So we want to teach our kids what healthy love or a healthy marriage looks like, but without two parents in the household, often what they’ve seen is broken or simply non-existent. How do we teach our kids about building healthy relationships when we aren’t able to model it for them?

Today we’re going to unpack that in three main points. Number one, relationships are relationships. Number two, we’re going to talk about setting the tone. And finally number three, when our kids are in unhealthy relationships.

Ladies, so the question to you guys that I asked at the top, what’s one of the biggest challenges of teaching our kids healthy love as a single parent?

So when I think of love, I think of the interaction of other people. I know we can love ourselves and there’s that, but there’s a big component of how I interact with somebody else. And while my kids are there, there’s not another adult in my household that I’m interacting with constantly modeling how I’m going to show up in a marital relationship.

Yeah, it is tough, and especially if we’re coming from the place of having a broken relationship, and I know Marissa, you lost a husband to death, but before that you were in a difficult situation being married. And all of us can relate to this and I’m anxious to get this unpacked. 

Relationships are relationships. What do we mean by that?

The big thing is we’re all in relationships at some point, whatever it looks like. We have friendships, we have family members, we have relationships with our kids. And so just because we don’t have someone in the house that we’re in a relationship with day in and day out doesn’t mean that we don’t have the opportunity to guide our kids towards what a healthy relationship looks like. And then obviously they’re in relationships. So we have an opportunity. It’s just taking the opportunity to do that so we can show them that love is not defined by the presence of two parents in a house. And it’s not just about romantic gestures. Every relationship we have, whether it’s platonic or familial or romantic, has some of the basic foundations that are essential for creating that lasting bond and lasting love, what we’re all looking for in a partnership.

Some of those things [are] mutual trust and respect, open communication, being able to express your feelings, and listening to the other person having empathy and compassion. These are things we don’t have to just model with a romantic partner. We can model those with the people around us. And being able to show [our kids] that almost instills [it into their] nature and lays that foundation so that eventually, they show up with people, their romantic partners, in a healthy way.

It reminds me, Elizabeth, of what we talked about with Lori Lokey about unhealthy versus healthy relationships. She talks so much about how a healthy relationship has to do with you working on you first. Regardless of the status, whether it’s romantic or friendship or whatever, really doing your own work and being in touch with that is how you best show up in a relationship.

A lot of people are probably familiar with relationship expert John Gottman from the Gottman Institute. He says the foundation of any healthy relationship is the ability to share and respond to each other’s emotional needs. So that’s the same concept, whether it’s a marital relationship, a mother-child relationship, or even friends when there’s a play for emotional attention. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in only one specific defined relationship. He also says in his book “Making Marriage Work,” “A good relationship is one in which you feel safe and loved. It is not necessarily one that is perfect, but one that is real, honest and respectful.” And I think those things are key because we can create environments in our house where our children are treated with honesty and respect and authenticity. And I think that does set up a precedent and an example that even if I’m not modeling it with another adult, I’m still modeling it with my child. 

I know in my marriage and from what I’ve heard through counseling and even other relationships that I’ve had, how you were parented and how you were “showed up to” from your parents, not just in what was modeled for you with your parents, but also how they responded to you or didn’t respond directly affects how you look at relationships now and how I handled things in my marriage, how I’ve handled things in other relationships. And so we have a real opportunity to be really intentional in helping them understand what they want, what they should expect out of a relationship, and what they should stand for. 

Coming back to that authenticity and respect and all of that, for me growing up, I not only witnessed, but was the recipient of, my dad being kind of disrespectful and the way he talked to us. And when he was in a bad mood it created this situation where we were walking on eggshells, and that definitely has shown up later in my adulthood where it’s like I can’t quite reconcile that. And it doesn’t mean that we’re perfect parents or anything like that, but we are laying a foundation with every decision we make.

It’s so important. My dad passed away recently, and I’ve been processing a lot of stuff that I’d never even really thought of related to him. Let me put it this way, I learned at an early age that you avoid conflict at all costs. So I was avoidant. I very much didn’t know how to deal with conflict. I didn’t know how to bring it into the room. I didn’t know how to, and that’s not normal. Relationships require conflict. In order for us to have an authentic relationship, it requires both the good and the bad and how to process that. I didn’t learn that. And so it’s carried through into my relationships with my daughters, with girlfriends, with my wife. I look back at the patterns in my life, how I’ve been really avoidant in these things, and that’s why I think this point is so important. Relationships are relationships and how we show up in them is modeling to our kids how we deal with relationships.

