241: Validating children’s feelings: Why it’s important, and how to do it with Dr. Caroline Fleck

Hi everyone. I am Denise, a longtime listener of Your Parenting Mojo. I love this podcast because it condenses all the scientific research on child development, compares it with anthropological studies and puts it into context of how I can apply all of this to my daily parenting. Jen has a wealth of resources here, so if you're new to the podcast, I suggest you scroll through all her episodes. I'm sure you'll find one that will help you with whatever you're going through, or one that just piques your interest if you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 Reasons Your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one. Sign up at yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I have to say I'm really excited about this episode, which is on the topic of validation. And I'm here with Dr Caroline Fleck, who has recently published a book called Validation. And I want to say right here at the outset that I found the book both incredibly useful and extraordinarily frustrating. Dr fleck's publicist reached out to me about the book a couple of months ago, and I gave my usual response, which is that I'm cautiously interested. Perhaps it won't surprise you to know that I don't invite guests on the podcast if their message isn't reasonably well aligned with my ideas. There doesn't have to be 100% alignment, but I don't want to accidentally say yes to someone who wants to discuss ways to reward and punish our kids into changing their behavior, for example. I was in the middle of several things at the time, and I got about halfway through the book and I'd folded down the corners on a lot of pages, because I was finding the book so useful in terms of helping me to understand why validation helps us, and, more specifically, how to do it. I reached back out to the publicist, and I said, please go ahead and set up an interview, and then I kept reading the book, and a few days later, I got to the third of the three parts of the book, only to find out that it's about how to use validation to essentially reward people, including our partners and children, into changing their behavior to do what we want them to do. I reached out to Dr Fleck and her publicist and explain my dilemma, and I did use quite a few of my new validation skills in that message, and I acknowledge that she might not want to come on the show when I can't unequivocally recommend the book while she's still in the excitement of the release period especially. She also mentions in the book that she has some pretty severe health challenges, and I thought she might want to protect her energy as well, but she graciously responded and said she'd be happy to come on and either discuss the challenges I have with part three of the book, or have me append a conclusion of my own. And the first two parts of the book really are so useful, so we're going to focus on that in our conversation, and then I will wrap up with a conclusion on why I don't think the third part is as helpful. You'll get all the tools from the book from just our conversation so feel free to skip the conclusion if these additional ideas won't be helpful to you. So let me go ahead and introduce Dr. Fleck. She is a licensed psychologist corporate consultant and adjunct clinical instructor at Stanford University. She received a BA in psychology and English from the University of Michigan, followed by an MA and PhD from the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. She served as a supervisor and consultant for some of the most rigorous clinical training programs in the country, including Dr. Marsha Linehans BRTC at the University of Washington, the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford Medical Center and the VA Palo Alto. She's a respected voice in psychology and has been featured in national media outlets, including the New York Times, Good Morning America and the Huffington Post, welcome Dr fleck. It's still great to have you

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Awesome. I wonder if we can start with the basics, would you be willing to define what you mean by validation?

Yeah, so by validation, we were talking about a way of communicating that you are mindful, you understand and you empathize with some part of a person's experience, thereby accepting it as valid. That is a mouthful, so I like to truncate that to just validation shows that you're there, you get it and you care, right? It's that feeling of being seen and heard,

okay? And so why is that important in our relationships?

I believe that it is the most important quality in our relationships. In fact, I would argue that it's really hard to have authentic relationships in the absence of that, because when we don't feel seen, who is the other person having a relationship with, if it's not us, it could be a facade, it could be some version of us that they're holding on to. But when we don't feel seen in who we are, it's hard to feel loved, I think, for who we are.

Yeah and it seems as though, then what you're saying, particularly the mindfulness piece, is very different from I'm waiting for you to stop talking so I can say what's on my mind that I've been thinking about while you're talking.

Oh my gosh. I'm so glad you flagged that, because I think that is how many of us, myself included, a lot of the time listen. But like as I describe in my book, validation really is a skill, and the first part of strengthening that skill is developing the ability to listen without your own agenda to talk. And that's kind of the first step is to make almost a mindfulness practice out of the conversation itself. And you can do that at any moment. You can do it in the middle of a conflict. You can do it just when you're driving to the store. But that is, that is kind of the most fundamental level, is, are you engaging in participating in that way?

Yeah. Okay. And I want to sort of make sure that we're getting the nuance of the three pieces. The mindfulness was the first piece, the understanding was the second piece. And I remember talking with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett on her work on how emotions are made, and her idea that we sort of think we know what other people are thinking and feeling based on the arrangement of their facial features, when actually most of us are not very good at this.

Yeah, it's really surprising well, and not only are we not great at it, but most of us are pretty good at masking our actual emotions, right? So even if we do read whatever the facade is projecting that is a very blurry representation of what the other person is actually experiencing. To be able to see past that is, again, it takes some skill,

Yeah, okay. And then the empathy is the piece that you emphasized on, on really connecting with another person's emotions, which is so important to us.

Yeah, that's right. So the understanding, I think of more as like, a logical understanding, you know, like, this is a very weird reference, but like Spock from Star Trek, almost like a very like, you know, given x, y makes sense, and then empathy is more of, like the I don't know, Yoda kind of, it's this emotional intuition that incorporates the logical but has this higher level of emotional understanding as well.

Yeah, okay, okay, and so we're going to talk about a model in your book that I find incredibly helpful in terms of the validation ladder. And before we get there, I just want to lay a little bit of groundwork in terms of sort of how we validate people and what we validate. And one of your cardinal rules is to only validate the valid. And then you say that thoughts are considered valid when they are logical, based on facts and grounded in reality. And the example you give is of a schizophrenic patient going off his meds who then thought that you were colluding with the government to get him killed, which obviously is not a valid thought, because it wasn't true. And this plays out in a variety of ways in our lives. Right now we are in a political environment where the government has declared there are only two genders, which scientific research tells us is not fact. You know what is logical fact based and grounded in reality seems highly contestable. How does that fit in with your validation framework?

