The Peaceful Parenting Podcast

You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.
In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I interview Kahlila Robinson and Sarah Gerstenzang about self-regulation, co-regulation, repair, and what realistic emotional expectations look like for children ages five to eight. We discuss why parent self-regulation matters so much, how to support kids through big feelings, and practical strategies families can use together.
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We talk about:
* 00:00 — Meet Kahlila Robinson and Sarah Gerstenzang
* 03:00 — The book and self-regulation. What self-regulation is and why it starts with parents
* 06:00 — What’s realistic for kids (ages 5–8) and why big emotions are normal at this age
* 11:00 — Co-regulation: What it is and how parents support it
* 15:00 — Supporting kids through big feelings: Why feelings shouldn’t be rushed or shut down
* 20:00 — Revisiting hard moments and why conversations after the fact matter
* 23:00 — Repair: How and why to repair after conflict
* 29:00 — Practical tools and simple regulation strategies
* 35:00 — When strategies don’t work: Why practice and flexibility matter
* 38:00 — Where to find the guests
* 39:00 — Final reflections: Advice to their younger parenting selves
Resources mentioned in this episode:
* The Self-Regulation Workbook for Ages 5-8
* Kahlila’s website and IG @kahlilarobinson
* Sarah G’s website
* Yoto Screen Free Audio Book Player
* The Peaceful Parenting Membership
* Evelyn & Bobbie bras
* Strong-Willed Kids Workshop
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* Website
* Join us on Substack
* Newsletter
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xx Sarah and Corey
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Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guests are Kahlila Robinson and Sarah Gerstenzang, who wrote The Self-Regulation Handbook for Kids ages five through eight. Although their book is aimed at parents of kids these ages, the truth is that so much of what we discussed applies to parents of kids of all ages, toddlers to teens.
A lot of the themes we discuss today will be familiar to you as listeners because you’ve heard me talk a lot about self-regulation, co-regulation, and repair. Listen into our conversation to learn why these are important for us as parents and why they are so crucial for teaching kids self-regulation no matter what age they are.
Let’s meet Kahlila and Sarah.
Sarah R: Hi, Kahlila. Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the podcast.
Kahlila: Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you for having us.
Sarah R: Yeah. We’re going to be talking about your book, The Self-Regulation Workbook for Children Ages Five to Eight. But before we dive in, maybe if you could each introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Kahlila: Sure. I’m Kahlila Robinson. I’m a licensed clinical psychologist based in New York City. I have a private practice where I see kids, families, and adults. I’m also a mom myself of two kids, and I’m very happy to be here talking about the book and sharing more about our process and some of the highlights from the book.
Sarah G.: Yeah. Thank you. So I’m Sarah Gerstenzang. I’m a licensed clinical social worker here in Brooklyn, New York. I also have a private practice, which focuses on adoptive families and complex developmental trauma. I’m also the board chair of the Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York, and the parent of three children, two by birth and one who we adopted through foster care.
Sarah R: Welcome. Yesterday, when I was doing my preparation for this podcast, I came across an online copy of your book, Another Mother: Co-Parenting with the Foster Care System, and I started reading it, and I kept having to go, stop, stop, go back to the—it seems to—I kept it open on my laptop. I’m really looking forward to getting back to it. It seems really interesting. I grew up with some foster kids in my house when I was really young.
Okay, so back to the book that we are here to talk about. Maybe just tell us a little bit about your book and, just while we’re all on the same page, what’s your definition of self-regulation?
Kahlila: Our book is written for parents of kids age five through eight. So it’s called The Self-Regulation Workbook for Children, but it’s a slight misnomer. It’s more directly written for parents and focuses on the importance of parents being able to self-regulate so that they can be calm on behalf of their kids, and really teaching parents strategies for how to do that through really stormy times with their kids.
Because what we’ve seen, time and time again, is when parents are able to remain calm, for the most part, it benefits the child. It provides a model for the child. It supports a child’s own self-regulation. So there’s a lot in there in terms of parent guidance on how to support themselves when their child is having a hard time or when they’re having a hard time. And then there’s also a lot of strategies in the book for kids and parents to use together to support self-regulation in both of them.
So that’s the overview of the book.
Sarah R: Yeah, it’s a really helpful book. I notice that just in my practice of coaching parents, parents always come with this idea of, in short, “fix my kid,” right? So we kind of talk about that as the inroad, but then after a session or two, parents always say to me, “This isn’t even about my kid. This is about me.” And I think that’s—yeah. Nobody, though, wants to come into it thinking that. They always want to come into it thinking, “Fix my kid.”
Kahlila: Yeah.
Sarah G.: It’s kind of confusing for them also, because most parents parent the way that they’ve been parented, and they can’t really take that bird’s-eye view and see, often, how they are impacting their own child’s sense of safety and calm and capacity to be in charge of their own emotions. So yeah, it’s confusing.
Sarah R: So self-regulation—just give us a definition, what you think of as self-regulation, so we’re all on the same page.
Kahlila: Yeah.
Sarah G.: Throwing yourself.
Kahlila: Yes. In short, yeah. It’s the ability to identify feelings that you have within yourself in terms of how they come through. They could come through physically, they can come through as thoughts and as emotions. So, being able to identify those feelings and then find ways to contain them within yourself so that they don’t end up spilling out and creating more disruptive experiences for yourself or others. So: identifying, managing, and containing your own emotions.
Sarah R: Yeah. And that’s hard for kids, though. I guess that’s, you know—hence the book, right? It’s hard for kids, and it’s hard for adults too sometimes. I think that’s why you spent so much time on different—we’re going to get to that—but strategies for parents to use themselves for their own emotional self-regulation.
Before we talk about sort of what we’re working toward, what do you think typical self-regulation in kids looks like? Because what I find is that the parents I work with have higher expectations than kids are capable of, you know, sort of—we’ll talk about the under-eight set—in terms of what is a realistic expectation for how kids can manage their feelings?
Kahlila: Yeah. I think there can be a slight range, right, in terms of variability, as human beings. Five- through eight-year-olds are going to be expressing emotion. A lot of times it’s a full-body experience for them, right? So they’re sad, they’re mad—they’re going to feel the charge in their system, in their full physical system. It could come out in ways that are more physical than it would be for an adult. They actually feel the emotion physically in a way that I think is more powerful than adults.
They also, like we were saying earlier, don’t necessarily have that perspective on what’s a big deal, what’s not a big deal, what can be fixed, what can’t be fixed, how to solve certain problems. Things can feel much more overwhelming to kids because they don’t have that experience and perspective on how to solve problems, why certain things are certain ways, much less of an understanding around things like time and how things function and all of that. So a lot less information on how things run. And because of that, they can have bigger, stronger reactions to things than adults.
Sarah G.: And I would add to that, actually, that most children live in environments that are not very natural anymore. Kids five to eight—humans were meant to spend many, many hours, most of the day, outside in a natural environment, which is calming: walking, exercising, playing, learning from adults just by watching. So, number one, that would help their regulation. And if they did become dysregulated, I don’t know if you’ve ever been outside with a 6-year-old screaming, but it’s not nearly so terrible as it is with one in the grocery store.
So, yeah, I think that also contributes to the misalignment of expectations and capacity.
Sarah R: That makes sense. And I think it’s a tricky age too because, in my experience, both as a parent and a coach, I remember with all three of my kids, I think the hardest time for my husband with them was when they were around six. It was because they were so capable in so many other ways. They could learn how to play chess, they could talk to you about the stars, they could—you know, in some ways, intellectually, they’ve made a big leap and they seem so mature in some ways, but they also could have a meltdown where they’re a crying mess on the floor because they wanted to press the elevator button and you pressed it instead, right?
So there’s, I find, especially in this five- to eight-year-old set, a real asynchronicity between how developed they are in some areas and how emotional regulation is still super tricky for them in other areas. And I find that hard for parents. It does raise their expectations for how regulated it’s possible for their child to be in those difficult moments.
Sarah G.: Especially when HALT—hungry, angry, lonely, and tired—comes into play. I remember getting so annoyed at my husband. I had one child who’s super vulnerable to being hungry, and I’d be like, “What? You forgot the snack?” So they don’t have the capacity to overcome those things yet.
Sarah R: Yeah, and I love how you brought that acronym in, and you talked about the “L” as being—the “L” for an adult might be lonely, but for kids as seeking connection or feeling a lack of connection. I think that is really important to think about.
We’ve already talked a little bit about parental self-regulation. I want to just touch on that again, and also co-regulation. So self-regulation—when we can manage our own big feelings—can you talk about what co-regulation is? Listeners to this podcast hear me talk about it all the time, but because you do talk about that a lot in your book, if you could just talk about what co-regulation is, and also why parental self-regulation and co-regulation are so important in the context of kids’ self-regulation.
Kahlila: Yeah. So co-regulation happens in infancy, right? When we are an infant and we are hungry or sleepy or need soothing of some kind, ideally a calm, available, consistent parent will meet that need for us, and we have a way of calming our body down. So that’s when we first learn that a high-arousal, really active, really uncomfortable bodily state can actually shift. It can actually shift to something calmer. We figure that out. We learn that over time as infants, and that’s our first experience of co-regulation. It comes from outside of us, and then we learn that’s something that our bodies and minds can actually do.
Sarah R: So that’s like soothing a baby. That movement, holding them, making those calming noises. That’s something we do, I mean, a lot of us do that intuitively with babies. Maybe that’s not fair to say, but we’re—it’s easier for us, I think, to do it with an upset baby, a lot of the time, than it is with an upset five- to eight-year-old. Why do you think that is?
Kahlila: I think it has a lot to do with what you just said, Sarah, about the asynchronous development, which is typical, right? We’re supposed to be asynchronous at five through eight, but I think it’s that false sense of, like, “They’ve got it.” They have these capacities. They are in school. They’re on a sports team. They’re learning how to read. They’re making friends. They’re doing all these things that you’re amazed by and that show this type of emotional maturity and growth and development. So maybe there’s a false security there around, “Well, they can do it themselves.” And so it can be frustrating, right?
Sarah G.: Also, they can talk and babies can’t talk. There’s a great documentary called The Dark Matter of Love about some kids who are coming in from an orphanage into a family. Early in the film, there’s a lot of chaos, the kids acting out, but the dad can’t understand because they’re speaking in Russian. And you stay so calm—these kids are shouting—and they have the translation at the bottom of the film.
And I think when you have a five- to eight-year-old, they seem bratty sometimes because of what they’re saying and the way they’re saying it.
Sarah R: Mm-hmm.
Sarah G.: Whereas a baby—we’re biologically programmed, I think, to have that—it makes the back of your neck feel uncomfortable when you hear a shrieking infant, right? “Somebody pick that baby up.” But with a five-, six-, seven-, or eight-year-old, it’s more like, “What’s that kid sounding so bratty?” Obviously they need stuff too. They need to be co-regulated, but—
Sarah R: Yeah.
Sarah G.: That’s part of our natural need to, as Kahlila was saying—it’s totally natural—our need to get these kids in order so they can be functional adults someday. But they also need to learn.
Sarah R: I think that’s one of the reasons why every day I teach, “Kids are doing the best they can.” And I think it’s hard—it’s easy to remember that with a baby, but it’s harder to remember that with a five- to eight-year-old.
So what does co-regulation look like for a five- to eight-year-old with a parent? What would you do to co-regulate with a kiddo? Because that’s how they also learn self-regulation, right? Through co-regulating with us.
Kahlila: Yeah. So in our book, we talk about co-regulation starting with the ability to self-regulate as a parent. So if you notice yourself getting activated in relation to your kid, that’s fine. That happens. An awareness of that is really helpful—like, “I notice myself getting kind of frustrated right now,” or just a tightening of my chest right now, or a furrowed brow. Just being able to have some awareness of where you’re at, what your baseline is, is a good place to start so that then you can take care of yourself a little bit and keep yourself contained.
That can be saying something to yourself like, “Okay, here we go. This is not a big deal. This is something we can do.” Or, “My only goal right now is to keep calm myself. Let me see if I can do that.” Or, “This is temporary. We’ll get through this.” So a little bit of self-talk you can do with yourself if you notice yourself getting a little bit heated and wanting to co-regulate.
If you need something a little more than that in terms of self-regulation as a parent, you could do a little bit of deep breathing. If you practice breathing when you’re not upset, when you’re calm, it can be really helpful in those moments that are more intense. It can be a strategy that’s actually really effective if you take a couple nice deep breaths in.
And if you have more time and you can do something else to calm yourself down in the moment, you can do many, many other things. Sarah talks a lot about strategies to use in the kitchen, right? Like washing dishes. If you have a window in your kitchen, or a window somewhere, staring outside—something sensory-based. Smelling something calm. We like to talk about sticking your head in the freezer, getting that blast of cool air, chewing on a piece of ice. Anything that you can do if you notice yourself getting a little too agitated to then engage with your child.
