When I was in my mid-20s I started a support group in the King County Jail in downtown Seattle for what were called "victim offenders", which were women experiencing domestic violence who's abusers had manipulated the convergence of three-strikes law and mandated felony arrests for dv calls to get them incarcerated for *being* the abuser. Many of these women dealt with chronic addiction and would inevitably get clean while inside because the structure enforced by incarceration protected them from their own tendency to reach for substances in the face of (understandable) discomfort. I spent a lot of time talking about boundaries and structure with them because that's how I understood it (and myself) at that time, but through my journey as a parent I've realized it's less about an internal sense of structure, per se, and more about being able to sit with uncomfortable feelings.
In some ways, becoming a single mom when my kids were 5 and 9 was a benefit in this learning, just because I *couldn't* helicopter my kids. There weren't enough hours in my day. But I also had to confront the learning I'd done growing up about what I thought of as discipline but was really disassociation. I had to learn to sit with my *own* discomfort when my kids were hurting, which made me want to fix things, shut them up, tell them to toughen up, anything just to make my own distress to go away. I had to learn to just accompany them when they were experiencing hard emotions so they knew they didn't have to be alone without scrambling to make the hard emotions stop.
They're now 17 and 22 and have experienced their fare share of mental health challenges. But they're remarkably emotionally intelligent and I think my getting out of the way so they could develop those skills helped that reality blossom.
Love this, thank you, as always, for your insights Asha. I'm also curious about sitting with my own hard feelings with and in front of my kids. I think we talk a lot about withstanding their hard feelings these days, but what about our own? I bet your kids got some wise modeling in that, too.
Well, I'd say I've been imperfect at how I've dealt with my own hard emotions in front of my kids. The important piece for my relationship with them, and for their own development, I think, was being willing to acknowledge when I didn't do a good job and apologize to them when I acted out or overstepped or anything. Feeling like you've done wrong and will be punished for it in some way is SUPER uncomfortable. I felt that way all the time as a kid and it made me lie like a rug. Modeling accountability to my kids without fear has helped them learn that it's okay to screw up and own it. You won't lose love, at least not in my house.
Love this so much: "Modeling accountability to my kids without fear has helped them learn that it's okay to screw up and own it." There's SO MUCH VALUE in doing this, and for so many reasons. Thank you for sharing your story!
I have been wondering what schools are doing right now to help kids think about personal and social health and responsibility in dangerous times.
The principles you discuss here in the interview were well understood also when I was teaching middle-school at the turn of the century and earlier as I was raising my own kids. Ideas like not micromanaging their lives, letting them manage failures and mistakes, knowing feeling hurt or angry are okay, finding people to talk to rather than keeping things bottled up...
Even then, in less trying times than the present, we were trying to go beyond this with middle-schoolers, at least, by working with them regularly together about living in a healthy and responsible way in community with a lot of variation potentially in closeness to various crises.
I know my students were intimately concerned with what was theirs to do in the world in the moment, how to ask for help, how to offer help, how to protect, how to be safe themselves...
That's where their nightmares were landing them. I would think this would be even more true today.
We had regularly scheduled sessions for discussing these sort of things explicitly. I usually had a group of 25 eighth graders maybe every couple of weeks. We divided kids by grade in this way, discussing the same things, but the conversation would tend to be different for eleven year olds than for fourteen year olds.
Thank you. Your response makes me wonder: what is truly unprecedented about these times and what isn't? What do we already know how to do well and what are the new practices, teachings, spaces we need to adapt?
This is such a good point. I think there are quite a few things our generation of parents has "forgotten" about raising kids, because we've been getting such strong, fear-mongering messages telling us we need to do things differently. There are certainly exceptions, where the science or other influences have nudged us in a healthier direction (less physical punishment, a shift to more authoritative/less authoritarian parenting style, more openly talking to kids about things like sex and race, etc)... but parents used to be pretty good in terms of giving kids independence and letting them take healthy risks!
Different crises become more urgent at different times.
The big impetus a quarter century ago to be really intentional and constructive about school culture was Columbine.
Of course there had been violence in schools before, and in my long-ago youth as well. But Columbine brought the issue of violence into every school, the need to stand up for others, not just in your own little circle but also flagging brewing issues to adults who could intervene- the destructiveness of codes of silence and sweeping things under the rug.
Immigrant communities and marginalized people in schools plus their families have long been at greater risk than some of the rest of the student body, but the extent and stakes are outsized now in many places.
Issues like extracurriculars or dealing with perfectionism or dealing with frustration and and anger or listening rather than mostly talking are still issues, certainly, but for a lot of people there are particularly urgent issues too at the bottom of the Maslow pyramid, life and death sort of things that also stir the waters at school. Even our kids who are not particularly scared for themselves are keenly aware of how scared others are and how unfair it all seems.
And every time there is significant sudden job loss there is a big impact on families relying on those sectors for income. That just hits different communities at different times depending on the occupational landscape.
