TW: I talk about teen suicidal ideation in today's episode. If that is heavy on your heart, please skip this one.
One of the most profound parenting lessons I have learned is to teach my children how to walk through the fire, instead of putting it out for them. Teaching them to walk through fire and watching our kids struggle is a lot harder than using our own skills to get rid of the pain, but it's worth it in the end.
Want to dig a little deeper?
READ: Â Letters from Katherine
SEE: Â Â Katherine's Experiences
LISTEN: The She's Sacred Show
EXPAND: Â Intuitive Advisory with KatherineÂ
FOLLOW:Â Katherine on Instagram
PS. Want to stay connected? Be sure to follow me on Instagram,subscribe to The She's Sacred Show on your favorite podcast host, or subscribe to my free Substack channel, Letters from Katherine. To stay in accordance to my pristine intuitive energy, my newsletter is only for people who have invested in The She's Sacred Mini Experiences or Intuitive Advisory containers (see links for everything above).
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
Hello and welcome back to the She's Sacred Show. I'm Katherine Phifer and I am your host and I am so glad you're here. Welcome back. Today we are talking about parenting. I mean, we can have a whole podcast about parenting, right? And I have a lot to share about my own experience in parenting and how it has created me into the leader and the woman that I am today, and that it will continue to shape me. And there's a couple of things that I have really calibrated to as I have become more and more of the mother that I am. And one of them is this concept that I learned from Dr. Shefali. Your experience as a parent generally can be confronting and you're usually going to be confronted with the stuff that you need to heal.
If you're doing it right, if you're in it, if you're in the thick of it, your children are going to show you all of the things that you need to grow and shift and heal from. And that can be really hard and that can be really confronting. And, so one of the things that my kids showed me that I needed to heal on was my need to be perfect and my need to appear perfect.
And that was really uncomfortable for quite a few years because they were just themselves, just these beautiful, loud, energetic lovers of life, human beings that were So amazing and also really challenging to parent. And I had to do quite a bit of therapy and work around letting that go. I also had to do a lot of work around creating stability in my own nervous system because I would feel so overwhelmed by their energy. There was two of them and they were developmentally experiencing the same thing at the same time. And I often didn't know what to do. And I felt very disconnected from myself and it was a lot of work to figure out how to heal those parts of me and let myself be connected in with my nervous system because it was a lot easier to be anxious and hyped up on having to be perfect and having to be in the perfect arena all of the time and those weren't things that I knew going in that I would be facing but they were things that I really had to face as I became deeper entrenched in motherhood.
And I also knew that I wanted to be a really good mom for them. I didn't want to appear to be a good mom. I actually wanted to be a good mom. And I had met quite a few different kinds of parents. while I was in the throes of my children being young. And I felt like some parents were really amazing parents and some parents were really, really trying hard.
And then there were some parents that were really allowing their own mental health or their own issues to take precedence in front of their kids and their kids lives and then their kids were suffering because of it. And my job working with teenagers in crisis was one of those jobs that really shed light on all of the ways that things could go wrong or all of the ways that you could feel disconnected from your kids or make decisions that in the long run weren't for them, that they were for you.
And I didn't want to do that with my kids. And to layer that upon that, my husband and I had a really interesting work schedule, both of us, when the boys were little, where my husband was working 24 hour shifts and I was working shifts, depending on my husband's shifts, so that we could tag team parenting and tag team child care.
And so I worked, every other weekend and then I had m early shifts and later shifts and it was just it was all over the map. There was no real schedule and no real routine that we could implement and our boys really had a hard time with that And it wasn't until we moved to Tennessee when the boys were about seven.
I think they turned seven right after we moved there. And we ended up having a schedule that I created. A routine that I created because I was there every day and I was transitioning to working from home. And that's when things started to feel a lot more grounded in our house.
But the thing I want to talk with you about today is this concept that I heard in a podcast with Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach and Sister on We Can Do Hard Things, where I don't even remember what episode it was, but they were talking about how as parents, it's our job to show our kids how to walk through the fire.