Because if you’re trying to calm your child—think of a conversation you have with an adult when you’re upset, right? If you’re upset and you’re talking to an adult that’s annoyed with you for being upset, or that is upset themselves, that doesn’t tend to help calm you down. So you want to use that same model and idea for yourself: see if you can calm yourself down, make yourself feel as present and emotionally contained as possible on behalf of your child. So that’s kind of step one.
After that—Sarah, do you want to add in anything about co-regulating?
Sarah G.: Yeah. So step two would be really a variation on what we do with infants. It could be patting on the back: “Hey, what’s going on?” Or, “You need a minute? Do you want to go get your stuffy? Do you want to…” Just kind of calm down—what’s going on? But using that same body, as Kahlila said. You need to be in a calm place. No child’s going to calm down with their parent very agitated.
Then I think just using your words. I make a lot of eye contact with my child who had the hardest time—I actually had two kids who had a very hard time regulating—so I’d say, “Look at me. Look at me.” And I’d start deep breathing and look in their eyes. I wasn’t angry, just like, “Let’s calm down together.” Around those ages, that was super effective for them.
Sarah R: I love that. “Look at me” as a grounding technique, not as a “pay attention to me while I’m talking to you” sort of “look at me.”
Sarah G.: Yeah, no. It was like, “Let’s get back together here.”
Sarah R: Yeah.
Kahlila: I think you also want to frame it a little bit—maybe we’ll talk more about this—the idea of co-regulation is to prevent as much as you can and contain a more disruptive, explosive thing. But it’s okay for the child to feel upset about something, right? It’s not like you want to say, “Stop, let me co-regulate this child so they can stop being upset because this is so annoying to me.” Maybe this is a very legitimate, healthy emotional expression that they’re having, and you’re just there to contain it and guide them and help them ride that wave of emotion.
So I think that’s the other thing that gets a little tricky sometimes for parents. Co-regulation is not necessarily about stopping the child from feeling what they’re feeling and stopping the emotional expression. It’s more about containing it and supporting it so that it can actually flow out of the child, right? If there’s a legitimate hurt or upset feeling that the child’s feeling, you don’t want to co-regulate so that it goes away. You want to co-regulate so the child can actually have their full wave of feeling without it being super disruptive or overwhelming.
Sarah R: Yeah, that’s a great point. Sorry, Sarah, did you want to say something?
Sarah G.: I was just going to say what our point is—what I remember saying to my kids many times—is, “I want to hear what you have to say, but I can’t do that right now because of this.” There’s too much emotion going on.
Exactly what Kahlila is saying. And I think we can use our words to co-regulate too. “Wow, you’re so angry right now, and I’m really sorry you’re so angry. I want to hear what you have to say. Let’s take a few minutes.” So acknowledging what they’re feeling—your words really do matter. “I want to hear what you have to say, but I can’t in this situation that we’re in.”
Sarah R: Yeah, in Peaceful Parenting we call it welcoming feelings. You talk in the book about how that’s a really important part of kids learning self-regulation. Maybe you just mentioned it, but can you expand on that a little bit?
Kahlila: Yeah. I think it’s very important to understand that in order for kids to learn self-regulation, they actually have to feel the full extent of their feelings. Kids age five through eight pretty much don’t have a chance—they don’t have a choice—but to feel their feelings fully, for the most part. And as parents, we can unintentionally sometimes cut them off from the full extent and breadth of their feeling because it’s annoying or disruptive or we don’t want to deal with it.
In that way, they don’t necessarily get to learn how to fully contain it and understand it themselves. If they’re getting prematurely kind of cut off by a parent saying, “Stop,” or even just a parent that’s trying to use distraction—sometimes distraction is effective, but sometimes a parent that’s just like, “Look over here. Stop feeling what you’re feeling”—then it cuts off a little bit of learning for the child to say, “Oh, this is how deep the feeling goes. This is how long it lasts. Okay, this is what it starts to feel like when it starts to go down.”
They get more of an internal knowing and understanding around what the intensity of the feeling feels like. So if you cut that off prematurely, then they don’t get the full extent of that kind of learning.
Sarah R: Yeah. I think sometimes we don’t have the bandwidth for it as parents necessarily every single time they’re upset, but I always talk about thinking of that as an intention. Your intention is to always welcome the feelings, but sometimes you do have to distract because you’ve got to get out the door for work and you don’t have 15 minutes—or 45, or whatever—to sit with them while they go through the feelings. So I think it’s just, over time, our intention is to welcome feelings whenever possible.
Sarah G.: And I think one thing we talk about in the book that I think is just crucial is revisiting. I always say to parents, Saturday morning’s a perfect time. You have pancake breakfast, whatever, if you can. Then you say, “Hey, on Wednesday, when you got so upset and we did get to school, but I was wondering—why were you so angry?” And just revisiting that time so you can understand what happened and then make different plans.
I think that matters. It’s great if you can do it in the moment. That’s often very challenging. I have the same thought as you, Sarah. Time these days for parents is really, really rough. The pressures on them. But to actually go back and touch on that moment, that really matters.
Sarah R: I love what you say about—you don’t have to address it in the moment. You can address it later. I often tell parents, you don’t have to address it in the moment, and often it’s not even as effective because kids are not in their learning brains or their thinking brains, and they can’t learn when you’re trying to address whatever the situation is.
Another thing you talk about is repair, and that goes on the heels of what we were saying—addressing something that’s happened that’s difficult for you or for them or for both of you. Can you just talk a little bit about repair? Whether you’ve kind of messed up or you’ve had some conflict with your kids, why is it important? And what are some best practices around repair?
Kahlila: Yeah. I think this is probably one of the most essential places to go as a parent. It’s such an important parenting tool, actually.
And I think it can be foreign to a lot of parents, the idea of repairing with your child, because that wasn’t how you were raised. You didn’t have a mom or dad come to you after yelling or losing their temper and say, “Hey, you know what? I think I lost my cool.” So it’s kind of like, how do I do this? This doesn’t seem right, to apologize to your kid. There’s all this discomfort that parents can have around it.
But I think it’s so powerful, and one of the reasons it’s so powerful is because we really have to acknowledge that our children are some of our most important attachment relationships, right? There’s a huge importance to how we are feeling about ourselves depending on how our relationship is going with our kids. So repairing is not only healthy and good for the relationship and for the child, but it’s also healthy and important and good for the parent to feel like, “I’ve done the best I could in repairing a situation with a child.”
So we’ve all been there. We’ve lost our cool, overreacted, done something that we regret with our kids. And so when we talk about repair, the first thing that we suggest is just taking some moments of reflection for yourself and repairing with yourself. So that means whatever the shame or the guilt or embarrassment or sadness that you have around what happened, be with that. Be gentle with yourself. See if you can self-soothe a little bit. Parenting is a really hard job. I do the best that I can. Even good parents make mistakes. So really, again, that self-regulation around calming yourself down, trying to contain your emotions before you engage with your child.
So the first repair is really with yourself.
Then you want to be the, in terms of secure attachment, bigger, wiser model of things emotionally for your child. So you go to your child and you talk about it as simply and directly as you can. “Hey, I apologize for yelling. I actually think I overreacted. And I’m sorry that my voice got so loud.” And that’s pretty much it.
Then you see how receptive your child is to that. If they’re open to a hug or a high five, that’s another way to affirm the repair. And then you see what it’s like to move on. But you try to handle it pretty directly.
Again, in terms of the timing of things, it’s nice if you can handle it kind of the same day that it happened, shortly after the event happened. If that’s too hard for some reason, I think there’s no wrong time. There’s never too late to say, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about what happened to us last week, last month. It’s been on my mind, and I want to let you know that I apologize.”
Sarah G.: Yeah. And I think then on the other side of that is that children make mistakes as well, right? And that we can give them—some kids are very natural, “Oh, I’m sorry, Mommy,” and explain whatever happened. But at this age, it’s also unusual for them to do that. And so what one can do is give them an opportunity.
If they spilled, “Get the sponge.” Or say they had a big fit and the juice went everywhere—“Let’s get this cleaned up. You can help me by wiping up the floor.” Because we don’t want them to be stuck in that shame state of, “I’ve made this big mistake and my parent’s mad at me.” Even if you’re not yelling, you can be silently really angry. So you can just give them an opportunity to repair. If they’ve hurt another child, “Take this ice pack and go…” You can apologize by bringing over the ice pack, or drawing a picture, or something. I think it’s really helpful too to help them do it. It’s not like we just wait until they’re old enough to do it.
Sarah R: Mm-hmm. I always say repair helps the kid—when you invite them to make a repair, it helps them feel like a good person again.
And it’s an invitation because we’ve all heard that, “Say you’re sorry,” and then the kid’s just like, “Sorry,” and runs away. That’s not actually a repair. I always say, ask them, “What do you think you could do to help your brother feel better?” Which somehow is easier for kids, I think, than “Apologize” or “Tell them you’re sorry.”
But I love that you highlighted that it makes the person doing the repair feel better too.
And I just want to go back to what Kahlila said about doing your own repair with yourself first, because I think it’s really important that a parent making repair doesn’t turn into asking the child for forgiveness. That’s really what we have to do for ourselves first, because it’s not their job to say, “It’s okay, Mommy,” or whatever.
Someone in my life, who shall remain nameless, still has a hard time with doing repair because his mother did the “I’m seeking forgiveness” kind of repairs, and he just feels they’re empty because of that.
Kahlila: Yeah, yeah.
Sarah R: So you talk about tools. A lot of your book is really practical. You share a lot of self-regulation strategies for both parents and kids. So maybe you’ve mentioned a few already, but what’s your favorite strategy for parents from the book—one that you haven’t mentioned yet?
Kahlila: Yeah. I think my favorite strategy for parents—and this is kind of in the first half of the book, not in the strategies part, but you can think of it as a strategy—is actually playing with your kids most days when you can. It doesn’t have to be for a long time, but kids five through eight love to play, and it brings them so much joy and feels so good to them. I think it can be very regulating for kids, and I think it can be really supportive of the relationship.
Even with my older child, yesterday we had a day where it was parent-teacher conferences, he had a half day from school, and afterwards we did errands and it was kind of more relaxed and we had more time to hang out and chat. We just had an easier time with each other and enjoyed each other’s company. The evening routine was really smooth, and there was a lot of goodness between us and connection. The rapport was made even more solid between us.
I see that happen all the time when parents are able to devote even five minutes of undivided, no-screen, no-phone attention with their kid—playing with them, talking with them. It really builds this ease to the connection such that giving directives or following the routine just makes things smoother. So for me, an effective strategy is having a bit of play and fun connection time with your kid once a day, even if it’s only for five minutes. It really lubricates the whole system and makes things easier. It makes kids more motivated to keep that good feeling with you. So that’s one of my favorites.
Sarah R: Your book is really practical, and you do have strategies that parents can teach kids—things they can use in the moment. So what’s your favorite strategy? We’ll just call one out for the podcast here.
Sarah G.: Yeah, I would say, actually, taking a walk. Doing it with your child when—it’s a great way to regulate. Often once you’re calmer, you’re walking, you can repair. And it’s also something kids can really do themselves as they get older. It’s so simple. If things are really chaotic, it’s just like, let’s just start walking. Let’s walk around the—
Sarah R: I love that.
Sarah G.: Walk. Love that.
Sarah R: And that calls back to your “getting outside.” Everything feels better outside.
Sarah G.: Yes, exactly. And it’s funny—I just saw an article in the newspaper this morning about how now, having the phones that we have compared to not very long ago, landlines, people are actually spending so much more time on the phone. So if you can turn off that phone and take a walk—it’s really interrupting the parent-child relationship in a lot of ways. So we have to be very conscientious about doing that. So: a walk with no phone, I should say.
Sarah R: Yeah. I’m so glad that we didn’t have phones when my kids were little because I think about those hours and hours spent at the playground where, frankly, it can get a little bit boring sometimes. And there was nothing to do but interact with the other people or watch your kids. There were no phones to pull out and see what’s going on on Facebook or whatever.
Kahlila: Yeah. Can I have one more?
Sarah R: Oh, sorry. Yes.
Kahlila: Maybe for, you know, it’s a little harder for five-year-olds, but more for seven- or eight-year-olds: the idea of the child asking for a compromise when they are frustrated about something. You’re setting a limit and they’re not happy with the limit, and their response is frustration or anger.
To really help kids practice this as a strategy—it’s like a parent-child strategy—they can feel a lot more empowered when they say, “Okay, well this is the limit, but may I have a compromise?” And you can have a conversation with your parent that often gets you more into the thinking and speaking part of your brain versus the emotional part of your brain. You’re engaging and you’re trying to collaborate with your parent. That in itself calms things down a little bit. Again, it can be empowering for kids to say, “Wait a minute, I have a right to speak here and see if I can ask for a compromise here and work with my mom or dad and talk it through.”
So I really like that one too.