You know that really surfaced. I can, like, vividly remember watching, I don't remember, I can't remember who it was, but just that those words are like, you know the idea that facts are debatable and when that first started to bubble up into kind of our culture and our rhetoric, the first thing I thought is exactly what you're describing, which is, what does this mean for our ability to determine what is valid in terms of a thought process? Because validity is based on fact and science and data and logic, and once you suggest that those things are debatable, you have fundamentally uprooted our basis for determining validity. And it's a very good point. It's something I've run into so much, and increasingly, it seems, every year for probably the last five or six years. And what I do with that, when I'm really struggling to understand, how can somebody believe X, Y or Z, given what we know, like you said, given the science on this, and when I can't understand and I can't get on board with their logic, I can, at the very least, kind of zoom out and look at the context and see okay, if a trusted authority was telling me that there are only two genders and I was told that this was news, that this was factual information, I might believe that too. I can see the logic, so to speak, in their logic, even though I don't believe that it is logical. That is the most confusing sentence that was ever said out loud, much less on air. But here we are.

Yes, it's a confusing world we live in that fits in with one of the items on the ladder right, contextualizing given, what you are surrounded by, it makes sense that you would believe this. So okay, so that that helps me. Thank you. And then I guess, in a way, kind of pushing back on it from the other side, what I am hearing is sort of this very logical, rational perspective typically associated with men over right? This sort of feminine approach, of feminine air quotes, of knowing and intuiting. And you do say that all emotions are valid, which I totally agree with. But I think sometimes we make decisions by intuiting by just sort of a deep knowing, rather than a rational logical process. How does that fit in with validating the valid?

Yeah, in a lot of this work comes from dialectical behavior therapy or DBT. And you know, we have this concept of wise mind in DBT, which is we want to make decisions based not just on logic, but also on that intuition. And it's about the balance, but a truly and validating, a deeply validating response is one that includes both that logical understanding and the emotional understanding. I would argue that if you're only ever able to validate like the logical, again there can be this, like Spock like quality to that communication. It misses, it fails to see some of the intuition and the emotional logic so to speak, in a person's reaction. And so that's where, again, through these skills and this model, I hope to help people use that logic to take it one step further into the emotional understanding. And I do believe, for everyone out there who struggles with this, I absolutely know that this is a skill set. This is something you can develop, right? If you really struggle to get that other piece, this can, this will help you do so.

Yeah. And let's make this super practical for parents, right? Like your kid meltdown because their cracker breaks, but yeah, and they want their cracker to be whole again, and it was the last cracker in the bag.

And I wonder it's so frustrating?

Yeah, I'm wondering, if I can answer my own question, is it the same as sort of the first part of this? You know, given the context that you're in and you're a three and this is a big deal to you, it makes sense that you would be frustrated over the cracker breaking. Is that where you would go with validating the valid on the cracker?

I would I might also, again, kind of zoom back and see all right, kiddo, did they skip a nap? Have they not eaten in a while? Because I remember when my daughter was younger, it's going to make me sound like a horrible parent. We had this rectangular dining table that had a really sharp corners. And no, no, Jen, we didn't cover the corners like rational parents would do. For some reason. We just thought she'd stop running into it. But no, she kept running into it. And if that kid had slept and eaten and she hit the corner, she was like, Haha, money, Mommy, I'm so silly. You know she'd be okay. It might owie a little bit if she hadn't. It was like a complete meltdown, right? Same “trigger”, like that table. She could have even hit it with the same intensity. But it was really about the hunger, the exhaustion, all these other vulnerability factors that were coming into play. With a kiddo who's maybe crying over a broken cracker, and they don't usually cry over such a thing, if their behavior, if their reaction, seems outside the norm for them, I might zoom out and say, oh, okay, you know, I think we should probably take it. Are you feeling a little tired? Yeah, I would still validate the motion because they're still upset. Yeah, it is frustrating when that happens. Let's take a break. But I also need to attend to the other factors at play and ultimately help orient the kiddo to those factors so that they can make sense and understand their reactions.

Yeah, okay, and so seeing that it's not really about the cracker,

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right

And that there are broad, even broader context than the cracker, than this behavior makes sense within, okay, cool, all right. And, so why should we validate other people? Right? How does it help us?

Oh, boy, again, it's and I'm still entrenched in this. Honestly, sometimes it's hard for me to think outside of it, but it's like to me that's as though you were to ask, why should we show love, or why should we have compassion? Because it is absolutely essential, because we as human beings are distinct from other animals in our need for acceptance and belonging, and it is, I think it helps to see that as a fundamental need when we want to, I mean not want to, when we choose to torture people in this country, one of the forms we use is solitary confinement and taking people away from other people is what deeply traumatically hurts them, and I can't underline that enough, the need that we have to feel seen and heard. The more you can bring that into your relationships, the more you can provide that the healthier those relationships will be, the less conflict you have, and the more effective you will be in those relationships, and actually getting your needs met.

Yes, which we can all agree, is something that we want, and also it helps other people. And I think that a reason why parents can struggle to validate their kids’ feelings is that they worry that they're creating something out of nothing, right? They're creating something their child is going to worry about that they were a little bit worried about before, and now it's going to turn into a big thing, or their child has hurt themselves, and it's not really bad, but if they validate them, they're going to have a huge meltdown on their hands, because their kid is going to cry more. You look, I know you looked at some of the research on that topic. Can you tell us how you see the role of validating our kids’ feelings in these kinds of situations?

Yeah. Let's take the one where the kid is starting to get, kiddos starting to get worked up, right? And in that moment, I'm as focused on the power of attention. What we know is that attention can be pretty reinforcing. But my daughter was younger, she used to do this thing. When she was starting to, like, cry or get upset, she would go and look in a mirror. I don't know if anyone else's kids do this. She would go and look in a mirror, and then she would, like, get increasingly worked up. There was this, this really, I don't know why she did it, but in those moments, absolutely layering on attention would not be effective in the sense that it would escalate things for her. It would dis regulate her further. And in those moments, what I would do actually is more of a smooth and move like, let's, oh, okay, let's go over here. Let's take a walk. Let's go outside. Let's put that down. Let's not play with it. Kind of take her out of the situation until she's regulated. Because, as a psychologist, I know that her system is flooded. She's in a state of sympathetic arousal. She's flipped her top like she's not thinking clearly, and me trying to rationalize with her, or even validate her, it's just we're not operating at that level. She's not operating at that level. Now what I will do, and what I think is critical to do, is, after she's calmed down, then I will go in and validate the valid which might be, yeah, you were really frustrated by how uncomfortable that shirt tag was. I don't like having things on me that are uncomfortable either. That's, oh, I hate it, like if someone moves my eyebrows in that weird way, oh, I just can't stand that feeling. Like that makes total sense. I can validate her emotion, the ickiness, the discomfort. Now I don't necessarily need to validate the behavior of, let's say, tantruming and throwing things okay, because I don't see validity in that. I don't think that's an effective way to deal with a shirt that hurts, or even an effective way to regulate those emotions. Sometimes it could be, depending on the circumstances, but oftentimes it's not. And if I don't see it as valid, I wouldn't validate that.