It's not necessarily our job to walk through the fire for them. It's not our job to put the fire out. It's not our job to run away from the fire or show them how to run away from the fire. It is our job to show our children how to walk through the fire. And that my friend is really hard to do. I think it gets harder.
I, I really do. When your kids are little, you show them how to deal with pain. You show them how to work through their feelings. Maybe their feelings are really big and you teach them how to soothe themselves and how to deal with how they're feeling. And maybe you've got other things going on and you work around how to navigate those situations and support them in the way that they can figure out how to work through life and how to make friends and how to be in community with other people and other children and how to make good decisions around eating or sleeping or whatever it is by creating those routines and when they get older the trials get bigger and the trials get harder and that's when You're like, Oh my gosh, my heart is breaking. I don't want you to have to walk through the fire. I don't want you to have to navigate this. I just want to protect you. I just want to hold you close. I just want to show you that it's all going to be okay. I want to keep you inside this little house and not let you go.
And that's not serving them. That's not allowing them to live their lives or to make the mistakes that they need to make knowing that they'll be okay. And now as parents, we have this great fear around our kids not being able to manage their feelings and then doing something so drastic that could be life or death. And that's scary too.
The suicide rate for kids is through the roof. It's so much higher than when I was a teenager and it was just unacceptable. If you had, even if you had some ideation around suicide, you likely were not going to do anything about it because it wasn't socially acceptable to do that. But now it is. And that adds another layer of fear for parents to navigate through because and it makes it even harder to show them how to walk through the fire and also more necessary because we're so afraid that we're going to come home and find them not alive and that's so scary which makes our job of showing them not having to but wanting to and being tasked to show our Children how to walk through the fire, which means that we have to manage our own feelings around them hurting and being sad around the idea that they're going to get hurt by friends or by someone they're dating or or by experiences.
And one of the things that we have in our family have decided to be really committed to is this open dialogue where we sit at the kitchen table and we have dinner all together when Tony's home because he is not always home. His job is a 48 hour schedule. Now it used to be 24 hours. Now it's 48 hours.
So he's gone for two days and we have our own little routine. and not home. And then we have a routine when he is home. And sitting at that table and having a meal and talking about life and being so open and so candid about life has been really powerful for all of us. And not shying away from the hard conversations, like conversations around suicide, like conversations around safe sex, like conversations around good friends and friends that are more focused on themselves and can't be good friends.
And also conversations around school and grades and doing well or not doing well and figuring out how to navigate through the systems. And it's not always pretty. Navigating through the systems is not always pretty. But what I want my boys to know, and I really hope that they do know, is that they can come to me and come to their dad about anything at all and that we will be here, that there's no issue we can't navigate through, that there's always an answer.
Everything is figureoutable no matter what. That there might be consequences to their behaviors. But they, we are on their side. And that we're always on their side. That we're not ever against them. We're always in support of them. And they might need a consequence from us. For example, we have a consequence that if you're not doing, Well in school, it's a natural consequence.
If you're not doing well in school and you're consistently not doing well in school, you're going to get a tutor. It just is part of our family dynamic and that isn't considered punishment. It's considered, Hey, you're not doing well and we're going to support you through this process and we can't do it because we just, don't want to, first of all, get in the way of the relationship between ourselves and our kids.
And also there's like, they've changed math. We can't do math anymore. And,, that has, that makes things challenging. What I want to leave you with today is the concept that you as a parent are here to help your kids walk through the fire, whatever fire that is. And I also want you to know that I see you and I know that it's not easy.
I know that watching your kids go through things is really, really hard and you might default to trying to make it better or ignoring it or hiding from it. But that is not the answer. Okay. The answer is to be fully present and to support them in living this life. And they are, this is such a cliche, but they really are our future.
And there's the people we're creating this legacy that we're creating for. It gets to be really powerful and really beautiful. Until next time with love.
Comments