You know the season you’re in right now. The one where you thought you had it figured out but then everything shifted. Your kid went from baby to preschooler to tween to teenager, and you had to become a different parent every single time. Or the rules you’ve worked hard to hold at your house mean nothing the moment they walk into someone else’s. And you found yourself standing in the middle of a moment you weren’t prepared for, wondering if the fact that you’re doing this alone is the reason you keep getting it wrong. It isn’t. But that doesn’t make the season any less disorienting.
Every stage of parenting asks something new of you, and as a solo parent, you’re the one who has to figure out what that is without another adult in the house to help you read the room. The conversation that happens in this episode is the kind that makes you exhale. Not because it ties everything up neatly, but because it’s honest about how hard this is and how much grace you actually deserve.
Robert Beeson, Founder & CEO of Solo Parent, is joined by Elizabeth Cole, a single parent navigating a teenager in real time, and Amber Fuller, a counselor with a Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy (MMFT) and single parent. Together they dig into what it actually looks like to grow as a parent when your kids keep growing past you. Not a how-to. Not a list of things you should be doing better. Just three people who have been in it, talking honestly about what resilience looks like when you’re the only one holding it all together.
If you’ve ever been caught flatfooted by a new season of your kid’s life, questioned whether you’re doing enough, or felt the weight of knowing the years left are getting shorter, this one names what you’ve been carrying. And it doesn’t ask you to have it all figured out. It just asks whether you’re willing to keep growing alongside your kids even when you don’t know what you’re doing. That willingness, it turns out, is where resilience actually starts.
Key Insights from This Episode:
- Resilience is built through open systems, not closed ones
- Fear-driven parenting keeps both you and your kids in a box
- Self-compassion isn’t optional, it’s the foundation
Resilience is built through open systems, not closed ones
Emotional resilience is like a bridge. The more weight and tension you’re carrying, the more supports you need underneath to keep things stable. When life shifts and the parenting season gets harder, isolation makes it worse. Shrinking in shame or fear makes it worse. The move toward resilience is actually the opposite of what feels instinctive when you’re overwhelmed. It’s a framework Amber leans on from her own experience, and what it looked like in practice was building a team around herself — therapists, teachers, specialists, community. Even with a full support system in place, it was still hard. The point isn’t that getting help fixes everything. It’s that a closed system stays unhealthy. When the only voice you’re hearing is the one in your head that says you’re failing, it will keep saying that until something from outside interrupts it.
Robert echoes this when he talks about what happens when you finally find out what’s been going on under your own roof that you didn’t know. Not because your kids are hiding things out of malice, but because they’ve learned to manage what they let you see. That realization, while jarring, can be the thing that opens you up. Elizabeth takes it a step further by naming her own son as one of her best sources of perspective, not because she takes all his input as direction, but because listening to how he sees his world keeps her from projecting her own fears and experiences onto him. He showed her that the dynamic she was worried about between his friends wasn’t what she thought it was. She would not have known that if she hadn’t asked.
Curiosity, Robert points out, is the engine of relationship. Rules without relationship equals rebellion. And relationship is built in the small, repeated moments of genuine wondering about who your kid is becoming and what they actually need right now.
Fear-driven parenting keeps both you and your kids in a box
The fear that runs underneath solo parenting is something all three of them name without flinching. Amber describes parenting from a place of fear so intense that her nervous system was constantly dysregulated. She was reactive, wound up, bracing. And because so much was riding on her alone without an involved co-parent to share the weight, she tightened down. She wanted her kids inside the box because inside the box felt safer. What she came to understand is that this approach, born entirely out of love, didn’t leave room for her kids to discover who they actually were. They are creative, expansive people. And she was inadvertently cutting off that exploration because her own fear was driving the decisions.
Robert arrives at the same place from a different direction. He grew up thinking of himself as someone who lives outside the box, but with his daughters, he wanted containment. He wanted predictability. It wasn’t until one of his girls asked to speak to a clinician privately, and he found out there were things she’d been keeping from him because she was afraid of his disapproval, that he started to understand what his rigidity was costing them. Teenagers try things on, he reflects. They explore identities and ideas. It doesn’t mean they’ll land there. The parent’s job isn’t to lock that down. It’s to stay connected through it.
What both of them are pointing to is the uncomfortable truth that fear, even the love-soaked, protective kind, can close off the very relationship you’re trying to protect. And for solo parents carrying everything without a second voice in the house, that fear has more room to take over. Naming it is the first step out of it.
Self-compassion isn’t optional, it’s the foundation
Pausing instead of reacting is one of the most underrated tools in a solo parent’s kit. When you don’t know what to do in the moment, giving yourself permission to say “I don’t know yet, I’ll get back to you” instead of forcing an answer you’ll have to walk back does two things at once. It keeps you from saying something in the heat of the moment that creates distrust, and it shows your kid that uncertainty isn’t a failure. That it’s okay to need time. Elizabeth has leaned into this with her teenage son, and what she’s found is that the pause is actually one of the most honest things she can offer him.
The research backs this up. Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion frames it not as a soft add-on but as a core component of resilience. After a hard day, the practice isn’t a list of things to do better. It starts with a simple question: can I just notice and acknowledge that this was hard? Not to wallow, but to stop pretending it wasn’t. Parenting is a tough job. Solo parenting is tougher. Naming that honestly, the way Amber describes it, is not weakness. It’s the beginning of being able to move through it.
Ask yourself what you would say to a friend going through this exact thing. Because most of us would never speak to a close friend the way we speak to ourselves after a hard parenting moment. We’d offer grace. We’d say you’re doing the best you can. And then the one that tends to go unanswered: what do I need? Solo parents are extraordinarily good at tracking what their kids need and consistently under-practiced at asking the same of themselves. If you’re running on empty, you don’t have the resources to show up the way you want to. Self-compassion in this context isn’t a luxury. It’s the thing that makes everything else possible.
When You’re Not Sure You’re Enough
You are in the process of becoming the parent your kid needs, and becoming is a different thing than arriving. Arriving implies you get there, you figure it out, and then you stay. Becoming means you keep moving, keep adjusting, keep growing into whoever this next season is asking you to be. And that means you will be caught off guard sometimes. You’ll freeze, or freak out, or say the wrong thing and have to circle back. You’ll hit a season you didn’t see coming and have to figure out who you are in it. None of that is evidence that something is wrong with you. It’s evidence that you’re in it, fully, and that you’re still showing up.
The parents in this conversation have all been there. They’ve been scared, reactive, flatfooted, and convinced that their kids were going to suffer for it. They’ve also watched their kids turn out better than expected, grow into themselves in spite of the hard seasons, and demonstrate a resilience that had very little to do with everything going right. Your kids are more capable than your fear gives them credit for. And you are more resilient than the worst moment of last week suggests.
Keep asking for help. Keep letting your kids teach you something about who they are. Keep giving yourself the grace you would give a friend in your exact situation. You are not behind. You are becoming.
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Kristin Neff, researcher and author on self-compassion and resilience
- Dr. Dan Siegel, prior podcast guest known for his work on curiosity, connection, and child development