And then it’s not exactly a strategy, but we have this section in our book where we have, I think, about eight kids talking about a time that was hard for them and how they dealt with it emotionally. Kids seeing other kids deal with big emotions and learning from how other kids do it is actually really helpful too. I’ve seen kids really want to absorb that and use it for themselves when they see another kid using a breathing exercise or pretending to blow bubbles or doing something. A lot of kids are learning calming strategies at their school, and so a parent could also say, “Well, what have you been learning at school that helps with you feeling calm at school?” and have the child teach the parent what that strategy is—another nice way of integrating self-regulation practices for kids.
Sarah R: Yeah. I love that you brought up those calming strategies, like the ones that they’ve often learned at school these days, which is great—like blowing on a cup of hot chocolate, or pretending you’re doing that to do the deep breathing.
I love that your book is really more focused on the parents and what the parents can do in terms of self-regulation and co-regulation, because what I hear over and over from parents is, “Yeah, my kid can tell me five calm-down strategies that they’ve learned at school, but in the heat of the moment, they’re not interested in using it.”
So are there things that you suggest for parents when you have a kid who is resistant to those strategies that they know, maybe when they’re calm, they know they can use, but then when they’re upset they are refusing?
Sarah G.: Practice. They need to practice ahead of time. Then the parents have to catch them doing it, even a small amount. Like, “Oh, I saw you started the breathing, but then I guess you got so overwhelmed. That was amazing.” And so—but also, you know, the stop, drop, and roll that they do in schools for fire—you need to do the same thing with these strategies.
Sarah R: Mm-hmm.
Sarah G.: Practice ahead of time. Talk about, “This is going to be a really hard day for you. You’re so tired and we have these events, and what are you going to do when you’re feeling so overwhelmed? What do you think is going to work for you?” So forth.
Sarah R: Yeah, so prep ahead of time. And even afterwards, like, “Oh, that was so tough. You know, maybe next time we can try to do that calming strategy X that you learned at school when you’re feeling that way.” I think that probably reinforces some of the patterns too, just even talking about it later.
Kahlila: Yeah. And if you feel like there’s something that’s not working for your child and it—don’t use it, right? Think outside of the box. Try new things. Do some trial and error. Every kid is unique, and something that may work for one child may not work for another. So discover that over the years and kind of accept the reality of what works for your child and what doesn’t.
Some children may want a very tight bear hug. Other children might want to chew on a piece of gum or something like that, or take a walk. So be attuned to what is happening for your child and believe them when they say, “This doesn’t help.”
Sarah R: Yeah. Love that.
Thank you so much. This is really—I think your book is really great, and we’ll put a link to it in the show notes. Any place you want to send our listeners before we let you go? Any best place to learn more about you and what you do?
Kahlila: I have a website. It’s kahlilarobinsonphd.com. So that’s my website. I have an Instagram account with the same name, Kahlila Robinson PhD. So you can find a little bit more about me and my practice there. We’d be excited to get feedback from people on the book and see how they’re using it and what’s been helpful. So we are so open to hearing back from people.
Sarah R: Awesome. What about you, Sarah?
Sarah G.: Yeah, so anyone can find me at sarahgerstenzang.com. And I echo Kahlila’s request. If people find something useful in the workbook, we just love to—we’re proud of the work, and we’d love to know how it feels to actually use it.
Sarah R: Wonderful. We’ll put those links in the show notes.
Before I let you go, there’s a question that I ask every guest at the end of the podcast. So maybe, Kahlila, you go first, and then I’ll ask you to answer the same question, Sarah. Which is: if you could give some advice to your younger parent self—go back in time and give yourself advice—what advice would you give yourself?
Kahlila: I would probably say: enjoy it more. There’s something about the intensity and the demands of scheduling and routines and pressure and all that kind of stuff. See if you can not sweat the small stuff as much and be a little bit more relaxed about things and enjoy it more.
Sarah R: I love that. That’s so important.
Sarah G.: So we used to have very long dinner hours, and I was just thinking as we were talking about repair today: I should have done more repairs after some of those dinners didn’t go—sort of erupted. We had a nephew living with us for a while, so had four teenagers at a table. Anyway, lots of it was fabulous and wonderful, but also sometimes things happen. So yeah, I think, “Oh, I should have done more repairs after those dinners.”
Sarah R: Well, take your own advice. It’s never too late.
Kahlila: That’s right. That’s right.
Sarah R: Let me know.
Sarah G.: I’ve apologized for everything. Don’t worry.
Sarah R: Oh, good, good.
Well, thank you both so much for coming on. It was a pleasure to meet you, and thanks for all the support you’re giving parents out in the world.
Kahlila: Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you for having us. It was so nice to be here today.
Sarah R: Thank you.
Sarah G.: I really—
Kahlila: Appreciate it.
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Strong-willed kids can be some of the most challenging — and the most incredible — kids to parent.
In this bonus mini-episode, Sarah and Corey talk about what makes strong-willed kids unique, why they can feel so hard to parent in everyday moments, and why their determination, honesty, and sense of justice are traits to be celebrated.
They also discuss how small shifts in how we communicate with strong-willed kids can dramatically reduce power struggles while preserving connection.
If you’re parenting a child who pushes back, refuses to be bossed around, and stands firmly in their beliefs, this conversation will help you see their strengths and learn how to work with their temperament instead of constantly fighting against it.
Sarah also shares details about her upcoming workshop on parenting strong-willed kids.
You can find the workshop at https://reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/workshop
00:00 — Strong-willed kids: a blessing and a challengeWhy Sarah and Corey both love working with strong-willed kids.
01:00 — What makes strong-willed kids specialTheir sense of justice, independence, and willingness to question authority.
02:00 — Why strong-willed kids can make everyday parenting harderWhen kids won’t “just put their coat on.”
03:00 — A real-life example of strong-willed determinationSarah’s story about her niece tying her shoes while holding a fidget spinner.
05:00 — The nervous system reaction to being told what to doWhy strong-willed people resist being bossed around.
06:00 — The surprising realization Sarah’s son had at age 13Why he thought one parent was “better.”
07:00 — Power struggles and how to avoid themWhy connection matters so much with strong-willed kids.
08:00 — Workshop announcementParenting Strong-Willed Kids: Tools to Reduce Power Struggles Without Crushing Their Spirit.
Sarah: Hi, Corey.
Corey: Hey, Sarah.
Sarah: Let’s talk about strong-willed kids. Are your kids strong-willed?
Corey: Absolutely.
Sarah: Yeah, both. What about you?
Corey: Both of them. And yes—the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I am extremely strong-willed.
Sarah: Me too. And my kids— all three of my kids are strong-willed. And me and my husband. You should see us play board games together.
It did make it harder to parent them. And I also love how I am, and I love how my kids were and are. What do you love about strong-willed kids?
Corey: I love so much about strong-willed kids. I actually think some of my favorite clients to work with are those who have strong-willed kids.
Sarah: For sure.
Corey: Because these kids are just… what I love about them is they’re going to change the world. They’re not going to just go along with the crowd. They’re not going to just do things because you said so. They’re going to really think deeply about things. They have this deep sense of right and wrong.
Sarah: Justice. Yeah.
Corey: Yes—justice guiding who they are and what they want to do in the world.
Sarah: Yeah. What I love about strong-willed kids is that they speak their truth. You know how they feel. They’re not afraid to speak their truth about what they like and what they don’t like.
Corey: Yeah. You always know where you stand with them. There’s no guesswork involved with a strong-willed kid.
Sarah: Yeah. And they’re so willing to stand up for what they believe in—even if it comes at a cost to them.
I love how they won’t be bossed around. Because they’re little and they’re still learning, sometimes they don’t realize it’s at their own expense.
Corey: Yes.
Sarah: I think it’s something to be admired. And also, as a parent, it makes it tough sometimes to work with them.
Corey: Absolutely. There have been so many times where I look at my kids, or I’m talking to clients, and we’re just like, “Why can’t they just go put their coat on now?”
We have these busy schedules we’re trying to get through, and sometimes when you have these little strong-willed kids, you feel like you can’t get through the schedule because they won’t just go do what you ask them to do.
Sarah: Yeah.
One time when I was teaching a workshop on strong-willed kids—and another one’s coming up; we’ll get to that—I looked up the dictionary definition of strong-willed. It was something like: tends to do what one wants, even if others advise against it.
And I love that.
It reminds me of something that happened recently. As you know, I was visiting my sister and my niece, who’s eight. I was helping get my niece ready for school. She was tying her shoes, and she had a fidget spinner in one hand while trying to tie them.
Of course, tying your shoes is already tricky when you’re still learning, and trying to do it with a fidget spinner makes it even harder.
I casually said, “Let me hold that.”
She said, “No.”
I started laughing, and she looked at me.
I said, “Have you ever heard the expression cut off your nose to spite your face?”
She said no.
I explained that it basically means making things harder for yourself just to prove a point. I told her, “I don’t care if you hold that fidget spinner while you tie your shoes, but it’s making life harder for you. I love that you don’t want to be bossed around, and I admit I kind of gave you an order to let me hold it. I love that you’re standing up for yourself and not letting anyone boss you around. But holding onto that fidget spinner while tying your shoes is making things harder for you.”
She didn’t say anything.
She finished tying her shoe with the fidget spinner still in her hand.
Then when she moved to the next shoe, she handed it to me and said, “Will you hold this?”
I said, “Sure.”
And she tied her shoe without the fidget spinner.
That’s such a good example of how strong-willed kids can be. If my husband tells me to do something I was already planning to do, I can feel my nervous system activate—like, He can’t tell me what to do.
But because I’m a grown-up with experience, I don’t shout “No!” when that happens.
So that little tweak can really make things easier for strong-willed kids—and for us.
Corey: Absolutely.
And we were saying off camera too—obviously you are also my boss, and you are the only person in my life who can tell me what to do, and I happily do it without that nervous system response.
So all those tweaks that you’ve taught me over the years—how you manage me—show that there really is a way to work with strong-willed people, whether it’s a little kid or a grown-up, to make them feel empowered when you’re working together.
Sarah: Totally.
My middle son is extremely strong-willed. He’s 21 now, but growing up he absolutely would cut off his nose to spite his face so he wouldn’t feel bossed around.
My husband tends to be a bit more traditional—still peaceful, but a little more direct and demanding.
One time when my son was about 13, he said, “Dad’s a better parent than you are.”
I said, “Really? Why do you say that?”
He said, “Because I always do what he tells me to do.”
I knew what he meant. My husband would say things like, “You have to do this,” and my son would comply.
So I asked him, “Have I ever asked you to do something that you didn’t do?”
He stopped and thought.
Then he said, “No.”
The difference was that he didn’t feel bossed around when I asked him to do something.
And he usually did follow my husband too because he felt connected to him—which is another really important thing with strong-willed kids: connection.
But it was funny watching his face as the realization landed. The ground shifted for him.
He realized, “I do what my mom asks too. I just don’t notice that she’s telling me what to do.”
I thought that was hilarious.
Corey: That shows you worked with him so effectively that he didn’t even notice directions were happening.
Sarah: Yeah, exactly.
Well, there are so many fun things to talk about with strong-willed kids. I love them so much.
But I also see parents every day—and I know you do too—who feel really stuck. They feel like they’re constantly battling and getting into power struggles.
That’s why I’m teaching a workshop on this.
It’s on Wednesday, March 18th at noon Eastern time. You can go to reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/workshop to sign up.
If you have a strong-willed kiddo, this workshop is for you.
If you’re in our membership, it’s included, so don’t sign up separately.
It’s a live workshop on Zoom where we’ll talk about how to work with strong-willed kids so you can get through the day without feeling like you’re constantly fighting with them—while still preserving connection and getting the things done that need to get done.
If you can’t make it live, you’ll get the replay and a cheat sheet afterward.
If you’re listening to this on the podcast, we’ll put the link in the show notes.
If you’re seeing this on Instagram, the link is in my bio.
I hope to see everyone there.
Thanks, Corey.
Corey: Thank you.


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I am so excited I was able to interview a parenting thought leader I greatly admire. Lenore did not disappoint! So much wisdom, and so much fun! I think you’ll love this podcast episode.In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I interview Lenore Skenazy, author of “Free-Range Kids,” which grew into the Free-Range Kids movement. Now she is president of Let Grow, the national nonprofit that is making it easy, normal, and legal to give kids back independence. We talk about screens, anxiety, free play, and why childhood independence matters more than ever.
👉 Also- just announced- I’m teaching a workshop next week: “Parenting Strong-Willed Kids: Tools to Reduce Power Struggles without Crushing Their Spirit.” All the details HERE.
