February 22, 2022 • 23 mins
What if we didn’t put adults first? What if our policies and laws and individual actions were all for the kids? Raffi and Dr. Sharna Olfman describe a utopian vision.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
When the vision itself came to me was the culmination
of an accumulation of learnings over my lifetime. You might say,
at first, I thought, why am I being given this vision?
Surely there are others more worthy of being burdened with
(00:22):
the gift of child honoring as a philosophy. I'm Chris Garcia,
and this is Finding Raffie, a ten part series from
My Heart Radio and Fatherly in partnership with The Rococo
Punch about the life, philosophy, and the work of Raffie,
(00:43):
the man behind the music. One morning in Raphie says
he woke up from a deep sleep with a vision
two words suspended in mid air, char honoring. I knew
(01:04):
in that luminous moment that I was being given something
that would be the work of the rest of my life.
I knew in that moment that it was a unique
social change revolution that connects personal, culture and planet, an
integrated philosophy for restoring communities and restoring the earth. Everything
(01:30):
in Ralphie's mind seems to come down to child honoring.
It came up over and over again in our conversations. Basically,
it's his philosophy for saving the planet by putting children first.
It eventually became a book and an online course, and
Ralphie was selling it to me pretty hard and one
way you can deepen your connection with the beautiful words
(01:53):
that you might read and wonder how might I practice
this in my own family, as you would take the
online course in child hon ring that my Raffie Foundation
offers for a very reasonable price. On my dad, I
took the bait. Raphie's philosophy covers a lot. He asked
(02:13):
us to consider so many different concepts with children in mind,
from the way we grow our food to how we
measure economic progress. He paints a picture of a utopian
world full of farmers, markets, parents volunteering with their kids,
and pesticide free parks. I found it hard to know
where I'm supposed to step in, both as a person
(02:34):
and as a parent. See and reading it, it made
me think a lot about privilege, because it's there's so
much pressure on parents to make sure they're doing everything
just perfectly, reading the right books, having the right toys.
But at the end of the day, it's about survival
and love, and not everyone has the means to curate
(02:54):
the perfect bubble for their child. There's no such thing
as perfect parenting. So let's just put that out of
our minds. All parents, in their various situations, sum are
(03:16):
having a tough time month after month making ends meet.
You know. Everybody's got different pressures, different challenges, and also
different rewards, you know, but we're all doing our best.
And the point of conscious parenting is to be conscious
of how we are parenting, how we were parented, what
(03:39):
that instilled in us that might be passed on to
our children. So it's a call to conscious living. Raphae's
child honoring vision might sound a little esoteric, but I
have to give the guy credit. He knows when and
who to ask for help. He called up the top
thinkers and environmental health education, business, in psychology, you name it,
(04:04):
to test his ideas and shape his philosophy. I would
like to think that before I met Rafiel, I was
doing child honoring work. This is Dr Sharna Olfman, a
Canadian expat living in Pittsburgh. She co wrote Raphael's Child
Honoring book and happens to be a leading expert in
developmental psychology. One of the many reasons I'm excited to
(04:25):
talk to you um today is because you're an expert
in all of this and I am a sponge that
wants to soak in all this knowledge with you. Well,
I want to be really clear that the child honoring
philosophy is Raphael's philosophy, but we're part of this community.
(04:46):
The solutions require the work and the ideas of people
in many, many different professions. In her book series called
Childhood in America, Sharna writes about some controversial educational reforms
that she believed were harming our children, and Raffie was
all about it. What were you trying to communicate to
(05:07):
the world at that time? There were kind of a
confluence events that led to the creation of that book,
So maybe it would help to unpack that a little bit.
If you were in preschool in the nineties, you most
likely spent your days playing with ghak and sitting on
a carpet square singing Barney songs. It was pretty chill.
(05:28):
Playtime was the popular curriculum. Then flash forwards two thousand
and two, Former President George W. Bush had just passed
the highly criticized No Child Left Behind Act, and suddenly
schools became very test driven, meaning preschool kids spent more
time sitting at their desk taking tests than they did
outside learning how to play. As a clinical psychologist, I
(05:56):
was aware of this very big up surge in the
number of children who are being diagnosed with attention deficit
disorder and who are also being prescribed stimulants. So there
were like one in ten kids being prescribed riddle in
there are these kind of formal preschool settings, and also
there was this uptick in play getting translated to screen time.
