There is a particular kind of loneliness that shows up not in the quiet of the night, but in the middle of an ordinary moment with your kid. Your child pushes back, or says something that catches you off guard, and before you can respond, the fear is already there:
Am I getting this wrong? Am I ruining them?
No one is there to take the temperature of the room. No one to catch your eye across the table or say afterward, “I think you handled that well.” You are making the call every single time, and the weight of that can quietly shift from purpose into dread.
That fear is worth naming, because it does not stay where you put it. It leaks into how you respond to your kids, how tightly you hold rules, how quickly you give in to keep the peace. Parenting from that place, solo, is one of the most demanding things a person can do.
Robert Beeson, Founder and CEO of Solo Parent, sits down with Elizabeth Cole, single parent and co-host, and Amber Fuller, a counselor with a Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy and single parent herself, to talk honestly about what it actually looks like to raise healthy kids when you are doing it alone. Not the highlight reel. The real version, with the regrets, the blind spots, and the small moments that remind you things are going to be okay.
The conversation moves quickly past the surface into the tensions most solo parents carry but rarely say out loud.
The fear – that fear itself is driving your parenting, not love or wisdom. The guilt that your unprocessed pain is showing up in your kids’ lives without your permission. The pull toward people-pleasing or control, both rooted in the same anxious place. The exhaustion of trying to be everything, and the slow realization that “enough” looks different than the standard you have been holding yourself to. The grief of navigating all of it without a built-in sounding board, and the isolation that follows when you try to do it alone.
If any of that feels familiar, this episode was made for you.
Key Insights from This Episode
- Your internal world shapes your parenting more than you realize.
- The five Rs of stability give solo parents a practical framework for raising healthy kids.
- Blind spots don’t fix themselves. Inviting outside perspective is one of the bravest things you can do.
Your internal world shapes your parenting more than you realize.
Everything we carry internally tends to show up in our parenting. The overwhelm, the self-doubt, the fear of not doing enough. Without another adult in the house to help process it, that pressure has nowhere to go except onto our kids. Elizabeth named it plainly: without community, without someone to say “hey, I’m struggling,” it just builds until it leaks out.
For Amber, fear of getting it wrong made her reactive in ways she still carries regret over. She had stuffed her pain down, and it did what pain always does: found a way out anyway, into the small moments with her kids that she cannot get back.
People-pleasing is another version of the same thing. It looks like generosity on the surface, but it can quietly teach kids that everyone else’s comfort matters more than limits, more than healthy resistance, more than honesty. Robert reflected on wanting everyone to be okay so badly that he may have robbed his kids of the chance to learn that hard things can be survived. That kind of clarity only comes with time.
The path out of fear-driven parenting starts with awareness. Not perfection, not having it all figured out, just slowing down enough to notice what is actually happening inside you before it spills over. Amber offered something grounding here: getting it right about one out of three times is, according to the mental health field, genuinely enough to create stability for your kids. What matters is that you are willing to notice, learn, and go back and repair when you miss it.
That is a different standard than the one most solo parents are holding themselves to. And it changes things.
The five Rs of stability give solo parents a practical framework for raising healthy kids.
Respect, Relationships, Rules, Responsibility, and Risk. These five areas give you a real chance at raising healthy kids and becoming a healthier parent at the same time. Amber built this framework out of her own experience as a counselor and as someone who learned a lot of it the hard way.
Respect starts with yourself, not with your kids. It means honoring the weight of what you are carrying and how far you have already come. A reframe that landed in the conversation: treat yourself the way you would treat a friend doing all of this alone. You would not catalog their shortfalls. You would be amazed by them. Elizabeth put it simply: give yourself that same respect.
Relationships matter more than most solo parents give themselves credit for. Resilience does not happen alone. Relationships are an anchor of safety, a sounding board, a source of wisdom and practical support. That is true for you as a parent, and it is true for your kids. How you model building healthy relationships is something they are watching every day.
Rules teach security, not control. When kids know what is expected of them, they feel safe, even when they push back. But rules only work inside of relationship. Amber put it plainly: rules without relationships equal rebellion. Building curiosity about your kids’ lives, asking questions, getting into their world, letting them know their voice matters, that is what makes the structure feel like safety instead of a cage. Responsibility, giving kids something real to contribute, raises them toward adults who can function in the world. Robert has returned often to something Henry Cloud said in an earlier episode: “no one lives here for free”. It is a small phrase that carries real weight about dignity and belonging.
Then there is Risk, which is easy to avoid after everything solo parents go through. But avoiding it cuts off resilience. When Amber’s daughter Jade asked at 17 to drive cross-country alone from Nashville to Savannah, it terrified her. Jade is small, Amber noted, and “can fit in a lot of people’s trunks.” But Jade had a plan. She would check in daily, share her location, and stay in at night. Amber let her go, prayed, and trusted. Jade came back more confident and independent, and not long after spent two months alone in Japan. Sometimes the most loving thing is the scariest thing.
Blind spots don’t fix themselves. Inviting outside perspective is one of the bravest things you can do.
Blind spots are the things you cannot see about yourself. And yet they are shaping your kids every day.
Think of it like chronic pain. When you have had a backache for years, you stop noticing it. You just contort around it and call it normal. Default reactions work the same way. You have lived with them so long that they feel like just who you are. Elizabeth encouraged getting curious: do you overreact when your kid pushes back? Do you shut down? Do you give in to avoid conflict? Whatever your first response is to resistance, it is telling you something about unhealed places. And if you are willing to look, it can become a path toward growth rather than a source of shame.
Our parenting story often comes from somewhere much older than our kids. Amber grew up in a home where her father’s word was law and her mother enforced it with a wooden spoon. Without fully realizing it, she brought that model into her own solo parenting, defaulting to demanding compliance especially in moments when she felt most afraid. She had to learn to separate her story from her kids’ story. Robert found something similar: the voices he needed to separate from were not from his parents, but from his ex. Things he had been accused of that played on a loop while he was trying to parent, quietly distorting his view of himself.
The way through is not solitude. It is perspective from people who know you, or who have walked where you are walking. Other solo parents, counselors, trusted adults, even your own kids. Elizabeth asks Jax to share three things he loved about a recent experience and three things he would change. It is low-stakes and open-ended, and it gets her into his world instead of projecting her own lens onto it. The goal, as Robert put it, is not to have it all figured out. It is to stop trying to figure it out alone.
You Are Already Doing More Than You Know
If you made it through this episode and felt the weight of how much there is still to learn, you are in the right place. But do not let that weight become another thing you are dragging. The fact that you are paying attention, that you are willing to ask hard questions about your own patterns and how they might be affecting your kids, that is not a sign that you are falling behind. That is the work.
Just by showing up for a conversation like this one, you are demonstrating something real about who you are. You show up. You are intentional. You keep going even when it seems impossible. That matters more than getting every call right.
Healthy parenting is not about a perfect score. It is about staying in the game, staying curious, and being willing to go back and repair the things you missed. Amber spent years doing that work in recovery groups, in community, in honest conversation. It changed her. And it can change things for you too.
You are not behind. You are on the road. And you are not on it alone.