Okay. I mean, if it got your attention when previously she hadn't been able to communicate that the shirt was irritating her, then we could argue that it was actually a fairly effective strategy.

And in fact, that's what a lot of kids from highly invalidating environments learn. They learn to escalate to a point that they get the attention they should be getting at lower levels, right? So if a child says to you, my shirt is really uncomfortable, it hurts, it's stressing me out. That's something to take seriously. We shouldn't wait for them to melt down before we respond to something that's bothering them right now, there may only be a certain number of things we can do, but we absolutely don't want our kids to have to tantrum, to have their needs be heard and for them to be taken seriously.

Yeah, yeah and when, of course, when you're thinking about this with a two-year-old or a three-year-old who may not have the capacity to be able to even say it's my shirt tag.

Yeah, that's right. You know, but we have to look at what's developmentally appropriate there as well, right?

Yeah, okay, cool. I'm curious about gender differences in how this shows up, and I know that one of the studies you cite in your book talk about how fathers have been shown to respond to their children's emotions, including distressing emotions, in less supportive ways than mothers. And when I looked at the studies you cited that talked about how people learn validation, pretty often, the researchers are saying, okay, who wants to learn about validation? And all the women are like, yep. And all the men are like, I don't know. And what do you see in terms of men's ability to validate and willingness to learn about validating?

Oh, that's interesting to speak to what you were saying also about the research, I'm so excited to be able to talk with someone about this, but I was really, frankly disheartened. I'd done a lot of research on validation, and when I really started to dig into it, especially the effects on children and parent dynamics, so much of the research was just looking at Mom's validation, the effects of mom's validation on children. And I didn't, I frankly, didn't always see good explanations as to why, I can hypothesize or whatever, but I was disappointed by that. I think that puts a tremendous amount of pressure on women, first of all, second of all, I think it invalidates the effects that fathers can have on their children and the significance of their role, particularly when it comes to modeling and validating emotion. Now in terms of learning or developing these skills, I'd been teaching validation forever with my clients, and therapy with couples, parents, and at some point, was asked by Google to come and develop this interpersonal effectiveness class for a group of, like 100 folks who were this group was really team, was really struggling to communicate effectively. And this was a group of pretty much almost all men, mostly engineers, and those who weren't engineers were hard science researchers. And I thought, this is not going to go over well, I was like, frankly, I was so intimidated me going in there with my soft skills, you know. And what surprised me was how quickly these folks not only developed these skills, but the interest they showed in them. And that is part of why I wrote this book. It was after that experience of seeing like, oh no, this really resonates. What I found in that situation was an appreciation for the method, like, oh, this is almost like an algorithm I can use this, this validation ladder, this framework I created, I can plug into this. I know what to do when the person does responds negatively. I can just go back here. It was really sweet to see that the desire actually was there. I think a lot of the resistance was coming from a sense of hopelessness or inability to achieve or actually succeed in validating people. But once I gave them that path, it was like, oh, give me more.

Yeah okay, and that's now you phrase it in that way, that's a big part of what I got out of it as well was, oh, this makes sense. Okay, I can, I'm doing these already. Here's one where I'm not, you know, not doing as well. Here's where I can focus to improve my skills

Yes, yes.

So that makes perfect sense. Okay, so we're about to get there. Before we get there, the one last thing I want to address is, you know, what happens if we don't receive these messages that our experience and our thoughts and our feelings is valid?

When we we're not validated, often what happens is what we receive instead is invalidation. What we when we don't feel heard, we're often internalizing the message that your voice doesn't matter, your emotions don't matter. You shouldn't be thinking that way. You shouldn't be acting that way. You certainly shouldn't be feeling that way. And this is one of the single greatest contributors to mental health problems that we know of. This isn't a maybe that invalidation is problematic. This is no it is absolutely problematic. It is exponentially folks who are exposed to pervasive invalidation are exponentially more likely to self-harm, to suicide, to develop serious problems like major depressive disorder, borderline personality disorder, psychopathy. I mean, it really is. It's like the root of all evil in in a lot of ways. I cannot emphasize how important it is. And I say in the like, even if you don't develop the ability to validate, please, please, at least work on decreasing invalidation, because it is so toxic.

Yeah, and that brings to mind a theory that I have, which is that, you know, I think a lot of things we call mental illness are actually their root and absence of validation, and that we're essentially saying, you know, our culture is like this, and you can't cope with that, and therefore the problem is with you. You need to go and fix what's wrong with you, which is the opposite of validation. Because a validating culture, culture would say something like, oh my goodness, you're having a hard time. What is it about our culture, our environment, that you're in that is hard for you? And how can we all work together to support you in a way that you need to be supported. And do you see it in a similar way? Would you push back against elements?

No, no, I would underline that highlight that is truth. There is no way that you can learn to trust your emotions and navigate your environment if you are consistently told that what you were thinking and feeling is wrong. How can you feel seen if you don't even trust who you are? That is a confusing and hopeless way to experience life, and in the context of that hopelessness, that loneliness, that sense of shame, most people will resort to desperate attempts to cope or avoid that “reality” right?

Yeah. And this is why it's both so important and so hard, I think because we're trying to build the plane as we're flying it, right? To use an overused metaphor, which is to say that our parents didn't validate us, and so somehow, we have to learn from an awesome book out of how to receive and give something that we never received when we were little. And do this for our kids in moments when they're looking for validation, and there's this part of us screaming inside ourselves, but nobody did this for me when I was a kid.

It's true. My only other kind of hopeful note there is that you also it's absolutely possible to develop a self-validation practice wherein you develop the skills to validate yourself and your own experiences. That takes time, because, as you said, for most of us, it wasn't modeled frequently. We are a very critical culture. We're very focused on solving problems. We're not as focused on accepting people's reactions to problems or their reactions to their environments. And you can develop it. It takes a lot of work and intention. It's possible. I've, you know, I talk about how to do it. But another promising note there is that, in my experience, the better you get at validating others, the more easy it is for you to validate yourself. Those two things just go hand in hand. Once you start working that muscle and seeing people through that lens, it does turn inward as well.