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We talk about:
* 00:00 — Introduction to Lenore Skenazy
* 03:00 — The disappearance of unstructured childhood and why kids need risk, boredom, and problem-solving
* 06:00 — How independence builds confidence
* 08:00 — The social pressure parents feel
* 09:00 — How communities can bring back free play
* 15:00 — What kids learn through unsupervised play
* 19:00 — Why kids prefer real-world play to screens
* 24:00 — How fear reshaped parenting
* 29:00 — The rise of tracking and constant surveillance
* 34:00 — Independence and mental health
* 37:00 — The Let Grow Experience
* 41:00 — Kids are not actually addicted to screens
* 42:00 — Bringing back the teenage babysitter
* 46:00 — How giving kids independence reduces the pressure of intensive parenting
* 49:00 — The value of “kid world”
* 50:00 — Lenore’s advice to her younger parent self
Resources mentioned in this episode:
* Lenore’s Book Free Range Kids
* Two free independence-building programs for schools
* The free “Four Weeks to a Let Grow Kid” program
* Yoto Screen Free Audio Book Player
* The Peaceful Parenting Membership
* Evelyn & Bobbie bras
* Strong-Willed Kids Workshop
Connect with Sarah Rosensweet:
* Instagram
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* YouTube
* Website
* Join us on Substack
* Newsletter
* Book a short consult or coaching session call
xx Sarah and Corey
Your peaceful parenting team- click here for a free short consult or a coaching session
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Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Lenore Skenazy. You might know her as the author of the book Free-Range Kids and the founder of the movement of the same name. Now she’s president of Let Grow, the national nonprofit she co-founded with Peter Gray, Daniel Shuchman, and Jonathan Haidt. Their mission: making it easy, normal, and legal to give kids back some old-fashioned independence.
Lenore says our kids are smarter, safer, and stronger than our culture gives them credit for. If you’re worried about the ubiquitousness of screens in your child’s life and/or about the rise of childhood anxiety, you’re going to want to have a listen to this episode. Lenore and I discussed the importance of unstructured, unsupervised time in childhood, why it disappeared, how to bring it back, and what happens when we do or don’t.
She was so much fun to speak with, and her message is one that all parents need to hear and that all kids want them to hear.
I just loved this conversation with Lenore, and I know you will too. Okay. Let’s meet Lenore.
Sarah: Hi, Lenore. Welcome to the podcast.
Lenore: Thank you, Sarah. I am happy to be here, wherever here is.
Sarah: Well, I’m so excited to talk to you. I’ve followed your work since you were called the Worst Mom in America, back in the beginning of your Free-Range Kids days. I’m so excited about your new project that you’ve been working on. So maybe, if you could just introduce yourself and tell us who you are and what you do.
Lenore: Sure. I am Lenore Skenazy. I live in New York City. I have two grown kids—growing, grown, whatever you want to say. When are they done? I don’t know. But I wrote the book Free-Range Kids, and I am now president of Let Grow, which is the nonprofit that’s promoting childhood independence.
Sarah: I love it. I was recently—this, I promise, is going to make sense when I get back to it—but I recently listened to the memoir of Patti Smith, the artist and musician, and she talked a lot about her childhood growing up in the fifties, and how unsupervised and unstructured it was, and all of that. She had really great memories of playing in the woods, and the games that she would make up with her brothers and all of the neighborhood kids and the things that they would do. And I really wondered: is that kind of childhood why she became such a creative person and, you know, a successful person in that way? And it made me feel sad for that kind of childhood that’s lost to kids today.
So why don’t kids have that sort of unstructured, unsupervised play, like maybe you and I even grew up with? Because I know I did, for sure.
Lenore: I did, for sure, too. And everybody did. Some people ended up being Patti Smith, and most of us didn’t. Nonetheless, I’m sorry to see it evaporating too.
One of my recent analogies is that the rainforest was sort of disappearing, but we didn’t notice until we looked at pictures from before and after, from 1970 till now, and it’s like, oh my God, that’s the earth’s lungs, and look how small they’ve gotten. And I feel that same way about unsupervised time in childhood. It’s this natural resource. It’s something that all kids thrive on having, and we just keep shrinking it and replacing it with organized and supervised activities that we think are better, that we think, oh, now they’re learning chess, or they’ve made it to the travel lacrosse team—that has to be good. You’re up in Canada: made it to the travel hockey team. That’s gotta be good. More time in the luge—that’s wonderful, right?
But in fact, what kids really need, and what their whole innards are programmed to expect, is all sorts of time when they’re making up their own games, when they’re dealing with some fears and some squabbles with their friends as they figure out, what are we gonna do today? And, you know, is that tree gonna be too hard to climb? Let me try.
Without those everyday experiences of a little bit of fear, a little bit of risk, some exhilaration that nobody is there to give you credit for or a trophy for or a grade for, there’s something called the internal locus of control.
Internal locus of control is when you feel you can handle things. Things will come at you and you’ll deal, because you are confident and competent enough. An external locus of control is when you feel others are both manipulating you and taking care of you, that your fate is in someone else’s hands.
We’ve sort of swapped the internal locus of control of Patti Smith’s childhood and our childhoods for this external locus of control where somebody’s saying, okay, it’s three o’clock, I’m gonna pick you up, and then we get you to dance, and then we got Kumon, and then there’s homework, and then there’s dinnertime, and 20 minutes exactly of reading, because that’s how you’re gonna turn into a kid who loves reading. “Okay, start. Stop. I really love that. Really fell into that book.”
What I’m trying to say is that Mother Nature expected kids to get all of this give and take and excitement and confusion, and when we take it out, kids end up drooping because it’s like they haven’t gotten something very necessary for their development, sort of like food, except it’s independence and it’s free play. And we keep looking around saying, oh, it must be COVID that’s making kids so depressed. It must be phones that are making kids so anxious. And I think it’s just the fact that they have this very strange childhood, unlike what the system expects. And when you’re missing something foundational, you droop.
Sarah: Our mutual friend Ned Johnson, who’s a co-author of The Self-Driven Child—
Lenore: Love it.
Sarah: They talk a lot in that book about how we want our kids to be self-driven, but that self-drive and autonomy are correlated, in that when autonomy goes down, so does self-drive.
Lenore: They are the same thing! It’s so funny because we say we want self-driven kids, and then we drive them. Literally drive them to the Kumon and the Jazzercise.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s—I mean, I want to come back to, when kids have time on their own, they learn that they can figure it out. But just on a funny note about that self-driven and driving them places, it’s really hard to raise your kids this way—with unstructured, unsupervised time—when nobody else is doing it.
I remember, I live in a big city, and from the age of 12, when my kids were—I thought 12 was a good age for them to start getting around the city by themselves. They did. And of course, it wasn’t just like, okay, all of a sudden you’re going on the subway by yourself, but we worked up to it. So by the time they were 12, they were capable.
But I got so much judgment from other parents. My middle son played baseball, and he would get himself to practices and get himself home. And there were parents who would insist on giving him rides because they were concerned about him going on the subway by himself. And then I kind of had to give myself little reassurances, like, it’s okay, it’s okay if they’re judging you for having your kids be out and about by themselves. But how do you—maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, because we could talk about some ideas first—but when you are doing this on your own, say you’re letting your kids do things that you think are age-appropriate, developmentally appropriate, and then other people aren’t, what are some ways that parents can kind of give themselves some self-talk? What should I have told myself back then?
Lenore: Okay, I’m not going to talk about self-talk. I’m going to talk about changing the culture that you’re in so that you’re not the only one sending your kid to the park. And then also what Let Grow, the nonprofit I run, suggests in terms of giving kids back an easy way to give kids back some of this free play that we’re talking about.
First of all, if you want your kid to be playing outside, it’s no fun for them to play outside—whether people think you’re the worst mom or not—if they go outside to the park and, let’s see, I can keep going down the slide. That’s a lot of fun. You know, you need somebody to play tag with. You need somebody to talk to. You need somebody to swing next to or to push you.
So how do you get that? You talk to some of the other parents in the neighborhood and you say, let’s set up Free Play Fridays, right? I know everybody’s really busy, but a Friday afternoon before the weekend begins—how about from three to five, we all let our kids just play at the park together?
And I’ve heard about this working in many communities, including one 12-year-old who was so bored—I don’t know how he found out about it; I guess his mom must have known me or something—who went and put postcards in all the neighbors’ mailboxes, and he ended up with like 20 or 25 kids playing on Friday afternoons because he said, hey, let’s all meet, and parents, you don’t have to come. It’s not impossible to renormalize the idea of free play in a neighborhood.
And if you can’t get a bunch of kids coming together at the park, another idea somebody once sent to Let Grow, which I love—she called it a friendship club or friendship camp because she did it during summer. And it was simply this: in your neighborhood, there are probably some families that also would like to see their kids playing more, especially during the summer perhaps. And so what she did is she sort of made a pact with three or four other families that, look, my kid can knock on your kid’s door, your kids can knock on my kid’s door, and if my kid’s available, then that’s it. They’ll play. I won’t supervise them. I’ll know that they’re there. They can play outside, inside.
And that way you’ve sort of made it like the fifties. So now there’s kids going around the neighborhood knocking on each other’s doors, and that way you don’t have to worry about planning a play date, and you don’t have to have a phone involved. It’s just going door to door and finding these three or four friends who’s around.
People have started swearing by the landlines that you can buy now, or these pseudo-landlines. There’s one called Tin Can. And so kids can call up each other and set up a play date without falling into a phone and then never coming out again.
So those are all ways that you can sort of make free play happen again in your neighborhood. But what Let Grow recommends on top of all those is trying to get—we have something we call a Let Grow Play Club, but we might change the name for middle and high school because play sounds so babyish. And really what we’re talking about is the—
Sarah: Hang club. Call it the Hang Club.
Lenore: The Hanging Club. I was thinking of calling it the third—I can’t remember if it’s called a third space or a third place—but like when Starbucks started, everyone was excited because now there’s a third place. It’s not work and it’s not home. We can go and hang out.
So this would be having schools stay open for mixed-age, no-phones free play.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: And it solves so many problems. First of all, if you send kids home to play, we just discussed that oftentimes they won’t end up at the park because there’s nobody else at the park. So they’ll be back in their room on a phone, or you’re paying a lot of money and spending a lot of time driving them someplace else to be on an organized team, league, whatever. But at school, all the kids are already there, right? So it’s just a question of them staying a little longer.
If you’re in a very dangerous, scary neighborhood, you’re not sending them to the park. You’re just saying, you know, how about from three to five, four days a week, there could be a play club where there’s an adult supervising, but like a lifeguard.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: Right? So they’re not organizing games. They’re not solving the problems, the arguments. They’re just watching and they’re there in case of a shark or some other emergency.
And then the kids—and then you leave some stuff out for the kids. And actually, you’ll see this particular idea recommended in The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, who’s one of my co-founders of Let Grow. And one of the coolest things I found out, because I was helping him on the chapter for schools, was if you’re having a Let Grow Play Club after school, you should always have some really big sandbags there for the kids to play with. And do you know why?
Sarah: No.
Lenore: Take a guess. What’s the good of a sandbag?
Sarah: Like, how big are the sandbags you’re talking about?
Lenore: Like the size of a pillow.
Sarah: Okay.
Lenore: Like a filled pillow.
Sarah: For bases.
Lenore: Yeah, that’s something you could definitely use for bases.
Sarah: For some, any kind of markers and games.
Lenore: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And for building. And the sort of sneaky reason for having sandbags is that a kid can’t carry them by themself.
Sarah: Oh, it involves cooperation.
Lenore: It automatically creates cooperation, which is what playing in the woods does, which is what organizing a game of baseball does. And you want kids to have these easy ways of interacting and getting to know each other, the non-awkward ways.
Sarah: Right.
Lenore: And saying, hey, help me with this. Or like, look, we gotta bring this over here, it’s third base. Yeah, you’re doing something together and you’re automatically starting a relationship without any kind of like, “Will you be my friend?” Right. Or “I’m so lonely, Lily.” It’s not that.
And that’s what play has always done. Who are your friends? As Peter Gray, who’s another one of my Let Grow co-founders and a professor of psychology, says: when you’re a kid, a friend is defined as a kid you play with.
Sarah: Right.
Lenore: You know, “I’m going to Julie’s house.” What are we gonna do? “We’re gonna play.” Okay. I’ll see you at seven.
And so you want to have a bunch of stuff that—the technical term, I guess it’s not that technical, is loose parts.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: You want to have loose parts out there, and kids can bring them from home. And I’m talking remote-control cars and old suitcases and fabric and some rope or PVC pipe. Kids just figure out what to do with it. And so they’re being creative, and they’re explaining, “No, we’re gonna build it this way.” That’s communication. And then they’re cooperating.
“We’re gonna drag this bag over here.” And all the social-emotional skills that kids are getting now in worksheets on the rug during their social-emotional-skills-building time, you know, or little cards that say, “Remember, you’re not alone. Remember, people like you. You are good. You’re kind.” It’s like all this sort of fallacious confidence and connection happens automatically through play.
You play with the kids you like, and frankly, if you’re a total jerk and nobody wants to play with you, you start recognizing that and adjusting.
We’ve seen this in a play club. My favorite story about a play club was a kid who—everybody was jumping into a leaf pile. It was down in South Carolina. And they’d jump in the middle, and it’d be really fun, or they’d do a cartwheel into the middle, whatever, and then they’d leave and then it’d be the next kids. And they were organizing themselves.