(06:26):
At the time, my son had just lost a person
that was very, very important to him, and it was
a very very traumatic event for my son. So I'm
looking at all of these different trends and I'm thinking
about my child, and I'm thinking that these preschool settings
don't feel right for him. This was how I felt
(06:49):
as a parent, but it is also how I felt
as a developmental psychologist. If you take a bunch of
kids and you sit them at desks when they're meant
to be playing creatively, and then you know they spend
their leisure time in front of screens, it's going to
create some developmental issues. I look back and I think
(07:11):
about my childhood and I was a very energetic boy
that sat in a desk in a Catholic school all
day and then watched TV at night, and I think
my teachers and then my parents thought that I was
just a bad student or incapable of learning. I ended
up going to UC Berkeley, one of the best colleges
(07:33):
in the world, but I stumbled out of the gates
because I don't think I was meant to sit in
a chair and then watch The Simpsons all night. Afterwards,
in my own head, I almost saw myself as a
bad student, even though I wasn't, because I just couldn't
participate in that environment absolutely, And then those labels risks
(07:57):
sort of becoming self fulfilling prophecies. You know. The the
issue isn't that you can't get there from a lesson
optimal beginning, but why make it so hard? Um? Should
I be paying you for this session? And is this
become a therapy session? Now? I feel like I feel
so much. I'm like, you're right, and you know it
wasn't my fault and if only that would have happened,
(08:18):
I figured it out, But you know I shouldn't. I
shouldn't have had to. Um. Can you tell me about
the first time you met Raffie? So you know, Raffie
heard about my work and Ralphie was kind enough to
fly out to Pittsburgh and he uh met me at
my home. At the time, Sharna's kids were six and
(08:40):
nine years old, prime Raffie years. So when we finished
our meeting, Raffie grabbed a banana from my kitchen, put
it to his ear and his mouth like he was
holding a banana phone from just like the cover art
on his famous Banana Phone album, and he greeted the
(09:01):
kids and he talked to them through the banana. It
was just a really wonderful a first meeting, and my
kids just were enthralled. Ring ring ring, ring, ring ring ring.
Banana phone Ying Yang Yin Yang Yin Yang ying yan fool.
(09:21):
It's a real live mama and Papa phone, a brother
and sister and a doga phone, a grandpa phone, and
a Granma phone to oh yeah, my cell learn Ralph
(09:42):
he saw something in Sharna's work that he'd been trying
to articulate for the last several years. How we treat
our children is the key to building a sustainable world.
A few months after their first meeting, Ralfie flies Sharna,
her husband Dan, and their two young children out to
his home on a small island off the coast of Vancouver,
and I like to say we were living the child
(10:05):
honoring life. You know, it really was a beautiful, idyllic
two weeks. Main Island is this beautiful island off the
coast of British Columbia, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean. We
timed the visit to coincide with this amazing nature camp
(10:29):
that was taking place that my kids were able to
participate in. And it was such a magical camp, wooded, beautiful,
and the kids spent all day every day in nature,
tramping around the woods, splashing around in the ocean, collecting shells,
and putting on little plays, et cetera. Evenings, he would
(10:54):
often join us for dinner and we would spend hours
talking about how how to make the world a better
place for children. I think that Ralphie took me more
deeply into my awareness of you know, issues like global
warming and soil health, etcetera. Yeah, it was absolutely a
(11:17):
pivotal experience for me, and it was just a wonderful
way to kind of launch the work that we did
together over the course of the next couple of years
bringing the book to fruition. What would you say is
was the vision or the goal for this book. So
(11:41):
the Child Honoring Philosophy is both profound and elegant, I
would say, in its simplicity. But I would say that
probably the first impulse for Rafie in creating The Child
Honoring Philosophy was his concern about the health the physical planet.
(12:02):
You know, his concern about global warming, his concern about water, air, soil.