My relationship with my partner is a little bit different than a relationship with a child. For example, I model to my child, “You’re going to have to tell me—when you leave the house— where you’re going. He’s 16, he could be in Mexico for all I know. He does need to tell me. I need to know if I need to plan a trip to Mexico to retrieve him. If I were to ask [that of] my husband, depending on how I did it, it could be offensive. I don’t need to know the play by play of everything that he’s doing in the same way as a child. So that respect is modeled, but it is a little bit different. 

How can I as a parent, while I’m modeling respect, also have relationships or demonstrate other ways with my children where maybe I’m not a nosy, overbearing parent in those relationships and how do I help bridge that gap? 

The first thing that comes to my mind is physical safety. That’s the number one thing. And that’s been my message to Jax for a long time. I’ll ask him sometimes, “Jax, what is my job?” “Your job is to keep me safe.” “And why do I keep you safe? “So that I can have fun and not worry about it.” “Yeah, great. I got your back. I’m watching out for you. But with that comes boundaries. And you have to trust that I’m doing things and saying things and putting things in place to keep you safe.” And I know [your son] is 16 and mine is 11, so I’m a little behind you. And obviously the rope gets let out a little longer over time. You don’t necessarily put that in the same way because for me, while there’s that physical safety, it also provides a bit of emotional safety for Jax as well, that he knows that I have his back. 

And so it kind of goes back to that foundation, and hopefully all that’s doing is setting him up for success to be a good parent versus playing into the partner role. But he knows he’s not abandoned, and so hopefully that has an effect on his partner. 

And I think Marissa, to your point, Matt is an adult. He’s your husband. If he’s leaving for the grocery store, he doesn’t necessarily need to tell you where he is going. If one of your boys is leaving, you can ask them, “Where are you going?” But I think that Matt would probably [not] just walk out the door. He’ll probably tell you, “I’m going to go to the grocery store.” So the point is, in relationship, you’re checking in all the time, and it’s not dictating what you have to report. To me, it’s like, in relationship, we check in with each other, we let each other know how we’re doing. We let each other know where we’re going. I don’t know how to deal with conflict, whether it’s conflict with my partner, conflict with an employee, conflict with a friend or my kids. I haven’t dealt with that piece because someone didn’t model that for me as a child, and I am now kind of paying the price. And that’s why how we show up to it is super important. 

And I think the undertone is the same. It may come out a little bit different, but that’s hopefully where other relationships come. If one of your boys saw you ask Matt, “Hey, where are you going? Where are you heading?” It’s not an accusatory “check in with me.” It’s more like, “I’m actually interested.” And to Elizabeth’s point has everything to do with safety and building trust. Especially with your kids, they want their autonomy, but with it comes a certain level of trust. And so we have to communicate because the only way trust is going to be built is through open communication. And so that’s everything from “what are you dealing with?” to “where are you going?” And being honest about that.

How do we set the tone for teaching healthy love to our kids?

First of all, the tone may have already been set in a dysfunctional way. I know that there’s stuff that I look back on now that my kids are 19 and 16 and I’m like, “Oh, I can’t believe that’s who I was. That’s how I showed up both to my husband or late husband and to my kids.” And you can spend a lot of time beating yourself up over that dysfunction, but ultimately, we are where we are now and we’re trying to fix it now. So how do we bring it back around from, “We know that dysfunction is there” to teaching them?

Even my child at 16, it’s not too late to start modeling and teaching him better behaviors. And that does start by how we’re reacting and interacting with them. I’ll never forget a couple years ago, [my son] must’ve been 14-year-old. He sat me down on the couch and he said, “Mom, sometimes when you ask questions, we don’t understand that you’re asking questions and it feels accusatory.” I’m summarizing, but it was a very mature comment from him, and I was just blown away. I was like, “I had no idea. I didn’t know that that’s how you were receiving me.” And so from that, it was like, “Okay, I’m going to try to do better” but it took so much courage for a 14-year-old boy with one parent to step in and say, “This is how I’m feeling.” But when he did, I needed to start paying attention to that and I actually asked, “Can you please provide more insight in that? Can we walk through this?” And he’s like, “Well, I don’t know that I’m comfortable doing that.” I said, “No, I mean seriously, you’re allowed.” And he opened up and shared a bunch and it was very insightful for me. I know you’re not going to get that from a three-year-old, so some of that’s age appropriate. But in a three-year-old, if you’re interacting with them and you [may] recognize that they start pulling away or they start getting really moody. If he was throwing a temper tantrum, I knew something was wrong. And usually I could cure it by saying, “Hey, you want to go play a game together? You want to go do something together?” And it was all about time. So rather than say, “I can’t believe you’re behaving this way,” he was crying for attention. He wanted me to spend time with him. And so it was a really easy way for me to calm down his behavior. I’m sure it doesn’t work with every child, but by listening to some of those cues, we can begin to model: “Wait a minute, I need to stop and see you as who you are and how you’re showing up for me right now and what you’re asking for.” And that doesn’t mean I have to always drop everything, because sometimes you’re going to have to be patient. But when I can take the time to either sit and listen to your concerns or sit and play a game with you, it can make a big difference.