And then one kid jumped into the middle of the leaf pile and would not budge. He was just there. And everyone’s like, “Hey, get out of the way. Hey, you’re in the way. Move already. Hey, it’s my turn.” And he was just like, “I can’t hear you.”
And so finally the kids said, “Well, let’s just jump around him. There’s enough leaves.” And so they started doing that, and then the kid—the middle-of-the-leaf-pile kid—walked off.
And what’s wonderful about this is that the kids saw a problem, tried a solution—move, move, move—that didn’t work, and then came up with another solution: ignore him.
And had there been an adult who was jumping in to save them, to save the leaf-pile day, first of all, the kid would’ve gotten all the attention, because the other kids would just be waiting while the teacher says, “Now, you know, Aiden, we don’t sit in the middle of a leaf pile. There are other children. You see them there.” And then the kids—that would’ve been completely nothing. They just would’ve been waiting for an adult, as always, to solve the problem.
And they wouldn’t have been creative and they wouldn’t have been working together to solve a problem. But instead they did. And so that’s why you need free play, so that all those skills come into play. And by the way, it’s fun and it’s what kids should be doing.
But if you have a school starting a play club, all our materials are free, and they basically explain the philosophy behind why loose-parts free play is good and why it’s great to have different ages together because, you know, the older kids sort of are nicer to the younger kids.
Peter Gray always says, if you have seven-year-olds trying to play a card game together, it’s a disaster. It cannot work. But if you have nine-year-olds with the seven-year-olds, the nine-year-olds are so cool that the seven-year-olds want to be like them. And then the nine-year-olds are saying, like, hold up your hand. We can see your cards. Don’t put the—you know, don’t put an ace down. And they take the ace and they put it back in the kid’s hand. You don’t throw the ace down until the end.
And so it sounds like maybe some yelling or whining or complaining, and yet it’s education. And the older kids are learning how to explain a game, and the younger kids are learning how to be the older kids. And we keep segregating kids by age so that it’s only seven-year-olds against seven-year-olds in baseball or soccer or hockey, and all you know is who’s the fastest and who’s the best.
Sarah: I love it. I was watching some of the videos on your website, and there was one, a free play after school video, and the loose parts in this video were cardboard.
Lenore: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: And it actually—it’s going to make me cry—it moved me to tears, watching these kids. And there was this one scene of all these little kids, the game was two kids hold up the cardboard and another kid runs through it. And there was this clip of them working out whose turn it was and who was going to go next. And then they’re just doing the activity, and all the other things they were doing with the cardboard. It was so—they were all so immersed and at times joyful, and it was just so great to see, like, so wonderful to see. I really think it’s so great what you are doing.
And I think, you know, a lot of Jonathan Haidt’s book was about screens, and everyone’s worried about screens, and I think you talk about this too: the reason it becomes this vicious cycle, like a chicken and egg, is kids don’t have anything to do, parents don’t have anything for them to do, so they are on screens. And then they’re on screens and then they don’t get out and play. So it sounds like part of the answer here is doing the—getting the play going first.
Lenore: Yeah. First of all, I love that video too. And what I love about that game they’re playing with the two kids holding a piece of cardboard, and they’re all arguing like, who’s gonna go first to punch the cardboard? Which doesn’t seem like the funnest game in the world, but they were so eager. It’s like, “You’ll go first, then I’ll go.” “No, no, he’ll go and then I’ll go and then you’ll go.” It is just such a beautiful thing to see. And it’s all the different ages, it’s all the different races, and it all seems to be boys because who’s stupid enough to—
Sarah: The girls don’t want to punch cardboard. My kid one time was telling me about her two friends who were boys who were doing this thing as they were riding their bikes down the street, and they were spitting up into the air ahead of themselves and then trying to ride through the spit. And she was like, “Only boys would do that.”
Lenore: That is just weird.
Sarah: It works. It’s so much less waste in a milk bag.
Lenore: It sounds really smart.
Sarah: So anyways—
Lenore: No, no, I did grow up here, but we also don’t have milk cartons. We have milk bags. That sounds really smart.
Sarah: It works. It’s so much less waste in a milk bag. Everybody in—at least in Eastern Canada—we have like a plastic pitcher that’s got an open top, and the milk comes in a big bag with three smaller, like liter-and-a-half bags in it. Just picture a bag of milk.
Lenore: A bag of bags.
Sarah: You put your bag of milk in the pitcher and you snip a little hole in the corner. And then you pour it from the pitcher in the bag, and it’s far less waste than four gallons.
Lenore: Be Canadians. What can I say? We’ve got it all.
Sarah: So anyways, no, no, I did grow up in the US though, and we did have the pictures on the milk cartons.
Lenore: Right. So those pictures on the milk cartons did a number on us because, first of all, they said, like, “Have you seen me?” or “Missing,” and they never had a little asterisk that says, “I was taken in a custodial dispute between my divorcing parents.”
Sarah: Right.
Lenore: Because that was the vast majority of the kids, or they were runaways. But it felt like, since nobody explained this, that these were all children who were kidnapped by strangers off the street while riding their bike or walking home.
That’s also the era we got cable television, which gave us the 24-hour news cycle, which had never been part of anybody’s life until then.
And then there was when Adam Walsh was taken—it was a horrible story—but his dad was John Walsh, and he started America’s Most Wanted, and he went around the country and in fact ended up testifying in front of Congress that 50,000 children are kidnapped and murdered every year, which was off by a factor of about 50,000. Because it’s extraordinarily rare.
And so it just started seeming like, you know, you open the door and you let your kid outside and you’ll never see them again. Ann Landers or Dear Abby—or one of the advice columnists of the era—said that you better take, you know, try to write down or take a picture of your child before they leave for school, so you know what they’re wearing, because you won’t be able to give the information.
There was just a lot of panic about something that is extraordinarily rare.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: And so it just became the norm to not let them out of our sight. And then a couple of other things happened in tandem with this. One is, of course, we’re in a litigious society, and so schools thinking like, well, what if something bad does happen, even though it probably won’t? We don’t want to be sued. Let’s just say that no kid can get off the bus, or that no kid can play on the monkey bars, or that we can’t have any swings.
And then you have experts, and experts are always trying to tell you something really scary that they’re an expert in, that if you don’t do this, you know, something terrible will happen. Parents magazine would come—like, you gotta give it to those editors at Parents magazine—they had to come up with something terrifying every month.
Sarah: Well, it sells, right? And headlines, you know, clicks today and headlines.
Lenore: Right. And then there’s a marketplace, and the marketplace is always trying to figure out something that can sell, and sell a lot. And the best thing you can do is sell parents a product that’s going to save their kid from something horrible.
I was just reading a study that was done about tracking devices, and I think at this point it was like 86% of parents track their kids. And, you know, some tell them that they’re being tracked and some don’t.
There’s the Gizmo watch. If you buy it for your kid, it’s a tracking device and a phone. And if they don’t pick up the phone, what happens?
Sarah: 911.
Lenore: No, that’d be really terrible. I mean, I can—
Sarah: I can picture it.
Lenore: I could picture it too, but right now what happens is that it turns into a bugging device.
Sarah: Oh gosh.
Lenore: So that you can listen to see, is your kid like, “No, get away from me, stranger”? Or—you know—but it also allows parents to hear, like, “I hate my sister,” or “I’m mad at my teacher,” or “I ate a candy bar.” I mean, it just gives kids no life outside of constant surveillance, which is what we used to do with prisoners on work release. They had this kind of monitoring, right? They had an ankle monitor and you could see if the guy was going to work and then coming right back home. And even the prisoners knew that this was better than prison. Beats prison, right? But it’s not freedom.
Sarah: Yeah.
Lenore: What does a lack of freedom do to kids? I think the biggest thing is that it tells them two things. One is that the world is so scary and bad that you better not just be out there on your own, and also that your parents don’t think you can handle being out there on your own.
And I’ve been trying to grapple with this for a while. I was talking to these teenagers, and it was about eight years ago at this point, because at that point not everybody was tracked yet. But one of the kids who was tracked said to me something really strange. He said, “I just wish that I”—he was over 16—“I wish I’d get pulled over for speeding.”
I was like, that’s a very strange wish. Why?
And he said, “Because I would have to deal with it myself.”
He was longing—I mean, I think there’s this human longing to see what you’re made of and to prove to yourself and to the world that you can handle something on your own.
And with the ability to always be tracked by your parents and always press a button and be connected to your parents, your parents are on call for you in a way that was never possible until just now.
And it’s nice to help. You know, you want to help your kids. So if they call—my kids to this day, they’re in their twenties—if they call, they’re having a problem, I will help. But the instantaneousness of it means that without trying to figure out an answer, solve something on their own, kids can reach you and then you solve it. So you don’t know what they’re capable of and they don’t know what they’re capable of.
And so then you answer the next time, and the next time, and the next time, and you track them. And nobody ever gets the peace of mind. You know, the tracking devices say they’ll provide peace of mind, but they provide the opposite because, yes, it’s nice to know they’re gonna be home in time for dinner, but you also don’t know that, like if they were on a trip or even walking home or riding their bike and their chain fell off their bike—it’s a point of pride if you make it home with a broken bike or if you fix the chain, and it’s not a point of pride if you call your dad and say, can you come help me?
The dad feels proud, but he thinks, oh, my little girl can’t do anything yet. And the little girl thinks, oh, my dad—I can’t do anything yet.
So I think it changes a lot about the parent-child relationship, and it changes the child’s relationship to themselves because it’s not just themself. It’s themself plus this squad.
Sarah: I think it also reduces community. The example that you just gave—I could picture if that happened to one of my kids and they couldn’t figure out how to put the chain back on, they might stop somebody and say, can you help me with this? Or, you know, go into a garage and ask for a screwdriver from the mechanic to put their—you know—and just their interconnectedness that we all have with each other. I think if there’s just a direct line between parent and child, we lose out on that sense of community.
Lenore: That is so true. And it reminds me of a piece I haven’t run yet about a mom whose kid was sort of radicalized online and ended up in a locked ward for a little while, and then came out and gradually got better through doing music and through having friends.
And then he called her one day and he said, “Mom, the greatest thing—” Oh no, he came home and he said, “The greatest thing just happened to me.” And she’s like, what? Because she’s so grateful that he’s doing much, much better now. He’s in high school.
And he said, “I got a flat tire on my bike.”
She’s like, okay, that sounds just great. What do you mean?
And he had done exactly what you just said. That’s why it reminded me. He had found a bike shop and he’d gone in there and asked for help, and they fixed it. And he got back on his bike, and they didn’t even charge him because he is a nice young man and they were helping, and everybody felt great.
But for him it was so important to solve a problem, a real-world problem, on his own, that he regarded it as one of the highlights of his life to date.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: And his mom, in talking to me about the dire darkness that he’d been in and climbing back out to light, felt that this was one of the things that was crucial.
And I know that we keep racing to help our kids, and we’re doing this out of love and wanting to help them, to provide for them. And it’s really hard to see that stepping back is also a gift.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: Right? You’re giving kids this gift of trust and independence and time when they can figure stuff out on their own. And I think it would go a long way to solving a lot of the anxiety crisis and the depression crisis that we see in young people because, of course, you feel depressed if you don’t think you can handle anything, and you’re anxious if you think, what’s gonna happen? I can’t handle it.
So with us being there all the time, out of the goodness of our hearts, we’re really preventing some growth from happening.
Sarah: Yeah. And you make a big—in your TED Talk and other things you’ve written—you make a big connection to that stuff and childhood anxiety, which you’ve mentioned a few times, but maybe you could speak directly to how you think that this is related to anxiety, which has certainly spiked in the last few years.
Lenore: Well, it’s not just me noticing that anxiety is going up. I know that right now the focus is all on the phones, but the anxiety was going up for decades, long before there were phones. And so our colleague Peter Gray, who’s the psychology professor at Boston College, did a piece in the Journal of Pediatrics that came out now three years ago, and it just showed that over the decades—not just since COVID, not just since the iPhone—over the decades, as children’s independence and free play have waned, their anxiety and depression have been going up. And by the way, their creativity has also been going down.
And it’s not just correlation, it’s causation, for all the reasons that we’ve just been discussing. It’s when you figure out what you like to do and you make it happen, and it doesn’t work, and then you work harder and you make it happen now—we all know that the triumph of like, oh my God, the cake didn’t rise, and now I made it and it did. That’s what kids need day after day after day.
And instead they’re getting lessons. They’re getting school, and then after school they get more school that just happens to be school about lacrosse or school about chess.
And so the antidote is more independence. And there are two things I’d like to say about that.
One is that Let Grow has a free program for schools that’s really easy. It takes like 15 minutes twice a month, and it’s called the Let Grow Experience. If you go to letgrow.org, you click on it, there it is. And what it is, is it’s a homework assignment that teachers give their kids—or that a counselor can give the kids, whoever it is at the school—once a month that says, go home and do something new on your own with your parents’ permission, but without your parents.