You know, at the core, we're literally killing our children's home,
We're killing their planet. And if we want to turn
this ship around and we want to create a healthy
planet and a healthy world, not in which children can survive,
(12:23):
but in which they can fully thrive and fully self actualize,
then all of us need to lead with the question
is what I'm doing, what I'm saying, how I'm acting
in the best interests of the young child. So I
would like to say that the child Honoring Philosophy could
(12:43):
also be thought of as a value. When we lead
with that value, then we create a world that is
fit for children. When we don't, we end up with
the dying planet and kids who are eating junk food
and getting sick and not thriving and feeling like they
can't find a place for themselves in the world. It's
(13:07):
putting kids first and their well being, and by doing that,
everything will fall in place exactly. So sometimes we get
like blinders even when we're working. Oh, it's all about
the soil health, it's all about legislation, it's all about education,
it's all about mental health. Now, it's all about all
(13:28):
of these things because they all are integrated and they're
all interdependent. And that's the child honoring philosophy, understanding that
it's not just one issue, but it's all of the above.
I mean it it's where, Yeah, I'm just taking a
moment to absorb all this. It's a lot. If I
(13:57):
sound hesitant, it's not that I disagree with the one
aspect of this philosophy or what it hopes to do,
but like, how am I supposed to meet a tiny
humans most basic needs twenty four hours a day while
also considering how my every action impacts the world she's inheriting.
I mean, from my vantage point, it's a lot for
(14:17):
a new parent to take in because you're talking about
humongous systemic issues. Because I have to admit, doctor, I
started when we knew we were having a child. I
jumped in. I was I was reading so much and
then you have a child, and you become a zombie
for about three months, and then you crawl out. You
(14:39):
you come out of the thaw, and then you no
longer have time to read or understand anything. How do
I take this in? Where do I step in? Help
me out here? That's a really really good question. Ironically,
in the effort to curate that perfect bubble, sometimes parents
are moving their kids away from what they need most.
We want children's create civity to come from within, like
(15:03):
go on a nature trail. It's free, there's nothing better,
you know. But at the end of the day, what
your child needs from you is your love and your time,
and everything else is optional. I love allowing that space
for leniency because so many of his philosophies are incredible
(15:25):
in theory, but in practical application are they even possible? Right? So,
I think the idea is they're aspirational, but we do
what is healthiest for the family system. I don't know
(15:46):
if we have a system. It's more of a putting
out fires than saving the world kind of thing. Honestly,
we're just trying to make it to bedtime. And my
parents didn't have much of a system either. As I've
said before, or they both had difficult upbringings, lived under
an oppressive regime, and as immigrants moved to an unfamiliar
(16:07):
country where they didn't speak the language or have much support.
One of the unintended consequences that affected how they raised
me was anxiety. For example, my parents food insecurity growing
up poor in Cuba translated to over feeding me and
rushing through meal times. I still eat like the secret
(16:28):
police is going to take my plate away. And though
I've been fortunate enough to not have to flee my homeland,
I don't want to mirror my anxieties about the world
directly onto Sunny. You know, while I have you here.
(16:58):
Um I just something I think about a lot recently.
I'm the first American born son of Cuban refugees, and
um so one thing I think about a lot is
inherited family trauma, generational trauma. As people talk about these days,
how something that happened to, say, my great great grandpa,
(17:19):
affects me today and how it may have affected my
the rest of my family, either physically or emotionally or
something like that. How do I avoid passing that trauma
down to my daughter, to Sunny, I think a common
mistake is for the pendulum to swing so far the
other way, like, I'm not going to do it that
(17:40):
way because that's you know, or I'm working from a
place of fear, and so I'm going to do the
diametric opposite, which is also not always the best way
to go about it. So first is consciousness, so that
we can think through our choices and how they affect
us and what triggers us. And knowing that your daughter
(18:02):
will carry less of that trauma and will have other
opportunities because you are doing the work of trying to understand. Yeah,
I don't know if anyone in my family's ever had
almost the privilege to think about this. You know, they've
they've just been trying to survive and then, um, you
know these cycles they're vicious and they just almost automatically
(18:25):
happen unless you take a moment to acknowledge it, become aware. Absolutely,
I would agree with that. And you know, a conversation
that Raphie and I had on more than one occasion was,
you know the difference between being child centered and always
putting child at the center of everything. You want to
(18:50):
give your children to the best of your ability with
the means at hand, living in this very imperfect world
that we live in the best opportunity to meet their
developmental needs. But at the same time, you don't want
to raise a child who feels that they are at
the center of the universe and only their needs matter.