And I think especially as our kids become teenagers and start pushing back from parental guidance and even resisting it, we have to realize that if we’re working on this premise that all along, we’re modeling what healthy relationships look like. As they start changing, what we used to do when they were younger doesn’t work when they become older. Like me, paying attention to my daughter’s safety when she was 9, 10, 11 years old was fairly understandable—I’d ask “Where are you going? And can I talk to the parents first?” But when they became 16, 17 it didn’t work as well. And I started realizing that rules without relationship equals rebellion. So much in figuring out what’s going on with them [is through] spending time, getting to know what inspires them, and actually asking more questions (not invasive): What are you thinking? What are you doing? What?How did you do that on that video game? These kinds of things build bridges to build emotional collateral so that you can actually step into a place of asking the more serious safety questions.

It’s tricky when they become teenagers because it’s a guessing game at first. And then you start realizing, “Oh, okay, well can’t ask this way.” And so much of this is not about what you say or what you ask, it’s about how you ask it or how you say it and or even what you do. So one example with my two teenage boys. They can eat me out of house and home. We’ll go out to eat and I don’t eat everything. My oldest recently found out he cannot eat garlic and onions. So when we go out to restaurants, I now order food without garlic and onions because I’m assuming he’s eating the other half left over. What I’ve seen come out of that small act is, if I (or his brother) were to say we were hungry, he is willing to share. He will walk into the school cafeteria and share with anybody who is there because that’s what he experienced. It felt good to him, and he is now walking that out in his life. I didn’t tell him. I was looking out for him. He saw love and he thought, “This is how I want to treat other people.”

So I’m thinking about the person who doesn’t have capacity to step back and see what’s really going on. The question behind the question or the action behind the action. You’re talking about Hunter throwing himself on the ground with a temper tantrum and you had enough space and enough wherewithal to be able to be like, “Here we are. There’s this child acting crazy. What do I need to do?” And so I’m thinking about a couple of things. One is obviously the ability to love ourselves, but even take care of ourselves so that we can fully show up for our kids. I was talking to someone the other day and she was talking about how she couldn’t fully show up for her kids the way she wanted to because she didn’t love who she was. She hadn’t fully accepted who she was, really dove into what her values are, what her value is as a mom, as a human. And I thought that was a really interesting take because I’ve been going through some difficult things since the beginning of the year, and I noticed how I was showing up for Jax during that difficult time, which wasn’t great. I wasn’t my normal self. And he actually even said, “I just want you to get back to your normal self.” And I was thinking it was definitely a direct correlation to how I was feeling about myself. I was carrying a lot of shame and a lot of hurt and a lot of different things. But I wasn’t able to fully show up for him because I wasn’t happy with where I was at and I was struggling, to be honest. So I think there’s a couple of things at play here. But if you don’t know your value and you don’t know your values, how can you fully show up for your kids and be able to show up in any relationship? And I know we focus a lot on loving yourself, knowing who you are and your values and your value when it comes to romantic relationships. But it was just really interesting to me that you need to have that base to be able to show up fully as a parent. Because with what I hear with you Marissa, is, you know what kind of mom you want to be and you know who you are as a mom and you’re secure in that, and you know what you bring to the table for your child. You’re not trying to do too much. You’re not falling short. Maybe you feel like you’re falling short, but you’re not. And so being able to take care of yourself, know who you are and be secure in that, allows you to be able to step back and say, “Oh, you know what? I think he just needs time with me, so let me do that.” 