Great - and powerful - advice. Thanks for sharing this Courtney. Maybe teaching in public school helped me parent. I strove to help kids become independent learners; I learned just how capable and creative young people can be.
It was parenting mantra: I want my kid to be a thinking, independent person.
his really resonated with us — especially the idea that small, intentional shifts in how we speak to children can have a powerful long-term impact. We just published our first blog post at Everyday Good Studio on this very theme: why raising kind kids is a radical act in today’s world. If it’s of interest, we’d love to share it: https://everydaygoodstudio.substack.com/p/why-raising-kind-kids-is-a-radical?r=64gudu
Thanks again for such thoughtful work — it’s encouraging to be part of a community of people thinking deeply about how we raise the next generation.
Ok, in that thankfulness is part of the human psyche/mind, in this, of course, there is consideration, right? In thankful consideration of the journey of lifelong experience during each day, and thank you for the posted article: "Raising kids in a bleak, infuriating times," - ( https://courtney.substack.com/p/raising-kids-in-bleak-infuriating/ ).
How's the relational, to "*get it," in regard to just & fair peacefulness needed in daily experience? For example, a *perspective is a "take" *or termed, to "get it," a "take away" of something to discern or to have discerned. This could elicit, by the natural language usage content, "what is that? - 'word salad," or so it could seem by opinion.
There is the term, "human equality," however, that "truth," only has "true principles,"
and "falsehood," does have, "true *and false *or* only false sets of principles," and, that has logical in compass needed for ethical aesthetics to have expressed that.
The fact of inheritance, has that it is ethically legal to uphold, human equality, human dignity, human freedom, and human rights that includes the freedom of human non-vocal and vocal expression/speech, as a true principle,
*however, there is the freedom of inner-self or termed, the human thought in human discernment, and the realized to have pondered by one's own individual human "psyche" is the human mind of higher reasoning human consciousness, of the individual, of the identity can be by the "Birth certificate" as a "credential" or some other verification of this of the "name," of the human being person, an individual that has human equality, human dignity, human freedom and human rights as a *state of being during the daily life experience on lifelong "earthly" life, and the "hereafter" is subsequently after last breath of life of the human being person.
There term of freedom of expression for needed help that is *from transcendent beyond the natural, and *from transcendent from beyond the *human condition, is expressed in the English vernacular, "God," and the term, "God given name," is historical.
In this, thank you again for your consideration of this, and there is the needed fair and just peacefulness of the human psyche/mind and hopes of good circumstances of the human right of personal space to be in the state of just peacefulness.
I have so many thoughts. Let's see...
When I was in my mid-20s I started a support group in the King County Jail in downtown Seattle for what were called "victim offenders", which were women experiencing domestic violence who's abusers had manipulated the convergence of three-strikes law and mandated felony arrests for dv calls to get them incarcerated for *being* the abuser. Many of these women dealt with chronic addiction and would inevitably get clean while inside because the structure enforced by incarceration protected them from their own tendency to reach for substances in the face of (understandable) discomfort. I spent a lot of time talking about boundaries and structure with them because that's how I understood it (and myself) at that time, but through my journey as a parent I've realized it's less about an internal sense of structure, per se, and more about being able to sit with uncomfortable feelings.
In some ways, becoming a single mom when my kids were 5 and 9 was a benefit in this learning, just because I *couldn't* helicopter my kids. There weren't enough hours in my day. But I also had to confront the learning I'd done growing up about what I thought of as discipline but was really disassociation. I had to learn to sit with my *own* discomfort when my kids were hurting, which made me want to fix things, shut them up, tell them to toughen up, anything just to make my own distress to go away. I had to learn to just accompany them when they were experiencing hard emotions so they knew they didn't have to be alone without scrambling to make the hard emotions stop.
They're now 17 and 22 and have experienced their fare share of mental health challenges. But they're remarkably emotionally intelligent and I think my getting out of the way so they could develop those skills helped that reality blossom.
Love this, thank you, as always, for your insights Asha. I'm also curious about sitting with my own hard feelings with and in front of my kids. I think we talk a lot about withstanding their hard feelings these days, but what about our own? I bet your kids got some wise modeling in that, too.
Well, I'd say I've been imperfect at how I've dealt with my own hard emotions in front of my kids. The important piece for my relationship with them, and for their own development, I think, was being willing to acknowledge when I didn't do a good job and apologize to them when I acted out or overstepped or anything. Feeling like you've done wrong and will be punished for it in some way is SUPER uncomfortable. I felt that way all the time as a kid and it made me lie like a rug. Modeling accountability to my kids without fear has helped them learn that it's okay to screw up and own it. You won't lose love, at least not in my house.
Love this so much: "Modeling accountability to my kids without fear has helped them learn that it's okay to screw up and own it." There's SO MUCH VALUE in doing this, and for so many reasons. Thank you for sharing your story!
I have been wondering what schools are doing right now to help kids think about personal and social health and responsibility in dangerous times.