And each month there’s a slightly different tinge to it, like do something with a friend, or do something for your family, or do something out in the community. But the whole idea is for the kid to see that the world is their oyster. I can go to the store. I can bake the cake. I can climb the tree. And it’s for the parents to sit there shaking the whole time, yet their kid is getting the milk or whatever.
And then have this burst of joy when their kid comes through the door. They brought the milk. Oh, and look, they also brought cookies. I didn’t say to get cookies. Okay, they brought cookies. And recognizing that their kid is growing up and competent and isn’t a baby anymore, is capable of being a real person.
And that’s the joy that we keep taking out of parents’ lives by saying, you have to be with them every single second. Imagine if they came through the door: oh my God, you missed the home run. They get to tell you, it was a home run. You should have seen it. Everybody was cheering, and I thought I wasn’t gonna make it, and I did.
You know, you don’t have to be there for every triumph of your kid’s life. They can tell you about it too. And you just feel this joy of recognizing there’s a person separate from you who’s going forth in the world and making it happen.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: So we really recommend the Let Grow Experience.
And the other thing that I wanted to say originally about the importance of independence and being able to go around your neighborhood and be part of it is that we are all concerned about phones. And so over the summer, when we did that study about parents who think that their kids are going to be kidnapped, we also had the Harris Poll do a study of kids age eight to 12. And one of the questions they asked was: if you could play with your friends in any way, or you could hang out with your friends in any way, which way would you prefer? Either just free play, hanging out in the neighborhood, no adults, whatever, or in an organized activity—it could be knitting or hockey or chess—or online. And that could be playing video games or Snapchatting or just texting each other, whatever. Which would you prefer?
And I realize that this is audio, so I’m going to show you a graph, but I will also explain it. There’s a giant part of the graph that’s what kids most prefer, and that is just hanging out, free play.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Lenore: Second choice is organized activity, and trailing far behind is phones, screen time, phones.
And so we keep thinking that kids are addicted to their phones. But kids are addicted to each other, and when we don’t let them meet up one way or another in real life, they will go where they can. Okay, everybody’s at soccer or everybody’s online, but that’s not by choice.
We keep thinking that kids are online by desire, but it’s by default. And default is ours. Sorry, that’s the first time I tried out that pun.
Sarah: I like it.
Lenore: But I would say that the fault is ours—and not individually. Culturally, we’ve just decided that kids can’t be roaming around the neighborhood and can’t be trusted with some free time. We think that they’re gonna fall behind or they’re gonna be—and that’s why we began this discussion with, well, if you want your kids to be outside, what can you do? You gather together with other friends and you make a pact. You send them to the park. Or you ask your school to keep the school open for the Let Grow Play Club. And then there they are.
It’s just so fun to watch. You watch them and you just can’t believe how funny and creative and sometimes bored and sometimes mad, and then problem-solving, they are. Because the desire is to play, and they make it happen by hook or by crook.
Sarah: I have another idea for you that is—
Lenore: Oh, great. Let me hear.
Sarah: Bring back the teenage babysitter.
Lenore: Yes.
Sarah: When I was growing up, everyone—myself and all my friends and my sister—we all had summer babysitting jobs. Because I think part of the reason why parents overschedule their kids and they’re in camp all summer in these activities is because they need childcare. Right, right. And even—I didn’t need childcare in the summers when my kids were little because I was a stay-at-home mom, but there were no other kids for them to play with. So I would actually tell other parents, hey, don’t put your kid in camp this week, and I’ll take care of them.
But when I was a kid, the 14-, 15-, 16-year-olds would have their summer charges. And this could work for after school as well. And then we would get together with our friends at a park or the neighborhood pool or whatever who had the kids that they were babysitting for. And they would all play together.
And even if you don’t have your teenage babysitter get together with other kids that are being babysat, they still have—they can still play instead of being in the organized activities. And honestly, I work with enough parents who have teenagers who—the teenagers say there aren’t any jobs. There’s no way for me to make money. And they don’t have anything to do either.
And lots of teenagers love kids. My kids all loved babysitting. And that’s another thing too, though, is that a lot of parents are afraid to let their kids be babysat by teenagers because they think they’re not responsible, which is totally not true in most cases. So maybe in Let Grow you could talk about bringing back the teenage babysitters.
Lenore: First of all, I think you should write a blog post for us about that, but you should probably just get it in the Globe and Mail. I mean, that’s just a great idea because it gives teens a job.
And then I thought what you were gonna say is bring back the teen babysitter because unlike a professional nanny or a coach, who’s paid to really be assiduously watching every single second of them or teaching them a skill, a teen babysitter might be sitting on the couch eating Cheetos, which means that the kids do have to entertain themselves more.
Sarah: Yeah.
Lenore: Or a teenage babysitter might say, let’s go outside and we’ll play a game together, because they’re still of game-playing age, young enough they—
Sarah: Wanna play. Yeah.
Lenore: Yeah, yeah. No, I think that’s really great.
And one of the things Peter says about a Let Grow Play Club is that you don’t have to have a professional teacher at however many dollars an hour running that. You can hire a teen or a couple of teens from the local high school.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: And then, like you said, they’ve got a job, and then the kids have somebody who’s supervising them who’s not inclined to micromanage—
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: Or teach.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: So that’s a great idea.
You know, I’ve spoken to parents who were teenage babysitters and would not hire a teenage babysitter now, and also wouldn’t even let their teen be a babysitter because of this wholesale undermining of our trust in what our kids are capable of.
And when you say like, they’re not responsible enough—well, of course, if they have no responsibility, how can they even prove that they’re responsible? Which is sort of why I’m worried about phones and tracking. It’s like, how do you prove that you’re responsible when somebody can always check to see? I mean—
Sarah: Yeah.
Lenore: That’s—how do you prove I didn’t go to the party? I said I wasn’t gonna go to the party. I wouldn’t go to the party. Maybe you didn’t go to the party because you knew I could track you. It’s like, well, how do I ever prove to you how capable I am and how mature and responsible I—it’s hard.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. This is such a great conversation. I love the work that you’re doing and that Let Grow is doing. And I love the title—in my mind I had a “let it” in there, and then today I was like, oh, it’s Let Grow, like let go.
Lenore: That’s exactly—that was our original name, was Let Go and Let Grow. And then our executive director’s husband said, why don’t you just shorten it? And so we did. And it’s a terrible name in some ways—people think it is “let it go” or “let it grow” or “let’s go,” and “let grow” is a weird phrase. But that is the whole point.
Sarah: I love it. I think it’s great, and I love the work that you’re doing. And I wish that—I hope this catches on.
It’s interesting. I got interviewed for a radio piece the other day, and there was an article, and the article was about trending searches. And whoever wrote it seemed to think that the trend and the trending searches were about parents looking for ways to get their kids off screens, of course. But all the trending searches were adult-organized activities.
Lenore: Yes.
Sarah: You know what I mean? And so I said to the radio person, I was like, you know, these are all great, and maybe these are a really wonderful bridge from screens to being outside or doing creative play or whatever. But really, adults just need to get out of kids’ way. And that’s the key here, is that we need to get out of kids’ way and just let them do what they’re naturally predisposed to do.
Lenore: And also it gives us back our lives.
I mean, speaking of trends, the birthrate is plummeting and parents are stressed and some giant percent say they’re just barely getting through every day. And of course that’s the case.
I was just—there was somebody on, I don’t know, Twitter or Instagram today saying, like, I can’t believe it. My kids are saying, “Where’s my Lego?” and “What can I eat?” and “What can I do?” And I’m like, those are all questions that could be answered by a kid and not by you.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: And then that would get them more engaged in life, and that would give you time to read a book or run away from home, which sounds like it’d be great for everyone.
The whole point of my TED Talk was “I did it myself” is so important for kids, and it gives parents back their world too. Not everything has to be you watching them do something that you can see.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s really the answer to making intensive parenting less intensive.
And honestly, for me, a lot of the reason why my kids had so much of this unsupervised time was because I’m a bit lazy. Like, I remember this one time—I was thinking about this in terms of, like, the kids sometimes they’ll make mistakes and they won’t get it exactly right. I was bringing my daughter and her friend somewhere—they were probably eight—after dance class, I think I’d picked them up, and they were hungry, so I said, let’s get you each a piece of pizza.
But living in a city, it’s hard to find a place to park to go into the pizza place. So I said, I’ll give you some money. I’m going to pull over here in the no-parking area, and you two go in and get yourself some pizza. And I’m sitting out there like, this is taking an awfully long time.
And they came back with a medium pizza, like a whole pizza.
Lenore: Oh, that’s so funny. Wow.
Sarah: And they had somehow, instead of ordering two slices, somehow they had ordered a whole pizza. And they were a little surprised too. But I just laughed and I thought, how cool that they were doing this thing themselves and it didn’t go quite right, but also it was an experience, and they learned from it.
Lenore: And a memory. A memory. What if instead you’d parked and run in and brought them two slices of pizza and they ate them in the back of the car while you drove home? That would be a day that you would never remember for the rest of your life. And instead, it’s the day that everybody came home with this giant pizza.
Sarah: It was really funny. But that was purely because I was trying to cut some corners myself. I wasn’t thinking, gee, let’s let them experience going into a store on their own.
Lenore: Right, right, right. I mean, that’s the beauty of being a human. Not every—you know, you’re not a servant. And everybody’s better off if—
My friend once explained this to me, and then, of course, I’ve taken it as my own mantra as if I came up with it, but Chris Byrne told me that in the olden days there were three worlds, right? There’s the kid world, which is the riding their bikes and eating candy and chasing squirrels, whatever. And then there’s the adult world, which is boring. I remembered from when my parents were at the table, it’s like they’re discussing politics, they’re discussing who’s having an operation. It felt like you get to 50 and all it is is operations and politics. And then there’s family world when you are together, you know, at family dinner or on a vacation or church or synagogue or whatever.
But now we mash them all together. And really, everybody likes it more when the kids—it’s like the kid table is more fun than the kids being at the adult table at Thanksgiving, right? So you separate them. It’s not that they’re never gonna spend time with grandma, it’s that they’re joking and becoming dearly close with their cousins, and you’re finding out who’s having an operation. So everybody wins.
Sarah: That’s right. That’s right.
Where’s—the two more quick questions before I let you go. Where’s the best place for folks to go and find out more about what you do? And we’ll put any links you mentioned in the show notes.
Lenore: Great. So go to letgrow.org. And if you’re a school or at a school, there’s a section for schools, and you can get our free programs there. If you’re a parent, we have the same programs just for home use, and those are all free. Everything’s free. So you could click on the parent thing if you want to change the law where you live so that you’re—you know what, don’t even go into the law. So just press schools or parents. And then we’re all over all the different social media.
Sarah: Wonderful. Okay. The last question is the question I ask all my guests, which is: if you could go back in time with a time machine, what advice would you give your younger parent self?
Lenore: Oh, my younger parent self. I think I gave myself the advice, which was let your son ride the subway alone, because that was the inciting incident that started Free-Range Kids, is that I let my nine-year-old ride the subway alone, and I wrote a newspaper column about it.
What I didn’t know then is that it would end up being a movement and my life’s work. But I would say, do it that weekend, because like a week later he was 10 and nobody would care. So hurry up. That’s great. You got five days left, Lenore. Get him on the subway.
Sarah: Thank you for doing that, because it’s been—it’s really an important countercultural voice that you have and that your organization has.
Lenore: Well, thank you, and thanks for having me. And I love the rat story, and I’m taking it as my own.
Sarah: Oh, good. Please do.
Lenore: Thanks!


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You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.
In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I interview Jessica Slice, a disability activist and the author of Unfit Parent, a Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World. We discuss the effect of Jessica’s disability on her life and parenting, and what non-disabled parents can learn from her about parenting.
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We talk about:
* 00:00 — Intro + Jessica Slice and her book
* 00:02 — Jessica’s disability story and diagnoses
* 00:05 — Wheelchair, identity shift, and living as disabled
* 00:06 — The disability paradox explained
* 00:08 — Perfectionism, capitalism, and happiness
* 00:11 — Disability culture vs. hustle culture
* 00:13 — Becoming a parent unexpectedly (foster → newborn)
* 00:14 — Why early parenting can be easier for disabled parents
* 00:18 — Skill overlap: disability + parenting
* 00:20 — Myths about disabled parenting
* 00:26 — Fear of care, aging, and needing help
* 00:27 — Parenting and interdependence
* 00:29 — Community support and parenting
* 00:30 — Letting go of control and certainty
* 00:32 — Everyone needs help
* 00:34 — Advice to younger parent self
* 00:35 — Where to find Jessica
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* The Peaceful Parenting Membership
* Evelyn & Bobbie bras
* Jessica’s books
* Jessica’s Substack
* Jessica on A Slight Change of Plans
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* Facebook Group
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* Website
* Join us on Substack
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Podcast Transcript:
Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Jessica Slice. She is a mother, a writer, and a disability activist, and the author of Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World. I love this book and I’ve been telling everyone about it. I highly recommend you pick up a copy. We will link to it in the show notes. Until then, have a listen to my interview with Jessica, where we talk about disability and parenting and what non-disabled parents can learn from her about parenting. Whether you are interested in learning more about disability culture, or want some new and somewhat startling answers to the question, “Why is parenting so hard?” I think you’ll have a lot to think about after listening to this episode. Let’s meet Jessica.