I think the hard thing for me is: Where do you begin in loving yourself? And the older I get and the more work I do in loving myself, and I think I would’ve used to say, “Well, what does that even mean?” What I’ve come to understand is it is not this whole, “I love everything about me,” and I would love to be able to go there. Elizabeth, you and I talked about this the other day, just about identifying the things that we value about ourselves. And it started me thinking about inventorying some of those positive things and even writing them down, even if it’s just one or two at a time. How you love yourself or appreciate yourself or value yourself or whatever is just going, “Okay, I may not be good at all these things.” And certainly those are the loudest voices that we hear in our minds all the time. But you know what? I’m actually pretty good at listening, so I’m going to write that down as, “I’m actually a good listener” or I might be good at caretaking, maybe I’m great at jumping in if there’s a wound or first to organize or whatever. But I would just say for those of us that have a hard time getting our heads around “how do I love myself?” start by making a small inventory of things that you do well, and it doesn’t have to be exhaustive, but literally write that down. And I was impressed. I don’t think I’ve ever done that. I don’t think I’ve ever written a list of things that I value about myself” but I thought that it was a really insightful place to start in loving yourself—just trying to identify one piece at a time, those things that are valuable. I made the list as far as what I saw about myself, and then I brought it to a few close friends, Robert being one of them, and just said, “Here’s what I did. Here’s what I see. Where am I missing the mark? Where am I lying to myself?” And then luckily, nobody removed anything from my list. Then you added some things to it too, which was great. Once you brought those things up, I was like, “Oh yeah, you’re right. Okay, yeah, I’ll add that to the list,” which was helpful. Sometimes obviously people see things in you that you don’t see yourself, and so bringing friends into that process was good.

Start with yourself, start analyzing some of these positive things and realizing that you’re actually bringing something to the table. Which leads me to my final point in this section, and that is, how we deal with conflict and how we resolve conflict is a key point and I was not good at this. But disagreements are healthy, conflict is healthy. It’s not a bad thing. You can’t just be avoidant. But how we walk through that and how we navigate it with our kids is teaching them how to do that in a relationship. So it is so important and it’s so difficult when we get inflamed by something that our kids do, whether it be a safety issue where they’re just out of line or a disrespectful thing or whatever it is, how we deal with the conflict is so critical because conflict will arise and you can’t just avoid it. You have to step into it realizing that it actually deepens your relationship. And so setting the tone and how we deal with conflict is super important.

Struggles don’t mean that love is failing, which is what I thought as a kid. If there’s conflict, if there’s struggle, something’s wrong, we’re going down. But that’s not what it means at all. It’s actually part of growth. We have to normalize imperfections. When Colton was home for college, they got into a fight over something that was pretty silly. I could see both sides to it. I could totally understand where they were coming from. Hunter didn’t want to hear Colton talking. Listening to this situation, I’m like, “Okay, we can’t deal with this right now.” Well, then Colton put his AirPods in. I gave it like five minutes, and then I started a different conversation with Hunter that eventually was something like, “You love your brother, don’t you?” Yeah. “If your brother called you from Oxford and said, ‘I need you. I need you tonight,’ at 3:00 AM you would get up and tell me you were leaving, and you would head down there for him, wouldn’t you?” And you could almost see the tears welling up in his eyes as he was realizing, yeah, that’s how much I love this man. And I said, “Would you let something as silly as this stand in that way?” And so getting him there, opening up, having him approach it from “you really love your brother” before he was thinking about what the conflict was over. And realizing that’s the value you want to be presenting, not this value of this is my right and why did you offend me and whatever—night and day difference by the time we got out of the car and the fight was over. So I actually learned something from that by walking Hunter through that. And sometimes we have to focus on that relationship and really let them know that that’s the choice you’re making. It’s not the argument. It’s not your anger right now. You’re choosing whether you want to nurture or destroy this relationship.

This guy said that he would watch his father disagree with his wife and he would go into the room and start writing. And he was like, that’s odd because in the middle of this strife, he wouldn’t just storm out, but he’d walk into the room to start writing. The kid would see his dad go into the other room. And eventually he found out the principle of that. And the father said that whenever they were in disagreement, he would go into the other room and he would force himself to just write, start writing down what he loved about his wife. To reframe doesn’t mean the dispute’s gone. It doesn’t mean that there’s whatever. But to bring yourself back to like, okay, what’s the foundation here? Oh, I love this, I love this, I love this, I love this. Okay, now let’s reapproach conflict. And I thought that was really good advice because it is important to go for someone like me that is conflict avoidant, to realize it’s part of growth, and that it doesn’t mean that it’s all eroded. There is a foundation that’s secure.