Okay, that's helpful and hopeful. Okay, I want this episode to be super practical for parents, and so I wanted to kind of work through the validation ladder. Can you start by just, I mean, obviously we know we can picture a ladder, but it has a specific, you know, tripartite structure. Can you describe that to us so we can have that image in our minds as we move through the steps?

Sure, sure. As I said at the at the top of the hour, yeah, validation is composed of kind of mindfulness, understanding and empathy, and we broke that down. The validation ladder has eight skills that map on to one or more of those qualities. At the bottom of the ladder, the most basic skills we talk about are these two kinds of mindfulness sub skills. And using these two skills will help you show that you are engaged, you are mindful, and most importantly, that you are not being judgmental. Okay, so that's the aim of those two skills. It doesn't matter whether or not I like or agree with the person across from me, I should, at the bare minimum, always be able to remain mindful and to project that in some way. Again, validation is communication so we're focused on the communication of that awareness or that attentiveness, okay. And we've got two skills there. A step up from there is understanding. We have three ways of communicating understanding in a way that actually also projects mindfulness. If you're able to access those skills, great. Now, if you really get it, if you're present, you understand and you feel, you empathize, then you can use our top three kind of empathy skills that not only communicate mindfulness and understanding, but show that you care. You feel it. You're there. It's as though the other person is looking at themselves in a mirror when they look at you, that is the ultimate kind of experience. And that's the structure of the ladder. And again, it kind of moves from very accessible to you've got to really feel it to be able to communicate these skills. And also, they get trickier.

Yeah. Okay, thank you for that description, and we're going to talk about what are each of the skills within that ladder. And a couple of things that you emphasize in the book that I want to make sure come out here are there the sub skills within each of the three segments are interchangeable in terms of their placement on the ladder. It's not that you know the skill number one in mindfulness is easier than skill number two in mindfulness. It's within mindfulness which is the easier of the skills, so that the levels refer to the categories rather than to the individual skills themselves. And then the second point that I think is important is, the higher you go, the harder you fall. And if you fail, if we fail, what should we do?

So fortunately, there's not much at stake with the mindfulness skills, like you're not likely to strike out terribly by attending non judgmentally to someone. If you fail in your attempts to try, maybe one of the higher validation skills. If you really wipe out and the person is like, no, that's not what's going on for me, you can always go back to those mindfulness skills. That is what we do. That is the process of developing these skills. It is this, this series of wipeouts and then returning and resetting and trying again, and that is how you hone it.

Yeah, okay, great, all right, so let's start at the bottom of the ladder, then with our mindfulness skills. And there are two of those attend and copying. What is attending? Hopefully some of this through our conversation.

Yeah, so attending is just again, paying attention, non-judgmentally, and projecting that in some way to communicate that quality. You've got two ways, a couple of ways to go about it. I'll focus on two. The first is to play this little game in your head where you're trying to solve as someone is speaking to you, you're trying to figure out, what is this person's point? Like, what are they trying to say? Why does it matter to them? What's going on here? And then, crucially, how could I do a better job of making that point? Now that sounds judgmental, and that's not where we're going here. Instead, it's almost, if you've ever seen like a late-night host, or like an Oprah Winfrey, these folks interviewing people, they are completely focused on the guest and trying to pull out the most concise, interesting version of this person's story that they can. They're kind of helping them in that way that is how to attend you want to you're trying to join the person in creating their message, rather than just sitting back and going like, this is how I'm going to react to this. This is what I'm going to say instead. Here's my rebuttal. So rather than fixating on what you're going to say, you focus on what they're trying to say. You don't have to even communicate that. It's just a game you're playing in your head. It's like a little solitaire, and you're just kind of ping ponging as you're listening between like, what's their point? How can I sharpen it? What's the point here? Why does this matter? Let me sharpen it. Let me sharpen it. And that's if you do that, you will naturally find yourself asking questions, doing things like this naturally, that again, demonstrate that engagement. Okay, so that's the first part.

Is a well-placed for you.

The other important quality to attending is non verbal’s and nowhere did this become more obvious to me, like the importance of non-verbal’s, as when we went into lockdown and all of a sudden so much of our communication was limited to zoom video conferencing, everything else. And this was before we all had good cameras and like stuff like that, right? This was a really crude day. Yeah, right, right. It was really crude. And we lost. You could feel the loss in connection, and part of what we were responding to in those moments was the lack of this very critical way of communicating, and that is through body language, nodding, eye contact. Eye contact is so tricky over VC, because you're often not looking at the person you're looking slightly down, even hand gestures right, just little ways of showing momentum or enthusiasm, leaning forward. All of that is compromise and yet we know that those simple non-verbals, nodding, eye contact, gestures, proximity, kind of being closer to all of those functions to increase a sense of connection. So that's attending, yeah, it's that combination of non-verbals and asking yourself those questions

Right and so as we're asking ourselves that question. How could I make this person's point for them? I think we may end up asking them questions to further understand them, and I think that's the part that's really important, right? Because when we're in a sort of typical disagreement with somebody, we might ask a question, but it's sort of a it's not really a question for looking to understand and answer. It's a question for to make a point, right? Well, you possibly think x when I actually said y, right? That's not a question that's going to further our understanding of this person's position.

That is absolutely right. That's right, that's right, yeah.

Okay, that's attending, and then the next rung of the ladder, still within our initial mindfulness space, is copying. Tell us about copying.

Copying is one of my favorite little skills, because it's so freaking easy and it also sounds really bizarre, but once you start practicing it intentionally, you will see the power in it. So copying is what it sounds like. I want you to repeat the words somebody uses, or just kind of echo back or mirror what somebody has said, that is a version of copying, you’re copying their words or you can copy their ways. You can if they cross their arms, you cross their arms. They bring a hand to the chin. You bring a hand to the chin. I know what you're thinking. That sounds incredibly mechanical and weird. And here's the thing, guys, we all do this naturally. We are hard wired to copy as babies, little babies copy their caregivers’ facial expressions, and in so doing, copying activates what's known as mirror neurons, we are actually able to mirror or experience some of what the other person is feeling through that mimicry. This is critical, because, as I said before, working those basic validation skills like these two mindfulness skills, helps you develop the understanding and empathy you might need to validate at a higher level. And this is one of the way, a very obvious way in which to do so. And I just, I could geek out on the research on this all day, like it's so fun all the different experiments they've done of having, you know, researchers copy or not copy participants without them knowing and yeah, I will make the point that you naturally copy people that you are attracted to, that you want to impress, that you find interesting. We do that by design. We're less likely to do it when we dislike, disagree, are angry with the other person, and in these moments or we experience them as other outside, these are the moments when copying will serve you best, because those are the moments when connection is often not there and most needed.