Sarah: Hi Jessica. Welcome to the podcast.
Jessica: Thanks so much for having me.
Sarah: I’m so glad to have you here. If you wouldn’t mind just starting out by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Jessica: Of course. My name’s Jessica Slice, and I’m really happy to be here. I am an author and a speaker and just write in general about disability and perfectionism and our shared fragility. I live in Toronto with my two kids and my husband, and we have a dog named Honey Puppy, and I’m, yeah, really happy to be here.
Sarah: It’s so good to have you here. So your book about parenthood and disability—I was so surprised that I know so little about disability. So maybe you could tell us about your disability and then your journey to becoming a parent.
Jessica: Yeah, of course. So I became disabled at 28. And so I have this real before-and-after story, and I also feel like because I don’t have a congenital disability—or I didn’t have a disability until 28—that I have a perspective from that specific position. You know, I grew up having a body that was generally accepted, generally welcomed, that I didn’t have accommodation or accessibility issues.
But when I was 28, I was on a hike. I developed heat exhaustion, and I just became extremely sick. So the day before the hike, I was active. I went for a seven-mile run. I was on vacation, and then the day after the hike, it was hard to even walk down the hallway. I just had this range of debilitating symptoms: extreme dizziness, nausea, this sense of kind of like floating above myself, unexplained fevers. My legs were going numb.
And I saw doctors and, well, I assumed I just needed to recover from the heat exhaustion. But then I didn’t. And so I just started seeing doctors and no one knew what was wrong. They said maybe I was just stressed. And this went on, and I ended up not recovering ever. Like I still have many of those symptoms now.
But about two years into that, I finally saw someone who diagnosed me with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, which—at that time, it was 2013 that I got diagnosed—it was not very well known. It’s better known now because it comes along with long COVID in a lot of patients, and so more people are talking about it.
But then two years after that—or one year after that—my little sister developed the same symptoms that I had, and it seemed rare that two people would have this exact same sudden onset. And so our doctor at Duke sent us to a geneticist at Duke, and that geneticist diagnosed us with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which is a genetic connective tissue disorder. And so that causes a lot of widespread pain, a lot of dislocations, some vascular issues—well, not as severe as certain types of EDS, but can cause POTS. And so I have, I sort of have two disabilities that are connected, and in a lot of people with EDS, they end up developing POTS.
And then in 2018—so for a long time, for those first seven years I was disabled—I just sort of shrunk my life to fit my body’s needs, which I, which was okay. But I, I just didn’t go anywhere where I would need to stand or walk or be upright.
And then seven years in, when my child—and I’ll, I’ll explain meeting her—but when she was one, I was like, I think I wanna go more places. And so then I got my first power wheelchair, and that made it so I could go on walks and go to stores and go to restaurants, or go to her ballet classes, or just be in the world a bit more.
And so, and it was around that time that I really started identifying as disabled and not just sick. Mm-hmm. And that was a real transformation for me. It was a switch from feeling like I had this body that worked and stopped working to having a body that had switched from one identity to a different identity. What a trip that—yeah.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Because you had experienced life as both disabled and non-disabled, you have a particular insight into something that I, that you wrote about, which is the disability paradox. Mm-hmm. Can you talk about that? Because I think if somebody had been disabled their whole life, it might be harder for non-disabled people to believe that the disability paradox is true. But because you’ve been—no, I’m serious. Like, it is kind of funny, but because you’ve had both types—mm-hmm—of lives, can you explain what the disability paradox is and any—just any thoughts on what you think listeners should know about that?
Jessica: Yeah, I mean, God, I could talk about this all day. I’ll try not to be too long-winded about it. But the disability paradox is this philosophical phenomenon where disabled people are far more satisfied with our lives than people would expect. And in fact, when you measure satisfaction, disabled people are equal to or more satisfied than non-disabled people. But that really goes against sort of our collective assumptions, which is that the very worst thing is to be disabled.
You know, even from the time someone gets pregnant, you say, “Well, I don’t care if it’s a boy or girl, as long as it’s healthy.” And I don’t wanna, like, take away from how hard it is to have a sick child, but the irony is: being a disabled person doesn’t end up diminishing life satisfaction across the board.
There are disabled people who don’t like their lives. There are non-disabled people who don’t like their lives. There are parts of disability that bring suffering. There are parts of kind of every person’s life that brings suffering. And so it’s not that disability never has hard parts, but it’s that it’s overly reductive. It overly flattens a person to say that being disabled is worse than non-disabled.
In my experience, before I was disabled, I had this kind of overly shiny and successful life. I stumbled into a career in my twenties where I was making a ton of money. I was married to my high school sweetheart. I was out with friends every weekend. I sort of like, there were all these things you should try to achieve, and I was just like, I had done.
Sarah: And you were on a cruise in Santorini when you got sick. Like, I mean, that’s like a perfect example of how shiny your life was, right?
Jessica: Yeah, it was. And earlier that year I had been celebrated in Chicago for being one of the best realtors in the country. Like, I just had—It was like someone had, you know, set up these things that we’re told will make us happy, and I was checking them off. And I had this really deep sense of—it was dissatisfaction or suffering, or kind of like rottenness inside me. And it was because I felt like I never was getting to the place I needed to go. Like there was this level of perfection, this level of joy, enjoyment that I couldn’t quite access. Like every trip was not quite good enough. Every accomplishment was not quite enough. It was like I was so hard on myself.
And I think part of that was being so proximate to what the world says we should be. And then when I became disabled—I mean, there were many excruciating years. There were the two years looking for a diagnosis, when I was getting sicker and sicker and sicker. There was the falling apart of my first marriage. There was losing an income. You know, I went for years without reliable income, living on very little a month. I mean, there was real suffering there.
But what it also did: it took me off this track I had been on, and then I had to form something else there. And I was forced to be still with myself. I was forced to tell the truth to myself for the first time. I just had a lot of time like knocking around my own brain.
And for me, once—especially once I was able to have money to live on and have a life, have a diagnosis, you know, have a life that felt like I could survive it—once I was there, it was wild, but I found myself so much happier than I had been before.
And I think a lot of that was because I liked myself and knew myself for the first time. And I had just sort of jumped off the track. I had, like, leapt from—or been forced off, pushed off—the track from this thing that I was almost good enough at to whatever was true for just me in my life. And there was such honesty there that even the hard parts felt survivable. It was like I was knocking up against something—(I shouldn’t clap on the mic)—but I was knocking up against something solid in myself. And that felt like a way I could live.
And so the disability paradox makes sense to me. Not that everyone has to have this wild change that I did or totally change their mindset, or I don’t mean to overly silver-line what can be a very difficult experience. But I think the real thing is: we do a very, very, very bad job of predicting what will make us happy. And the thing that often ends up working is just honesty and getting to know ourselves and being stuck with our own stillness. And that sometimes disability—or often disability—fosters a truthfulness that can feel like getting free.
Sarah: I love that. In your book you talk a lot about—I mean, it would be so easy for me to go off on this tangent, but I’m not going to—about capitalism and our culture of individualism. And do you think that part of the disability paradox is that you step away when you’re disabled, you need to step away from that? You said you stepped off the track and I immediately thought of the rat race of getting more. Mm-hmm. Having more, producing more, and not needing anybody else—that is capitalism.
Jessica: Absolutely. I mean, if we believe that more money and more purchases and more perfection in ourselves will bring happiness, then we never get there and we end up just spending a lot of money, which feeds a system that wants us to spend a lot of money. But disability culture as a whole fosters community, fosters creativity, fosters, you know, like a “crip time,” like a slower different pace of life. It’s like there’s all these kind of anti-capitalist sentiments inherent in disability culture, which I think really pushes against that. And I think that’s a huge part of it. I mean, as you know, my book—I sort of like, I say that over and over and over again. I think it’s massive. Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a, it’s such an interesting—it’s a good segue, too, to talking about parenting. Because I think a lot of the things that make—and this is what your book is a lot about—a lot of the things that make parenting hard and not enjoyable also come from the same source of capitalist and individualist culture and society. Mm-hmm.
And in your book you have a chapter called “The First Week.” You were a foster parent and you unexpectedly got a newborn who is now—Mm-hmm—your child now. But you weren’t expecting a newborn, so you weren’t prepared for a newborn, and you had to kind of scramble and get everything together in that first week. Mm-hmm. It was a bit of a shock and surprise, I think, for you.
But even with that, you talked about how your first week was pretty relaxing and nesting and beautiful. And then as you started to talk to people—maybe you could take it up from here—you sort of talked to non-disabled people about their first week with their newborn and saw quite a contrast.
Jessica: Yeah. You know, I started that chapter not knowing what I would find. I thought there might be a difference between the struggles of the first week between disabled and non-disabled people. And I mean, a major caveat is that each person has their own unique experience. Painting with too wide a brush is never great.
But in my interviews, and what I have found since, is that in many cases disabled people have an easier time adjusting to parenthood than non-disabled people, at least at the beginning. And I think a lot of that is because the first week sort of brings to the surface realities that disability has already brought to the surface.
When you—particularly people who give birth—so if you give birth and you suddenly have a fragile body for the first time, and you’re taking care of a fragile baby, and like the baby’s fragility is just so evident—I don’t know if you felt this way, but with both of my kids, it’s like you’re watching them breathe like a maniac. Like they breathe so fast and slow and pause and they turn color—beat through the top of their head.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jessica: Oh, yeah. Horrifying. And you’re just sort of confronted with these bodies and how fragile we all are. And you’re also confronted with how much we need other people.
And you know, one of my favorite disability scholars, Jennifer Fink, talks about how fear of disability is fear of needing care and/or fear of giving care. The first week is like: you need care. Particularly if you’ve given birth, you are giving constant care to this baby. And you’re sort of in—it’s like you are transported into this other world of fragility and interdependence and uncertainty.
And if you’re disabled, that’s sort of where you’ve already been living because of your own body and because of navigating the world. And if you’re not disabled, I think it can feel particularly jarring. And it can feel like, “How will I ever survive this? How can I ever get to the other side of this? Who am I now? Will I ever find solid ground again?”
And I think that disability is a protective factor there. I think it really helps you.
Whether those changes—I know with my daughter, she had some health issues at the beginning and I just had this sense like, “She’ll be fine.” We also didn’t know if she was going to be a—like how long she would be with us. It could have been weeks or months, and I sort of found myself okay with that. At first it was this weird sense of: all I need to do is love her and be here. And I know that sounds overly shiny.
And in the book I interview this woman who had volunteered to help us adjust. So I posted on the neighborhood listserv, said we needed supplies. This woman, Renee, replied and said, “I’m a doula in the neighborhood,” or a night nurse. “Can I come help you with your first night and help you get set up?” It’s—yeah—amazing.
And so she came and set up a bottle station, and she came in. And then my husband’s mom ended up paying for a couple nights a week of Renee to come and help us for those first few months, which I know not everyone gets. But you still have a lot of nights without help. Yeah.
But so she was there a lot during those early days. And so I interviewed her for the book and I was like, “Was it really as magical as I remember?” And I was sort of afraid she’d be like, “No, you were a disaster.” But she said, “No, I have never seen anything like it.” She said coming into your house was like just walking into—there was like—you were just like reading poems and so calm and happy and in love. And she said she really couldn’t wrap her mind around how different it was.
And that made me feel good that my recollection had been accurate.
Sarah: You weren’t rose-coloring it. You had a great quote on Maya Shanker’s podcast—which, what a great podcast to be on. That’s one of my favorite podcasts that I listen to.
Jessica: Oh, she’s the best. We’ve become friends since.
Sarah: Have you?
Jessica: She’s really—
Sarah: Oh, she seems lovely from listening to her podcast. We’ll put a link to the episode in the show notes for anyone who wants to listen to it. Great. But you said something on her podcast—so I’m gonna quote you back to you—that you said that you thought the first week, and parenting in general, was easier for—or could be. I know we’re making a lot of generalizations, but could be easier in general for disabled people because you said the bodies and minds of babies and kids are needy and unpredictable, and a disabled body and mind is also needy and unpredictable, and that you saw there was a practical overlap in skills. I thought that really distilled down the idea that you’re talking about just now.
Jessica: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think it’s kind of like we’ve just been practicing for this without realizing it.
Sarah: And I think that’s the thing that’s so hard: for parents, that needy and unpredictability is what makes the adjustment to parenting so hard for non-disabled people who aren’t used to—again, to the capitalist and individualistic structure—Mm-hmm. We think we can control everything. Mm-hmm. And perfectionism is another theme in your book too, right? Mm-hmm. Of like, we can control everything and we can make it all perfect. Mm-hmm. And if you’re disabled, you’ve probably had to let go of that idea of control and perfection.