I was telling a friend the other day, “I wish I could just love like I’ve never been hurt.” And obviously that’s not possible. It’s a pipe dream. With a kid or any relationship, that practice puts you in a posture to love like you’ve never been hurt because if you’re in that conflict, all that’s doing is producing hurt and a lot of it is born out of hurt. And so the hurt gets to win versus the love. And so I love what you guys both said because I feel like then the love trumps what the hurt has done. 

But what do we do when we know that our kids are already in an unhealthy relationship? How do we walk alongside them? How do we teach them what a healthy relationship is if they’re already in an unhealthy one?

I think boundaries are the number one key. Jax has had the same group of friends since kindergarten, and so everyone’s kid is everyone’s kid in our neighborhood. Everybody’s just showing up everywhere and they don’t always get along, and that’s all fine. But I think boundaries and also an understanding and a patience and a forgiveness level. And you guys have older kids, and so this looks much different; I’m just thinking about my son’s little friend group. I’m thinking about a couple of instances, one where Jax has had some issues with one of the boys in the group being mean to him or not including him. So I’ll just check in with him every once in a while, “Hey, how’s it going with so-and-so?” And he’s like, “Yeah, it hasn’t gotten any better.” And I’m like, “Have you guys talked about it?” “Yeah, but he doesn’t really care and he just blah, blah, blah.” I’m like, “Okay, well, I mean, if you need to take a break from being friends for a little bit to just give some space, that’s fine.” He’s like, “No, I just tell myself every time that he says something mean that I forgive him.” And he stands up for himself and he says what he needs and all that. But I thought it was really sweet that he’s not going to disregard a friend because he knows he is going through a hard time. And the friend also has learned some bad habits. Or one of the friends has actually said, “He’s had some boundaries” which I think bumped up against Jax a little bit. The friend was like, “Yeah, I’m just trying to pay attention to some of my other friends at school and maybe don’t have as much time for us, so it’s nothing personal.” Then there’s another kid who shows up, and he’s the kid that gets angry and leaves and storms out. And I’ve talked to Jax about that, and it’s like, “Hey, we don’t abandon.” We’ve told him if he wants to go home, that’s fine, but we’re not going to go home out of anger or because you’re upset. You guys work this out. You can work it out together. You’ve been friends for a long time and let’s work this out first, but we’re not going to just storm out of here and abandon each other. And that’s not the household we have. I think it’s just moment by moment situations and then teaching boundaries as you go.

So I’ve faced this a lot more. There’ve been a few friends like that, but a lot more just with girlfriends or whatever. So there was a girl, and this was in eighth grade, who would text my son in the middle of the night that she was suicidal, stuff like that. I’m like, “You can’t dump that on an eighth grade boy, this is not fair. This is not the right time, and by the way, why isn’t your phone downstairs?” But that’s a whole other conversation. And so that opened up a lot of questions and a lot of conversations with my son about, “Okay, do you like being treated this way? She obviously has some growing up to do. This is not a healthy relationship.” I think it can get really scary because as a parent, you’re watching your children who are making decisions on this “date or not date,” which in eighth grade, I don’t even know what that means. But they can do that behind your back so you can tread on that and end up in a Romeo and Juliet scenario very quickly. So it became less for me about dictating, “This is one you can have or is not” And more about helping them see what was going on. A different son was dating a girl who just never wanted to do anything. That one lasted for a while, but it eventually resolved. He realized, “No, this is not where I want to be. This is not a kind of give and take relationship that I want to be a part of.” And so I think if you rush in to save the day a little too quickly, you’ll keep them from learning through experience. Now, if they are in immediate harm’s way, there’s obviously times when that doesn’t apply, but sometimes if it’s just that that person is inert, your child is probably smart, and they’re probably going to figure it out, and that lesson is probably going to last with them a little bit longer. So how do I guide them, mentor them, coach them through this relationship while it’s here, as opposed to just dictating and cutting it off and changing her phone number and his phone so he can’t text her kind of stuff.

I like some of the questions that you can answer too. Are there things in the relationship that make you uncomfortable? Just asking questions about it and helping them understand, helping them get there without telling them, and even if you don’t agree with them, validating, not judging them, just kind of saying, “Yeah, okay, that makes a lot of sense. But how does the relationship make you feel overall?” I think they’ll get there on their own, but it’ll also give you a little insight into some things that you can start instilling in them; I’m thinking about my adult relationships and if someone were to ask me, “How does this relationship make you feel overall?” Reading between the lines, if it’s like, “Well, I put up with these behaviors.” And then it’s like, “Okay, but you don’t deserve that. And so what is it that’s making you okay with those things?” You can get underneath if you notice some patterns of the choices that they’re making, and you can then maybe reparent in a different way moving forward, not necessarily right there on the spot, but you have some indications of things you can help coach them along in without them knowing, if you will. You can read between the lines.