Yeah, and I want to sort of dig in just a tiny bit on the sort of copying the words, if you're saying, you know, I'm feeling really tired, and I say, oh, you're feeling really tired, but that sort of rote copying of the exact words you said is probably not getting you to where, where you want to go, right? So how should we what should we be doing instead of the actual, you know, repeating of the words, right?

Just there at the end of your sentence you said as type of rote copying is probably not we're going for it, right? And then I said right, right back at you. Okay, I'm plucking out a single word that you said and I am repeating it. I'm not going verbatim, you know, repeating exactly what you said. I'm also not doing the infamous I hear you saying you're frustrated, which, for some reason like that really gained steam in, like, the 80’s, or something, I don't know. And now I work with couples, and one partner will say to the other, well, I hear you saying, you know you're you feel overwhelmed. And there's just something about it that's like, I don't there's something invalidating about it. It's not that.

Well, there's also, I mean, if it's coming out in that tone, there's also some attending skills missing there, right? Because the person has not actually been attending, they've been listening and thinking, how dare they say that they're feeling overwhelmed, or whatever the thing is, right?

Yeah, that's right. But the point with copying isn't to make a huge production or draw attention away from the other person. I'm just trying to signal attunement, and I do that by, like I said, plucking out a word, especially if it's like a rich adjective that the other person used, or an emotional adjective, frustration, disappointment. Those are the like, the real power points not power point, you know what I mean.

Yes, yeah, okay, cool. All right. That's within our sort of bottom rung of our validation ladder. Let's move into the middle step, set of skills on the ladder, right the understanding skill set. And we already touched on contextualize a bit when we talked about, yeah, given where you know the people that you listen to, the news media that you that you get your information from, I can see why you would think this thing that scientific research says is potentially not the truth. Given all the things that are happening in your life, child, and you're, you know, you know you didn't get a nap this morning, and you're hungry and all the other things that were happening, it makes sense that you would be frustrated, feel frustrated that the cracker broke. We’ve had those examples of contextualizing. What else do we need to know about contextualizing?

Yeah, contextualizing is really helpful. By contextualizing, I mean you're seeing someone's reaction in the moment, and it doesn't immediately make sense to you, all right, so I’ve given the example of if I am at a PTA meeting and we're sitting in a classroom, and then a door slams down the hall and two thirds of the parent’s duck under their chairs as though a bomb had gone off. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I would have a hard time validating why they I mean, it was a loud noise, but we're in like California, it was clearly a door. What's going on, now when two thirds of a group did that exact same thing when I was teaching at the VA, a group for veterans who had just returned from active duty, that behavior made total sense to me, for those folks, even though they, I think, were embarrassed and there was just a sense of disappointment, almost palpably in that room. For those folks, of course, their behavior made sense because I understood the larger context, and that's where contextualizing is helpful. It's helpful in making sense of a reaction that doesn't immediately make sense in the moment, given just what you have. Now is that clear enough? I should ask before I moved on into next.

Yes. No, I think it is. And there are a couple of things that I thought were particularly helpful about contextualizing in viewing it as it's the opposite of you should be able to right. You are old enough to be able to do x. You should be able to do x, which compares our child to another child, which compares our child to a theoretical child who can do this, right? And your VA, example, you're a grown man, you can hear that this is a door slamming. Why are you under the table? Right? This comparing our these people to somebody who has healed, or who doesn't have a hard time hearing a door slam. It doesn't help the person. Yes,

I'm really glad you mentioned that point, because it gives me just a split second here to make another point that I really think is so important for parents, which is that we need to drop the you're too old. You know, you're eight years old, you're too old to be having tantrums. You're too old for this, you're too old for that. So and so doesn't do that. Does your friend, you know, Mikey, punch people when they're and that message is invalidating and it's shaming. As an adult, I would be so hurt if someone said to me, Caroline, you're 40 something years old. You're not exercising every day. I mean, what's wrong with you? You've been hearing this, you know, all the research. I mean, all your friends do it. What's wrong with you? Right and when we think about it in those terms, it's very hurtful. Yes, the behavior might not be effective in the moment and you can speak to that, you that's fine to target, I can say yeah, Mikey, punching people doesn't work. I can understand why you do it. I can understand that you're frustrated. I think that's a valid emotion. It may have even been modeled for you. I understand your brother punches you all the time. I can see why that would be a natural response to this situation. The problem is it doesn't work here. Let's talk about what you can do instead, so I can validate the valid which is the emotion and where that behavior comes from, that there is a context in which it made sense, but that is not now.

Yeah, and I think you and I have some slight differences in our perspective on this information which we will get to possibly after our conversation ends. And I think you know, where you see, this isn't the moment for this behavior. I see, what is the need that is driving this? And how can I help you to meet that need? We can't so that you don't, you know you don't want to hit because your need is met, because, by and large, we don't hit when our needs are met.

That's exactly what I'm looking for. There's a bit of what we call functional analysis that is inherent in contextualizing I'm looking at, like, where is this coming from, and what function does it hurt serve? Okay, if you want this person to understand that they hurt you? How can you deliver that message more effectively? Because the behavior of punching them doesn't get that need met. Now, it's a valid need, and I'm going to validate that. However, I'm not going to say it's cool for you to punch him or even that's okay. I get it. No, it's not okay. I get it and it's not okay, but it is. You do need to get that need met, so let's find something that is okay and that scratches that itch and that gets your need met right? Very nuanced, right? We're really into it, but I think this is important, because this is where this stuff gets so tricky in parenting, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. And as a tool to help us get there, it reminded me of Alfie Kohn's words always assume the best possible intention consistent with the observed behavior, which sounds like a mouthful, right? But doing is, is we're contextualizing. That's what he's encouraging us to do. Yeah,

Yeah, that's exactly, right?