Jessica: I get maybe one email a week from a person whose parent was disabled, or is disabled. And the one I got this week said, “Everyone thinks their mom is the best. But, Jessica, if I may, my mom was the best. She was patient, kind, and smart. She would happily read to me or listen to silly stories or let me sit on her lap for as long as I wanted.” And then she said, “As an adult and mother, I have always had the feeling that my mom was a better mother somehow because of her disability, but I have also always felt guilty even thinking that, like I was somehow celebrating her having MS—a disease that took her from us. The way you describe disabled parenting and its creativity, resourcefulness, and necessary rejection of capitalist hustle reads at some points to me like a love letter to my own mom.”
Sarah: Aw, that is so sweet. Incredible. So lovely. Yeah. That’s really lovely.
Jessica: And it feels—’cause there’s this feeling writing the book of like, “What if my kids hate having a disabled mom?” And I’m like, “No, it’s actually great having me as a mom.” And getting these emails from people saying, “No, this is what I experienced,” mm-hmm, that there’s something in the way disability forces a rejection of hustle culture for many of us that allows us to be the kind of present and slow and flexible parents—or at least that I could have never been before.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. There’s so much in your book too about the challenges with the medical system and Child Protective Services, that people who are disabled get their kids taken away at way higher rates than people who are not disabled, and have trouble accessing good medical care, reproductive services. You know, there’s a long list of things that are harder for disabled people. So I’m glad that there’s something that feels like you’ve got a boost in that, that you’ve—Yeah. It’s like a short circuit to things that I hope parents in our community slowly start to figure out in terms of the perfectionism, mm-hmm, and the slowing down. You were forced to do all of that.
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. I do sometimes feel self-conscious when I see the way my peers parent—when I see them making these perfect little lunches and these divided-up lunch boxes, or doing elf on the shelf, or these kind of versions of parenting that I just—I don’t have the energy or capacity to have as part of our lives. And I can feel like, “Are my kids missing out from this type of parenting?” And maybe in some ways they are. You know, nothing simple.
But I know I would have done those things. The version of me in my twenties would have done those things, but she would’ve also been a lot less patient. She would’ve had a lot less time for just sort of wasting hours and being together. And I don’t know that there—I have an ability to be present with my kids that I wouldn’t have had before.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think you—I heard you say on Maya Shanker’s podcast that you and your husband one weekend were like, “Oh my gosh, it was such a busy weekend,” but then you realized that you had only gone to the park and met some friends or something. But I think that’s amazing. Like, I think that kids would trade more time with their parents and more connection time, whatever that looked like, for all of the activities and all of the stuff. Like, I really do.
Jessica: Thanks. Yeah. We don’t do very much. Our kids are in no activities, and who knows what they’ll end up being mad about as adults.
Sarah: So what myths about disabled parenting do you want to dispel? You said a lot of non-disabled parents think that disabled parenting would be like—they’re just who they are, but without being able to see, was an example you said in your book, right? And so—I don’t know—maybe in that direction: what do you—yeah.
Jessica: Oh, that’s great. So yeah. And I found myself feeling this way. You know, when I interviewed blind parents for the book, I was imagining my life, but without vision. Mm-hmm. And when people imagine me as a wheelchair user, as a parent, they probably imagine their life, but just adding a wheelchair, and that’s not really how things work. We adapt based on who we are and our needs and our whole life is sort of built around that.
And so there’s a level of creativity. There’s a level of building from the ground up. I think people really underestimate our ability as humans to build and to create and to problem-solve in community. You know, I have a lot of close relationships with other disabled parents and we problem-solve together, and I think that—I think it’s more possible than people imagine.
I was watching a friend of mine, Jessica, do a reel recently where she went through her face cream nighttime routine, and she is a quadriplegic and so she has some use of her hands but can’t rotate in certain ways. And she was walking through which bottles she can open and that she puts them on her sink and then dips her thumb in and kind of puts it on her face and then—and it took a very long time.
And I also—I don’t have a very complex face routine. So in that way it was like, I was like, “I would never do that.” But I thought, “Oh my gosh, she must be so tired doing that every night.” And I found myself thinking about her routine through my body. But then I thought, “No, I’m doing the thing.” It’s not her routine through my body; it’s her routine through her body, which she lives in.
And we all just live in the bodies we have and get used to it. You know, like when you’re walking around your house, you’re not like, “This would be easier to clean up if I could fly,” or, “If I had wheels on my feet,” or whatever. We just live in our own bodies. And I think it’s a different way to think about disability.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. I’m so glad I read your book because I didn’t know how much I didn’t think about disability. Do you know what I mean? And that just reminded me when you said, “We live in our own bodies,” and it’s so useful to be able to see the world in a different way through somebody else’s eyes a little bit.
I was actually reading your book at a cafe yesterday and I got up to go to the bathroom and I realized that the bathroom had a handicap sign on the door, but it had a piece of furniture that was outside the doorway that was blocking the door. Yeah. So that somebody in a wheelchair wouldn’t have been able to get through the doorway.
Jessica: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: You know, I don’t know. It’s just stuff like that. It’s so good to—
Jessica: Oh my gosh, that’s constant. Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jessica: Or you go into a bathroom like that and there it’s where they store all the supplies for the restaurant, so you can’t actually put your wheelchair inside.
Sarah: Right. It’s too crowded. Yeah.
Jessica: Yeah. And the thing about disability is it’s coming for us all. The only way you live a life without disability is if you die tragically one day. Otherwise your body—all of our bodies—change at some point. Yeah. And we, and our needs and capacity shift. I mean, you know, even you—like, I would imagine at this point your needs, your capacities are different than they were 20 years ago. And I think our discomfort with that ends up hurting ourselves too, because we have such fear of aging, such fear of need, such fear of all the ways we change, and that’s just part of being a human with a body.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And you talk about that fear of disability, and I think it’s the same with fear of aging, fear of care, right? Mm-hmm. Fear of needing care. Mm-hmm. And, mm-hmm, can you talk about the care aspect—talk a little bit about parenting and how you see non-disabled parenting as people are suffering because of that lack of care that we have?
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think for all parents there’s this sense that you should be able to provide what your kids need without assistance, and that there is a distinction between people who give care and people who need care. And that a mom in particular is a person who gives care and doesn’t need it.
And I think what disability forces to the surface—particularly those who have some care needs like me—is: I give care and I need care, and that is part of my daily life. And needing care does not hinder my ability to be a valuable member of my family or a good mom. And I think it dispels that myth, I guess, that you have to be one or the other.
But I think if all parents could reject that binary of caregivers or care receivers, then it would mean that parenting didn’t feel as impossible, or didn’t have such an impossible standard, that weakness were allowed, or dependence were allowed, or interdependence.
And I think it would just change how we think about parenting in general because there’s this feeling, I believe, that particularly moms have to be all-powerful and limitless and perfect—and that it is a failure in the very definition of what it is to be a parent to start to need support and care.
Sarah: That’s so true. I live in a community of about 700 people and our houses are all very close together and we all know way more about each other than perhaps you might want your neighbors knowing about you. Mm-hmm. But at the same time, it is a community of care.
And I was reflecting on how my first week didn’t feel that hard, but I also had neighbors who organized dinners brought to us hot at six o’clock every night. And my in-laws lived down the street, and I had friends who lived nearby who could come over and help and hold the baby. What a difference it is to live in a community where people help each other.
We lived temporarily in Vancouver for a year, and the night before we were moving back, we realized that we had gotten—in trouble—with being packed and ready for the moving truck to come and called the one person that we knew who was in town and said, “Can you come over and help us? Like, we’re in trouble. The packing—we’re really behind.” And he said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m watching a movie. I can’t come.”
And I realized: back in our old community, I could have put something out on our E-group for our neighborhood, and I would’ve had 30 people—I kid you not—people who I don’t even really know very well who would’ve been like, “I’ll help you. I’ll help you.”
For me, I don’t think that my motherhood was as lonely or as difficult because I live in a community. And people generally don’t live in a community like that anymore.
Jessica: No. Oh, that’s an excellent point. I think disability forces interdependence. But I mean, the point I try to make with my book is you don’t have to be disabled to have these values of creativity and interdependence and rejection of hustle culture. And it sounds like those are some of your inherent values too.
And yeah. I mean, community eases so many of those burdens. And not seeing the need for your neighbors as evidence that you’re not suited for motherhood, but just that you’re a person with limits.
Sarah: Yeah. I would get, sometimes I would feel lonely and just go out with the baby in the baby carriage. Yeah. Find someone to talk to. Just—yeah. Yeah.
And I think that can be one of the answers too: how to make non-disabled parenting easier is to try to find and make community if possible. But are there any other things that you can think of that you think would be helpful?
Jessica: I think reckoning with your own fragility and the uncertainty of life is a huge part of it, I think. So much of parenting heartache comes from this feeling that there’s a way it should be with your kids, a way it should be with yourself. And then when you veer off of that, it feels intolerable.
And you know, there’s kind of the early parts of it. Like you don’t know what your kids’ educational needs will be, or their physical needs, or their sleep needs, or their anything needs, or their food sensitivity. You know, you don’t know any of that. But then that keeps going all the way to what is very hard to swallow, which is: we don’t know that our kids will be okay, and we don’t know that we will be okay. And that is terrible. And it is also true.
And I think so much of what we do in life and in parenthood is this desperate attempt to pretend that we’re not mortal and pretend that we’re not fragile. And to act like if we try hard enough, we can insulate our kids from suffering and from pain or from illness, or from, God forbid, death.
And I think there are ways we protect ourselves and protect our kids, but a lot of it is not protection. A lot of it is like this desperate attempt to close our eyes to what is true. And I think one of the most important—and one of the hardest—things I’ve done is confront that. Confront how little I control in my kids’ lives. Mm-hmm.
And there are ways we—and some of that’s just internal. Some of it’s poetry and journaling and just looking at it. And then some of it is actions we take.
Sarah: Just before we close, I was looking at my notes just to make sure that I asked you everything that I wanted to ask you. And I came across this really beautiful quote from your book that I had written down that I think really encapsulates something that we’ve just been talking about. And you said: “The problem isn’t that disabled people need too much help to parent safely. The problem is that society refuses to admit that everybody does.”
And I think that’s really beautiful to think: we all need help, and so many people are struggling because they think they should just be able to do it all themselves. And that we were not—we weren’t made to parent in isolation.
Jessica: No. And we weren’t made to solve our parenting problems with purchases. Mm-hmm. Or just working harder, or sleeping less, or optimizing our days or being more efficient. Like that—there is no there, there when you’re looking for the answer down that path.
Sarah: Yeah. And that’s what I mean—capitalism sells us that idea that if you have the—
Jessica: Yeah.
Sarah: You know, the perfect tool or stroller or whatever it is, then life is better and easier.
So thank you for your book. It’s a question that I ask all my guests, which is: if you could go back in time to your younger parent self, what would you tell yourself? What piece of advice would you give yourself back in those early days?
Jessica: It would be to get a wheelchair sooner. Yeah. Gosh, I missed that first year out in the world with her. Mm-hmm. And I wish I had had it sooner.
Sarah: What made you not get it sooner?
Jessica: I never considered it. Mm-hmm. Not once did I consider a wheelchair. I thought: whatever I could do with my own body was what I deserved to have access to.
Sarah: So—
Jessica: And I remember—yeah. And then I said to my husband at one point, “If only there was like a chair that I could be on that could recline and was cushioned and I could move around on it.” And he’s like, “I think that’s just literally a wheelchair.”
Sarah: I love that. Yeah. So, yeah. So you were still holding onto the “I can do it all.” Even with your disability, you’re still holding onto “I can just do it and grit through it and”—
Jessica: Well, no. So it wasn’t even—’cause I didn’t do any, like, I didn’t go places. Mm-hmm. I thought—not that I can do it all. I accepted my limitations, but then I made my life only as small as what I could handle with my own body. Right. I hadn’t considered that there are tools that would open up the world to me again.
Sarah: Well, I’m glad you got a wheelchair. And, me too, I’m glad you wrote your book. I really recommend it to everyone. And where’s the best place for people to go and find out more about you and what you do?
Jessica: My website is jessicaslice.com. I’m on Instagram and post when I can convince myself to. But I do write very regularly on my Substack, which you can find under my name, Jessica Slice, on Substack. And I write about parenting and about disability and about the poems I’m reading, and I really love that community there.
Sarah: Do you write poetry?
Jessica: No, I’ve never tried, but I read poetry every day and it’s a huge anchoring point in my day.
Sarah: Maybe when you have more—when you’re not in the thick of parenting small children—you should give it a try.
Jessica: Maybe. It sounds so daunting.
Sarah: Well, I mean, you’re a wonderful writer, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were poems in there also.
Jessica: Thanks.
Sarah: Thank you, Jessica.
Jessica: Thank you.



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