You already know you want to protect your kids. It’s woven into everything you do, the voice you try to keep steady, the weight you carry quietly, the way you show up even on the days when showing up is the hardest thing on the list. And yet, most of us are still figuring out exactly what that looks like.
Robert Beeson, Founder & CEO of Solo Parent, Elizabeth Cole, single parent, and Amber Fuller, a counselor with a Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy (MMFT) and single parent, dig into one of the realest tensions in solo parenting: how much of your struggle do you actually let your kids see?
This isn’t a conversation about trauma dumping or crisis management. It’s about the everyday moments, the tight finances, the hard mornings, the grief that doesn’t stay in its lane, and the question of whether letting your kids into some of that might actually be the most courageous and connecting thing you do. If you’ve ever pulled yourself together before walking back into the room or answered “I’m fine” when you were anything but, this conversation is going to reach right where you are.
You want to be the steady one. You don’t want to load your worries onto shoulders that are already carrying more than they should. But you also sense that always performing okay might be teaching them something false about what it means to be human. You worry about saying too much or not enough. You hold back, and then sometimes you break, and neither one feels quite right.
Key Insights from this episode:
- Struggle is something you can model, not just survive
- The space between hiding and dumping is where real connection lives
- Vulnerability, done with intention, builds the trust that nothing else can
Struggle is something you can model, not just survive
The instinct to hide struggle from your kids makes sense. You’re the adult. You’re supposed to be the one who holds things together. But that instinct, however well-intentioned, might be working against us. Research is consistent: kids develop resilience by watching adults navigate hard things, not by watching adults pretend hard things don’t happen, and Amber Fuller backs that up from both her clinical experience and her own life as a single parent.
That’s a significant reframe. It means the moments when you’re struggling aren’t just moments to get through before you can be the parent you want to be. They might be the moments where you’re doing some of the most important parenting of all.
If we aren’t showing our kids that struggle is a normal, human part of life, the story they’ll end up telling themselves is that it isn’t okay to struggle. Elizabeth said it plainly, and it’s hard to argue with: your kids are already carrying something. Whether they’re navigating a family transition, a loss, growing up in a home that looks different from their friends’, or simply the daily reality of a one-parent household, if they’ve only ever watched you perform steady, they may not have permission to fall apart, ask for help, or trust that they’ll be okay.
Learning to struggle well, to acknowledge difficulty while still moving forward with intention, is a skill. Robert spent the early days of single parenting wrestling with exactly that, particularly around finances, unsure how much to let his daughters in while trying not to load them down with worry he thought was his alone to carry. And kids learn it the same way they learn most skills: by watching someone they trust do it first. The real question isn’t whether your kids will ever see you struggle. They already do, whether you’ve intended it or not. It’s whether what they’re watching is something they can learn from.
The space between hiding and dumping is where real connection lives
There are two failure modes here, and most of us have experienced both of them. The first is over-protecting: scrubbing the emotion off before you walk into the room, saying “I’m fine” on autopilot, handling every crisis in private and presenting only the composed version. The second is the opposite: unloading the raw, full weight of what you’re carrying in ways that make your kids feel responsible for it or afraid.
Elizabeth framed a helpful middle ground by naming three levels. Don’t hide. Don’t dump. Do model.
Don’t hide means being honest in a way that’s age-appropriate and contained. It gives kids language for emotional experience, lets them see that struggle happens and doesn’t destroy everything, and protects them from filling in the silence with something scarier than the truth.
What age-appropriate actually looks like is worth unpacking. A younger child doesn’t need details, they need reassurance. Something as simple as telling them you’re feeling sad today but you’re okay and you love them is enough. It names the emotion without creating anxiety. For older kids and teenagers, you can bring in more context. A thirteen or fifteen year old can handle knowing that finances are tight, that you’re working on a plan, and that things may look a little different for a while. What they don’t need, at any age, is to feel like the weight is theirs to carry or that the outcome depends on them. The goal is to bring them close enough to feel connected, not so close that they feel responsible.
Don’t dump means your kids don’t need to know the mortgage details or the specifics of what your co-parent did. They don’t need to be the emotional support system for your worst moments. Those needs belong with your friends, your therapist, your community. Your kids need to know you’re human, not become your crisis partner.
Do model means letting them see what healthy processing actually looks like. When things are hard, you reach out. You pray. You make a plan. You feel the feelings and you keep going. And you say that in a way that’s real, not performed: “I’m sad right now, but I’m okay. Feelings come and go. I’m talking to people who love me, and we’re going to be alright.” That small script gives your kids a template. Struggle isn’t the end of the story. It’s a part of it, and there are ways to walk through it.
Leaving room for questions is another piece Robert raises that’s easy to overlook. If you open the door a little, keep it open. Don’t give a brief honest moment and then shut it down before they’ve had time to process. “I don’t know” is a real and acceptable answer. So is “I’m still working on this.” Your kids don’t need you to have it resolved. They need to see you in the process.
Vulnerability, done with intention, builds the trust that nothing else can
Here’s what actually happens when you let your kids see you struggle with some intention and care: they let you see them struggle too.
Amber describes this as mutual self-disclosure. When you share vulnerably with your kids, even in small ways, you signal that this is a safe house. That feelings are allowed here. That hard things can be spoken. And the result is that they start bringing their hard things to you. In the context of single parenting, where their world has already been shaken, that trust is not incidental. It’s the thing.
That kind of trust shows up in surprising ways. When finances got tight early in Robert’s single parent years and a move felt like a real possibility, he wasn’t sure how his daughters would react when he finally brought them into it. What one of them actually said was, “Dad, I don’t care if we live under a bridge. As long as we’re together, we’re going to be fine.” That response didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a kid who had already learned, somewhere along the way, that her dad was someone she trusted and could be honest with.
A similar thing unfolded when the kids’ father in Amber’s family was recently laid off. Rather than shielding them from the stress of it, they walked through it together, praying, talking about his plan, staying connected to the process. When he eventually got another job, her daughter cried. Not from relief alone, but because she had been in it with him. It felt like a shared win, because it was.
This is the gift on the other side of the uncomfortable decision to be real. Not just a healthier, more resilient kid, but a relationship where you both belong to each other more fully.
And it doesn’t always have to be the heavy stuff. Elizabeth makes the point that sharing something funny, embarrassing, or a little ridiculous can be just as powerful as the harder conversations. The moments where you let your kids see you as someone who gets flustered, makes mistakes, or doesn’t always have it together are their own kind of invitation. And those smaller moments of honesty make the bigger ones feel a lot more natural when they come. Humor, as Amber notes, is its own form of courage. Letting your kids see that you’re not always composed, not always certain, not always above the fray, isn’t failure. It’s intimacy.
What You’re Already Giving Them
If you’ve been white-knuckling the performance of okay, hear this: what you’re trying to protect them from is also what could connect you to them.
You don’t have to have the answers. You don’t have to know exactly how much is too much. You just have to be willing to start, in small ways, with age-appropriate honesty, letting them see that you are real, that life is real, and that neither of those things means unsafe.
Your kids don’t need a parent who never struggles. They need one who struggles and keeps showing up. Who says, “I’m not okay right now, but I’m working on it, and I love you, and we’re going to be alright.” Who leaves the door open for their questions. Who treats their feelings with the same care you’d want someone to treat yours.
That is the kind of parent you already are. And the courage to let them see a little more of the real version of you? That’s not a departure from good parenting. That might be the heart of it.