Yeah. Okay, all right, cool, that's the first of the understanding, the second of the understanding skills is equalizing, which is the idea that anyone in your shoes would do the same thing, which is a core element of Dr Kristin Neff work on self-compassion I think so. I'm sort of curious. I don't know what you're going to say about this. Is it right to say that we should contextualize or equalize, but not both?

Yeah, you typically don't need both. So equalizing is just the person's reaction, their response makes perfect sense in that moment, given what you have right or given what you know about the situation, you don't really need to abstract anything. A parent raising concerns about the fact that the class, the teaching is all going to be remote this year at a PTA meeting, that makes perfect sense to me. I don't need to extract anything. It's not like they hit under their chair or I'm like, that doesn't fit here. When a person's reaction just is understandable and immediately, to me, I can do that beautiful of course, anyone in your shoes would feel that way. And I want to clarify that equalizing isn't any better or stronger than contextualizing, as you had mentioned before. These are all just understanding skills. It kind of just depends on the situation, which one you can pull from to convey understanding. Equalizing you would use when you just immediately get it. It makes sense.

Yeah okay, great. And then the third idea within the understanding skill set is proposing, right sharing an idea about what you think the other person is thinking or feeling or wanting to do based on what they've said already in the conversation, and what you know about their situation. And I think this is where we start to get into some of the like, I don't know if I can do this. What if I get it wrong, kind of skills. What do you want us to know about proposing?

Okay, so first of all, I want you all to know that this is like a Jedi mind trick. When you get good at proposing you all of a sudden have a, this seamless way of connecting deeply with people and quickly with people. And it is just so beautiful. I want to, like, wrap this in a gift and give it to everybody, because it is, it's so powerful to be able to say what somebody else might have been thinking or feeling and articulate that before they even did right?

Can you give us an example? How can parents think? Oh, yeah, now I know what proposing is.

Yeah. Let me think of a good. Okay, this is, a heavy example, but I'll use it. I was treated for breast cancer just shortly before publishing this book, and I lost my hair, and my daughter has struggled a lot with the change in my appearance, and obviously with the whole experience, and to her, I feel very different than I was before. I feel like a different person to her, and she attributes that change to me losing my hair. And she'll say things like, mommy, can you just go back to being the mom that you were, which hits me very deeply and is painful. And to be honest, it's something I really I find myself at times, pushing back against or wanting to push back against, and say, no, I am your mom. I still love you the same, nothing's changed. And I have said that at times ineffectively, and correct it afterward. But if I propose here to say because nobody else sees what she sees, and this is kind of maddening for her, like everyone acts like nothing has changed, but it's changed. And if I say things are different. In a way, it's like you're and she understands the concept of mourning, but it's like you're mourning somebody and nobody else sees it. And in that situation, she hasn't said that as a child, I imagine she hasn't even conceptualized it in those terms. But if I am able to see that, and if it's accurate, if it kind of fits with what she's experiencing, that is a profound moment of like you get it, you are able to put words to something and describe something that I was struggling, not only do you not judge me for it or feel criticized, you know, or hurt by what I'm saying, you see me better as a result. And so that is an extreme example, but I think it kind of shows what we're going for, or the potential there. Proposing doesn't have to always be this huge, you know, insight, it could, you know, if someone's yawning, you could say, oh, you must be tired, like, on some level, that's proposing. But that's kind of the potential of that skill.

Yeah. And I wonder if it for you, is so because it really seems like it is something that hits you right when she says that I'm wondering if it's a well, there's part of me that hasn't changed, and I still love you, and I still want to show up as your mom. And also, there's part of me that really has changed, and some of those things I see as learning and growth, and I like it, and some of it like I kind of just wish I could go back to how I was before.

Oh my gosh, absolutely, especially with, like, the physical stuff, right? Like, yeah, this is not how I'm used to looking or feeling or any number of things. Like, it's weird. It's totally weird. Yeah, happy, sorry.

Please don't apologize. I'm grateful for the gift of sharing that with us. And one thing I want to touch on is sometimes our proposals fall flat. And you have this idea in your book of a dial where there's, at one end of the dial, there's an idea, and at the other end of the dial there's, like, a fact, like, I'm going to state this as if it is actually true, and that we can use that dial right? And just now, I kind of made a proposal to you, right? I proposed how you might be feeling, and I began with, I wonder if, because I we don't know each other that well, and I don't know if that's true for you, right? I dialed that down pretty far. And I think that can help us to not fall flat. What do we do if we do fall flat?

Proposing is one of the skills that you have to be prepared to strike out on, because if you are going to get good at this, it takes a lot of trial and error, and the error can feel we feel unseen in the moment, right? If I was to respond negatively to that, to be like, no, that's not accurate like Jen, what are you talking about? Like you're going to feel like judged, and, you know, everything else. And our inclination when we get it wrong is to pull back. We tell ourselves things like, I don't want to make it worse. I've screwed this up or they don't get me right, we just get defensive and we shut down. Worst thing you can do, what you need to do instead, is go back to those attending skills and just start playing that game in your head again. Of what's this person's point? How could I do a better job of making that point? Because if you get it wrong, then you clearly don't actually understand. And that is what you know, the understanding skills are intended to communicate. If you missed it, you got to work on your understanding. Here's the thing, most people, nine out of 10 times, welcome the opportunity to be understood. They appreciate you putting in that legwork and not disengaging. And as painful as it can feel in the moment, it's just stay in the game, and you can then propose again later, once you get more information.

Yeah, okay, all right, awesome. We are getting close on time, and we've got to run. I'm going to set the stage here, and then I'm going to kind of let you pick how you pick how you go into this, right? Within the empathy skill set, we've got taking action, which is taking action on other people's behalf, we've got emoting, sharing how you're feeling about what the other person is sharing, and then finally disclosing so validating the other person's worth by demonstrating that you get their experience by sharing. Sharing something similar that may have happened to you. What do you want to emphasize that? Do you think is really important, especially for parents in their relationship with their kids, as well as with their co-parents?

Yeah, I think probably one of the straw of those three, the most effective with children and teens is often disclosure. If especially, I mean, and so now with young kids, they idolize you, right? And if you're able to say, like, when I was your age, I had a similar reaction, and did I ever tell you about the time I didn't make the soccer team and x, y and z? If you can do that in a way that doesn't trump their experience.

Yes, that’s really important.

Really important, and that doesn't minimize it because, for some reason, as parents, we really and I was so disappointed to realize this as a parent, I did have the urge to have the like back in my day, back in my day, we didn't have computers. You had to use a phone like.