So unfortunately, I’ve had some experience with this with my daughters in unhealthy relationships, and I can tell you that no matter how much we love and care and want to be there and even ask some of the right questions, there are times when they’re not going to listen to parents.

And so what do we do in those particular situations? 

We need to pay attention to the warning signs if you feel like there’s emotional or physical abuse or disregard for boundaries or even unhealthy communication patterns and try to ask the right questions. But I know historically when I’ve been in a situation where I felt or believed that one of my girls was in an unhealthy relationship, even an abusive relationship, I was probably the last person that they initially would answer those questions [from]. They were ashamed that they were in it. And there’s a lot we’ve unpacked since. The one bit of advice that I really held onto is just working on creating a nonjudgmental safe place. It was like, “Listen, I need you to know that you may not feel comfortable talking to me about this right now, but I’m concerned about X, Y, and Z. We don’t need to talk about this right now, but it’s on my radar and I love you, and I want you to be safe, and I want the best for you and you don’t need to be ashamed of anything. I just want you to know that I’m always here if you want to talk and I promise to listen to you, and not to just jump in and insert myself, but I just want you to know that you have a safe place here to talk to me about this.

What I’ve uncovered since I’ve gone through some of those things is they didn’t tell me initially that they were in this kind of trouble. They were embarrassed that they let it get to that place. And we know all the cycles of abuse, how you blame yourself and all those kinds of things. But for those parents out there that might be dealing with this—and you see that your kids are in an unhealthy relationship, but all the questions and [everything] don’t seem to be working. And the best advice I can give you is to be the safe place. They do come back to that. I mean, every single situation that I’m talking about, I was brought in at a certain point and it did resolve. And so there is hope and obviously above all of it, pray, pray, pray, pray that your kids are in a healthy situation.

Takeaways

1. You can guide your children in healthy relationships regardless of if there are two parents in the home, meaning it doesn’t have to be a romantic relationship for you to model what a healthy relationship looks like. 
2. Building a foundation of healthy love starts with loving yourself and it starts at home how you react to each other, how you love yourself, take care of yourself, that all matters. 
3. If our kids are in an unhealthy relationship, our job as parents is to support them and be their safe place while also voicing our concern for their wellbeing. And that’s a tricky one, but all of these things culminate in the idea that we are the ones that are modeling back. We’re modeling what healthy relationships look like, starts with us, moves beyond us, but all happens at home. And then more than anything, we have to be the safe place.

Listener Question: How do I balance being both the disciplinarian and the nurturer for my kids without feeling like I’m failing at one or the other? 

I know that I’m more of the nurturer. I’m not the disciplinarian, and it’s not natural for me to be a disciplinarian. And it’s not that Jax doesn’t get disciplined, but it’s not my nature to show up in that way and to parent him that way. So I’m kind of okay with it —I’m a nurturer, and that’s fine. He gets enough discipline at his dad’s house apparently from the conversation we had yesterday. 

We are going to fail in both of them, and it’s just a matter of trending in the right direction, realizing we do have to balance both of these roles. We do have to be the disciplinarian and the nurturer. We’re not going to get any of them perfect. And it’s hard. I would say eliminate the feeling of failure as far as guilt or shame or toxic shame where it just weighs you down because you’re not going to measure up at all times.

When you fail in a certain area, work on repair. It not only resolves the situation potentially, but it also enriches your relationship and so have a lot of grace for yourself because it’s hard to do both of those things. I mean, even if you’re in a two parent home, not one parent is always a disciplinarian and not one’s always a nurturer. We’re going to mess up. So have some grace for yourself and keep trying. Don’t give up.

I would say I was raised in a fairly authoritative household, and so when I have to discipline my kids, I usually need to nurture myself while I’m doing it because I need to say, I need to remind myself why. If it’s longer than a, “Hey, you shouldn’t have done that,” then if they have consequences, I usually look at them and I feel guilty. I don’t want to have to tell you “no,” I don’t want to ground you, especially right now, and especially knowing that community is so very important. But there are times when I literally have to let it sit and then I have to go sit in that, and I’m more miserable than my child is being the disciplinarian.

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