The principles you discuss here in the interview were well understood also when I was teaching middle-school at the turn of the century and earlier as I was raising my own kids. Ideas like not micromanaging their lives, letting them manage failures and mistakes, knowing feeling hurt or angry are okay, finding people to talk to rather than keeping things bottled up...
Even then, in less trying times than the present, we were trying to go beyond this with middle-schoolers, at least, by working with them regularly together about living in a healthy and responsible way in community with a lot of variation potentially in closeness to various crises.
I know my students were intimately concerned with what was theirs to do in the world in the moment, how to ask for help, how to offer help, how to protect, how to be safe themselves...
That's where their nightmares were landing them. I would think this would be even more true today.
We had regularly scheduled sessions for discussing these sort of things explicitly. I usually had a group of 25 eighth graders maybe every couple of weeks. We divided kids by grade in this way, discussing the same things, but the conversation would tend to be different for eleven year olds than for fourteen year olds.
Thank you. Your response makes me wonder: what is truly unprecedented about these times and what isn't? What do we already know how to do well and what are the new practices, teachings, spaces we need to adapt?
This is such a good point. I think there are quite a few things our generation of parents has "forgotten" about raising kids, because we've been getting such strong, fear-mongering messages telling us we need to do things differently. There are certainly exceptions, where the science or other influences have nudged us in a healthier direction (less physical punishment, a shift to more authoritative/less authoritarian parenting style, more openly talking to kids about things like sex and race, etc)... but parents used to be pretty good in terms of giving kids independence and letting them take healthy risks!
Different crises become more urgent at different times.
The big impetus a quarter century ago to be really intentional and constructive about school culture was Columbine.
Of course there had been violence in schools before, and in my long-ago youth as well. But Columbine brought the issue of violence into every school, the need to stand up for others, not just in your own little circle but also flagging brewing issues to adults who could intervene- the destructiveness of codes of silence and sweeping things under the rug.
Immigrant communities and marginalized people in schools plus their families have long been at greater risk than some of the rest of the student body, but the extent and stakes are outsized now in many places.
Issues like extracurriculars or dealing with perfectionism or dealing with frustration and and anger or listening rather than mostly talking are still issues, certainly, but for a lot of people there are particularly urgent issues too at the bottom of the Maslow pyramid, life and death sort of things that also stir the waters at school. Even our kids who are not particularly scared for themselves are keenly aware of how scared others are and how unfair it all seems.
And every time there is significant sudden job loss there is a big impact on families relying on those sectors for income. That just hits different communities at different times depending on the occupational landscape.
Great - and powerful - advice. Thanks for sharing this Courtney. Maybe teaching in public school helped me parent. I strove to help kids become independent learners; I learned just how capable and creative young people can be.
It was parenting mantra: I want my kid to be a thinking, independent person.
Love that mantra!
his really resonated with us — especially the idea that small, intentional shifts in how we speak to children can have a powerful long-term impact. We just published our first blog post at Everyday Good Studio on this very theme: why raising kind kids is a radical act in today’s world. If it’s of interest, we’d love to share it: https://everydaygoodstudio.substack.com/p/why-raising-kind-kids-is-a-radical?r=64gudu
Thanks again for such thoughtful work — it’s encouraging to be part of a community of people thinking deeply about how we raise the next generation.
Ok, in that thankfulness is part of the human psyche/mind, in this, of course, there is consideration, right? In thankful consideration of the journey of lifelong experience during each day, and thank you for the posted article: "Raising kids in a bleak, infuriating times," - ( https://courtney.substack.com/p/raising-kids-in-bleak-infuriating/ ).
How's the relational, to "*get it," in regard to just & fair peacefulness needed in daily experience? For example, a *perspective is a "take" *or termed, to "get it," a "take away" of something to discern or to have discerned. This could elicit, by the natural language usage content, "what is that? - 'word salad," or so it could seem by opinion.
There is the term, "human equality," however, that "truth," only has "true principles,"
and "falsehood," does have, "true *and false *or* only false sets of principles," and, that has logical in compass needed for ethical aesthetics to have expressed that.
The fact of inheritance, has that it is ethically legal to uphold, human equality, human dignity, human freedom, and human rights that includes the freedom of human non-vocal and vocal expression/speech, as a true principle,
*however, there is the freedom of inner-self or termed, the human thought in human discernment, and the realized to have pondered by one's own individual human "psyche" is the human mind of higher reasoning human consciousness, of the individual, of the identity can be by the "Birth certificate" as a "credential" or some other verification of this of the "name," of the human being person, an individual that has human equality, human dignity, human freedom and human rights as a *state of being during the daily life experience on lifelong "earthly" life, and the "hereafter" is subsequently after last breath of life of the human being person.
There term of freedom of expression for needed help that is *from transcendent beyond the natural, and *from transcendent from beyond the *human condition, is expressed in the English vernacular, "God," and the term, "God given name," is historical.
In this, thank you again for your consideration of this, and there is the needed fair and just peacefulness of the human psyche/mind and hopes of good circumstances of the human right of personal space to be in the state of just peacefulness.