And only one person could talk at once.

Yeah, a busy signal and like and when I disclose in those ways, I'm not actually showing that I understand what my agenda there is to kind of like grieve or say, you've got it so well, you've got it so good. I should say similarly, I don't want the conversation to become about me. These are, this is a I very much see validation as an exercise in mindfulness. You are attending to the other person. If it becomes all about you, you've lost your focus. This is a very effective skill, but just again, the higher we go up the ladder, the harder it hurts when you fall. And if you screw this one up, you lose the connection for a moment. You can regain it by attending, but that's a possibility. Emoting is also a really important one. I just want to do a shout out to my dad out there. I think expressing vulnerable emotions is okay. You need to obviously not be leaning on your children for emotional support by any means, but young boys seeing real, vulnerable emotion expressed in adult men, helps them feel seen and safe in their own emotions. Okay, this is very important. We know that validation from fathers on their sons, in particular, their son's emotions, is very important and can be preventative in terms of mental health problems.

All right. Thank you so much for being here Dr Fleck. It's really been an honor to hear more about your work. And I know you and I have some differing opinions, and I've shared with you that I'm going to record a conclusion for after this episode, and that will sort of share some of the ways in which our approaches to using this information that I think is so helpful, are going to support parents. And I wonder, just, can you wrap up by telling us? Where can we find the book? Where can we find more information about you if we want to learn more?

Absolutely, my book is available wherever you get books, Amazon, audibles, Barnes and Noble. You name it, you'll find it. My website has bonus material from behind the book that I'm just publishing, I think, today, that's exciting. You can find me at drcarolinefleck.com, I'm on Instagram and tiktok again, drcarolinefleck.com Yeah, that should be it.

Thank you so much. Dig into that I appreciate. It really was.

Thank you so much, and thank you for reading, and have a great day.

You too. Bye. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, I found tremendous value in Dr. Fleck's explanations of validation in the first two parts of her book, I'd like to share some thoughts about the third part, which focuses on behavioral change and why I take a different approach. Dr. Fleck is a therapist who works with a therapeutic approach called dialectical behavior therapy, and this helps clients learn how to manage their emotions, improve relationships and tolerate difficult situations by helping them to identify problematic behaviors and replace them with more effective ones. Tools like DBT serve an important purpose in clinical settings where adults have specifically sought help for behaviors that are causing them distress. The question that I'd like to explore is whether these same approaches are appropriate as first line strategies with children. I know that from an outside perspective, therapeutic approaches can seem a bit like a menu where all of the options are equally valid, but I see them as tools that each have a role in helping us depending on what we're struggling with. As you probably know from listening to the podcast, I believe that understanding our needs should always be the first strategy we try. Most of the time we engage in behavior because we're trying to meet our needs, and our kids are doing that too. If we jump right to trying to change anyone's behavior, whether it's ours or other’s children, without considering our needs, we're missing something important. An example I often use is a child jumping on the couch. In my view, we have to understand why the child is jumping on the couch, if they're jumping because they have needs for joy and play and movement, and we're feeling worried the couch might break, we can ask if they'd be willing to jump on the bed, if that's more structurally sound, or maybe run up and down outside. But if they're jumping on the couch because we've told them not to do it before, because they have a need for connection, and they know that jumping on the couch is a reliable way to get our attention, then asking them to jump on the bed won't work if we have a need for mental space and ease. We might see if they'd like a hug or for us to read a story to them, and then both of our needs get met, and neither one of us has to have our behavior changed to meet the other one's needs. Tools like DBT absolutely have a place in supporting adults mental health. There are times when we can see what our need is and we can't meet it using the tools we have available to us. We might know that we want our child to learn how to explore risk on their own, but when it actually comes down to seeing them climb a tree, we can't take it. There's a mismatch between our values and goals for our children and our ability to live in alignment with those values because of our thoughts and beliefs.

DBT is really useful in those kinds of situations, because it helps us to change the way we think about them. But here's the thing, when you sign up to do DBT, you know what you're getting into. You're consenting to have your thoughts changed by someone else because you've tried to meet your needs first, and it hasn't helped. I think this gets much more problematic when we're thinking about using these tools with our kids, who, for the most part, have not consented to having these tools used on them. I think it's especially misplaced to use these tools as a first line strategy to deal with children's behavior, because we're essentially saying the only thing I care about is that your behavior changes. DBT is a behaviorist approach, which means the behavior is the only thing that matters. When the behavior changes, the therapy has been successful. Dr. Fleck explains that she believes this herself. She says, of course, there needs to be consequences for problematic behavior. I could refer to all of the parenting research that substantiates this point. But I don't need to, because if you spend any time around kids, then you know that they're like little Jurassic Park dinosaurs who will destroy the park and probably kill you when they realize the fence is off. Consequences, punishments, contingencies, whatever you call them, are important. Period. The question isn't about “whether or not you use them, it's how you use them”, and when I read this, I almost went cross eyed. How did a book on validation end up here? There is one form of punishment that Dr. Fleck won't ever consider giving a child, and that is emotional invalidation. You should always validate their emotions, but not their problematic behavior. As an example, she says we shouldn't say to our child, this isn't something to cry about. We should say it's okay to be sad and upset.

It's not okay to scream to me, this is another version of I love you. I just don't like your behavior. That sounds so logical from the parent’s perspective and so maddeningly patronizing from the child's perspective. And I noticed an interesting contradiction here when we talked Dr. Fleck wisely pointed out that telling a child you should be able to do whatever task we've decided they should be able to do, which compares them to a theoretical child who can do the thing we're asking creates shame and is invalidating. Yet in the book, she uses an example about her daughter, Havana's hair brushing, essentially saying you're old enough to brush your own hair because Havana has arms and a brush. This approach seems to contradict her point about contextualization. Sometimes a child might be physically able to do something, but still need support because they had a tough day at school, or need connection. It's similar to how we would appreciate our partner taking out the trash for us after a difficult day at work, even though we're physically capable of doing it ourselves, and it's a task we normally do when we make ourselves the judge of whether the child's behavior is acceptable or not, we put ourselves in a position of power over them. Dr. Fleck was trained in Dr. Alan Kazdin’s method. He was the director of the Yale parenting center and child conduct clinic, and he uses, you guessed it, behaviorist-based ideas to shape children's behavior. Excessively excited praise when the child does what the parent says, rewarding small steps toward the behavior you want to see with tokens that they can cash in for a treat, time outs, it's all in Kazdin’s method, and Dr. Fleck is right there with him, as long as we don't invalidate children's emotions, all the other behaviors-based tools are fair game. Now I'm not debating that there isn't decades of research out there that speaks to the effectiveness of these methods. There is, but we have to ask effectiveness at what is changing our children's behavior our only goal, if so, behaviorist-based tools are the ones to use. But if we care about our children's inner experience, then we're kind of on shaky ground here, because behaviorism doesn't take this into account. Behaviorism is about changing behavior, although we might see this as manipulation.

