around us, is enough for us to cope with. I do think the decision process should be a bit different for White parents of White kids who are less likely to be directly impacted, and who don't really have to know anything is happening if we don't tell them. But ultimately, in my opinion, whether we talk to our kids about this stuff and what we say is ultimately less important than how we are with them. Because they might remember some of what we say, but they remember a lot of what we do. So if we're talking with them about how wrong it is for Trump and Epstein and other powerful White men to use power over other people, other women particularly, and then we use our power over them to get them to put their shoes on and eat their vegetables and stop stalling at bedtime, we are creating the conditions in which all of that other stuff can happen. We are normalizing the idea that more powerful people can and should use power over smaller, weaker people. And this is an idea I've talked a lot about in the past, most explicitly in my book which is called, funnily enough, Parenting Beyond Power. In twenty-twenty three, it wasn't super well received and parents said they had a hard time understanding how power out in the wider world was connected to parenting. But now I'm hoping the time is right for me to start talking about this again, because it's at the core of everything I do with my own daughter and everything I do with parents who are struggling.

Most parents I work with know how they want to be with their kids. They know they want to be a calm, grounded parent who can co-regulate with their kids when the kids are having a hard time. Because we grew up with the power over framework, so-called gentle parenting can seem fine when things are going well, but it can completely fall apart in the difficult moments. I've worked with some parents who say they gentle parent until they can't stand their kids anymore, and then they explode until they can't stand themselves anymore. And that yo-yoing can feel really exhausting, but it doesn't have to be like that. When more of your needs get met in the calmer moments, you're better able to be with your kids in a way that's aligned with your values in the hard moments. It's not that you never have hard moments, but rather that they don't seem so destabilizing. And that's why the Taming Your Triggers workshop exists. We spend weeks understanding your nervous system, your history, your patterns, so that when your child is losing it, you're less likely to reach for control or shut down, and more able to stay present and meet everyone's needs and set boundaries, if necessary, without reproducing that same pattern of domination. So we spend part of the time processing and making sense of what has happened to us, and part of the time learning new skills to be with your kids to get out of that yo-yo cycle, like parent Maile did.

I think empathy and confidence are the biggest changes that I've noticed. I think that I have a lot of confidence now to do something else, where before I knew that what I was doing wasn't working, and it wasn't how I wanted to be, and it wasn't in alignment with my values, but I didn't have a great alternative. And what I was calling gentle parenting, I think maybe now I would call permissive parenting, or just like parenting without any boundaries. I think when I realized that Elliot's, my three-and-a-half-year-old's, biggest need was connection, that shifted a lot for me. And I really have had a lot of empathy for his actions, because I realized, okay, he's not doing this thing just to be annoying, or just because he's overstimulated. He's doing it as an act of connection. And so by seeing it that way, I think that's helped me, and that's actually helped me connect with everyone else in the house too, my partner and my baby. And I think also just the, like, having the empathy has also given me the time to pause, and kind of having the problem-solving skills of like, that needs-based framework of like, let me figure out what's going on here, instead of like, I'm triggered, and this thing.

And we focus on meeting your needs, perhaps for the first time in your life, like Victoria.

I've had extreme changes since, certainly since the beginning of the workshop, but even in the last few weeks, just noticing, really realizing how much my nervous system was just outdone, and doing things specifically to help with that. And then essentially meeting those needs for myself first, allowed space to be able to see my kids' needs, and not react to them. And that's come, you know, through lots of ways. Really just deconstruct the way my parents parented, has really made me able to let go of accountability, and shame. I was, I guess, I think that that would be the right word, that it was my fault, that I wasn't the parent that I wanted to be, or should my kids didn't deserve me. Yeah, so there's obviously a lot of work to still be done, but I actively see those changes in these past few weeks.

And from there, you're able to widen your window of tolerance, so you can create a pause between their behavior and your response, like Bryony did.

Compared to now, I feel totally different. I am way less reactive to Bella. I have a mantra in my head, literally, whenever her behavior is triggering or flooding for me. And I say, this is not her stuff. This is not her not loving me. This is not her not caring about me. She's having a hard time right now. And my job is to love her through that hard time. My job is to do the work I need to do to look after me outside of this moment. And that pause before I react is just, it feels like so different. It feels like bucket loads bigger than it was previously. I didn't even think I'd ever get to that pause. And of course, there are moments, but there is way, way less of them. And then after I've paused, I'm able to really love on myself and say, God, this is a really hard moment. And then I'm able to move towards a problem-solving place. The conversation of feelings and needs in our household is huge. The shift in my partner and how he looks at Bella's behavior is totally different. I still feel sometimes we eggshell a bit if she's having a hard time, like she's tired or she's hungry or a bit like, oh, it's coming. And I can feel the anticipation and the dread. But I'm better at dealing with it because I know that she just needs something. And it's a gift that I am so grateful for. I didn't think I'd be able to make that shift, but I have. Because if she needs something, I want to be able to help to meet that need. And I want her to recognize how to meet needs in herself and other people.

Look at what's changing for Bryony. Her daughter's really difficult behavior used to be really scary. Now it's much less scary because Bryony knows this is not about me. I'm not a bad parent. She's just having a hard time. And from there, I can find her need and my need as well. And we can meet both of our needs. And I know that's helping her to meet needs in herself and in other people. And that is how our work ripples out to the world. When we and our kids, and especially White parents and White kids, see other people's needs as just as important as our own, the kinds of things that are happening in the world right now will not be able to happen. They cannot happen. They are only happening now because some people see their needs as more important than everyone else's needs.

Tyson Yunkaporta talks about how violence can be hidden if it's outsourced to unseen powers and then exploded in places far away. Things like war zones and prisons and what he calls ghettos, so that people in the center can live in a clean, peaceful bubble. So if you're hearing what I've shared in this episode today and your body is saying, yes, this is the layer that I haven't been able to figure out how to explain, and I don't want to keep outsourcing the cost of my calm to my kid, then the Taming Your Triggers workshop is the place where we work on that together. And what I mean by that is, I don't want my own overwhelm to be solved by asking my child to be quieter and smaller and more agreeable. I want to learn how to stay regulated enough that I can hold the discomfort myself instead of putting it on them. So you probably didn't listen to this episode for some quick tips to stop tantrums, and that's not what you get in the Taming Your Triggers workshop either.

If that is what you're looking for, this is probably not the right space for you. But if you're feeling some sense of grief and maybe also relief that what you've heard in this episode connects the dots that you can have known in your body but hadn't known how to express, then this is for you. We've just announced an option to do the workshop at a cheaper price without group coaching. So if you've been interested in it before but it was financially out of reach and you felt bad asking about a discount, because I know that that happens, this option is for you. So you can learn more and sign up by Midnight Pacific on Sunday, March 15th. If you don't feel triggered by your kid's behavior right now, I'm so glad for you. I'm probably going to get a lot of hate mail and a lot of negative iTunes reviews for this episode, so if you would like to hear more of the real Jen in future podcast episodes, if you'd be willing to leave a positive review on whatever platform you listen on, I'd be so grateful. If you made it this far in this episode, you're my people. Thank you so much for being here. I so appreciate you.

If you'd like Jen to address the challenge you're having in parenting, just email your one-minute video or audio clip to support at yourparentingmojo.com and listen out for your episode soon.