Dr. Fleck addresses this directly, but by saying that quote these days, I think most of us see technologies like artificial intelligence as a greater threat to the enslavement of the human race. But I still want to address the behaviorism equals manipulation concern as it pertains to validation, because it comes up from time to time when it does, I reiterate that validation is the authentic communication of acceptance. I agree with this point. I think Dr. Fleck's work to explain how to authentically communicate acceptance is masterful, but is it really then acceptance if we use the connection, we've built through validation to try to change the child's behavior. Let's take an example, right? Let's imagine that you yell at your kid after you've already promised them that you're not going to yell at them anymore, and you and I get on the phone so that you can tell me about it. I could pay close attention to you as you explain what happened, and they say and then say something like, oh my goodness, you were sleep deprived, and your partner worked the baby up early, and your older child had a cold and you yelled at them for not getting dressed fast enough and ofcourse you did, and I'm copying you right. Think back to the skills that we learned in the conversation. Any parent would have lost it in that situation. Equalizing skill, you aren't a crappy parent. You're an awesome parent having a crappy day. Do you worry that you won't ever be able to stop yelling so there's a tentative proposal about what might be going on for you, and maybe I wait for your answer, and then I might say I once yelled at my daughter in a situation like that where I didn't get enough sleep, and she did something really small and I just lost it. Does it happen often when you don't get enough sleep?

And I'm disclosing something about myself and then returning the conversation to you as I'm supposed to using these validation tools. And then I could go on to say, Now, are you feeling good about our connection? I know I am. So how about we discuss the reward system I'm going to set up to get you to stop yelling at your kids each hour that you don't yell at them. You can put a cotton ball in a jar, and at the end of the week, you can exchange 50 cotton balls for a trip to Starbucks. How are you feeling about our connection? Now, maybe you're wondering, what on earth gives me the right to decide how your behavior should change? Maybe you're feeling pissed off that I use the connection to get close to you and then set up the reward system, which now puts me in a position of judging your behavior. Are you likely to want to share how you're feeling with me again in this method, it doesn't matter why you're yelling. It doesn't matter if your child's behavior reminded you of a traumatic experience you had in childhood, or that you're completely overwhelmed at work, or that you're neurodivergent. All that matters after we've validated you is that your behavior changes to meet my standard, when we look at it from the perspective of two adults in the interaction, it doesn't look so great, does it? It only seems acceptable when we're talking about children's behavior, because we're so used to using our power over them, and let's not forget why it's appropriate to use our power over them. If I annoyed you by using our connection and to then try and shape your behavior as I coached you, you could just decide, hey, no more coaching from Jen for me, and you might regret that things have turned out the way they did between us, but it's not like you and I are in a super close relationship, but with your kids, it's another story. Remember from the episodes on time out that those researchers say it's because our children look to us for love and care, as well as privileges like screen time and being taken to activities they enjoy, that we can and should use that relationship to shape their behavior. If you decide you don't like my coaching, you go find another coach or talk to a friend or just try and figure it out yourself.

You're in a consent-based relationship with me, and if you don't consent to work with me, the work doesn't happen if you go to a DBT therapist, you know what you're signing up for. You consent to the treatment plan. Your kid can't go and find themselves another parent. Your kid has to figure out how to still get love and care from you, and most often, they do that by hiding the parts of themselves that you don't like and you don't want to see and showing more of the parts of themselves that you do, which is the what the behaviors say is a good thing. But I work with thousands of parents who have been profoundly hurt by that shaping. And it's one thing to use those tools not knowing how much they can hurt, which is mostly what our parents did, right? It's entirely another thing to know that and to use them anyway. Most likely, if we're thinking about using these tools with our kids, we don't have their consent, and if we do tell them what we're doing, we're probably explaining the parts about rewards they're going to like, but probably not the part about how we want them to hide the parts of themselves we don't want to see anymore. Because if we did that, would they consent to participate? What should we do once we've created all that good will in the relationship through validation? Because this is the part three of the book that I wanted to see. The book helps us to build this amazing connection through validation, and I was hoping we could then use that connection to understand each other's needs, because that's where we actually get to the root of why the child is behaving in the way they are. They're doing it to meet a need, whatever it is. We're wishing they wouldn't do they're doing it to meet a need. When we see that behavior and we wish it wasn't happening, we can make a choice. Do I use behaviorist-based tools to just get them to stop doing it, or do I try to understand why they're doing it, what need they're trying to meet, and then help them to meet that need in a way that also meets my need. And if that answer isn't fully clear to us, what would we hope that other adults would do with us? Dr. Fleck says that quote, I, for one wish more people would try to manipulate me with acceptance and validation, but I for one do not wish that there's also a chapter in the book on how to shape your partner's behavior to increase the amount of work they do around the house, and if your partner has already flat out refused to help you, then I don't really see an ethical problem with using these tools to try to get them to collaborate a bit more. But what if your partner finds the book on your nightstand and decides to shape your behavior to be better aligned with what they want without your consent? Would you want that to happen? If the answer is that you wouldn't want your partner to do it to you, then you might want to think twice about doing it to your partner or your child.

I highly recommend the first two parts of Dr. Fleck’s book. I'm already using what I learned in it in my personal relationships as well as my coaching. The third part contains techniques that may be helpful in specific situations, but I really do encourage you to consider how these approaches align with your values about parent child relationships and consent before you apply them. Thanks so much for being here with me in this episode today, and don't forget that Dr. Fleck’s book on validation, as she mentioned, can be bought where all books are sold.

I'm a Your Parenting Mojo fan, and I hope you enjoy the show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful, you can donate to help Jen produce more content like this. Just go to the episode page that Jen mentioned. Thanks for listening.