(19:11):
So part of being a child honoring parent is honoring
yourself and honoring your needs and honoring your wellness so
that children also grow up to understand that they are
part of a family system. Well, dr, this has been
so helpful. Um, should we just pencil in one of
these for next week as well? And then uh, we
(19:33):
could just make this a regular thing because it's just
been so lovely and h yeah, thank you so much
for talking to me today. You're very very welcome, and
I can see with great clarity that you are a
child honoring parent and that Sonny is very lucky to
have you as a father. And it's been a pleasure.
(19:55):
Um speaking with you. Has developing the child honoring philosophy
(20:15):
been healing to you in a similar way, like do
you feel like it allows you to kind of break
the cycle of past traumas or hell part of you? Well,
I imagine it has been that way for me. I
think what child honoring has also given me is a
window into the truth of how we live and how
(20:40):
we become our true selves. It's like when you discover,
you know, the foundational experience of what it feels to
be human as being in those early years. Well, you
want to shout it from the rooftops. You want to say, Hey,
it's not just the university degree. In fact, more important,
it's how we raise these impressionable, vulnerable, susceptible people. We
(21:09):
just want to co create a world that doesn't inflict
so much trauma. Honest children, that's what we want. We
want to create a child honoring world, and that is
my deepest passion. Next time, on Finding Raffie, we dive
(21:40):
into how one family made sure their daughter was always
seen and heard for who she really was. Their parenting
journey is Raffie's philosophy come to life, radical, disruptive, and
child rearing like few in the West have experienced. This
is what child honoring really looks like. But does it work?
(22:05):
My parents did this crazy thing. They sacrifice so much financially, emotionally, whatever,
They made this amazing thing, and oh boy, I better
turn out well I'm the one. As an example of
look I turned out like this, so that means it works.
(22:27):
Finding Raffie is a production of My Heart Radio and
Fatherly in partnership with Rococo Punch. It's produced by Catherine Findalosa,
Meredith Hanig, and James Trout. Production assistance from Charlotte Livingston.
Alex French is our story consultant. Our senior producer is
Andrea swahe Emily Forman is our editor. Fact checking by
(22:48):
Andrea Lopez Crusado. Raphae's music is courtesy of Troubadour Music
Special thanks to Kim Layton at Troubadour. Our executive producers
are Jessica Albert and John parad at Rococo Punch, Ty Trimble,
Mike Rothman and Jeff Eisenman at Fatherly and Me Chris
Garcia thank you for listening.
When the vision itself came to me was the culmination
of an accumulation of learnings over my lifetime. You might say,
at first, I thought, why am I being given this vision?
Surely there are others more worthy of being burdened with
(00:22):
the gift of child honoring as a philosophy. I'm Chris Garcia,
and this is Finding Raffie, a ten part series from
My Heart Radio and Fatherly in partnership with The Rococo
Punch about the life, philosophy, and the work of Raffie,
(00:43):
the man behind the music. One morning in Raphie says
he woke up from a deep sleep with a vision
two words suspended in mid air, char honoring. I knew
(01:04):
in that luminous moment that I was being given something
that would be the work of the rest of my life.
I knew in that moment that it was a unique
social change revolution that connects personal, culture and planet, an
integrated philosophy for restoring communities and restoring the earth. Everything
(01:30):
in Ralphie's mind seems to come down to child honoring.
It came up over and over again in our conversations. Basically,
it's his philosophy for saving the planet by putting children first.
It eventually became a book and an online course, and
Ralphie was selling it to me pretty hard and one
way you can deepen your connection with the beautiful words
(01:53):
that you might read and wonder how might I practice
this in my own family, as you would take the
online course in child hon ring that my Raffie Foundation
offers for a very reasonable price. On my dad, I
took the bait. Raphie's philosophy covers a lot. He asked
(02:13):
us to consider so many different concepts with children in mind,
from the way we grow our food to how we
measure economic progress. He paints a picture of a utopian
world full of farmers, markets, parents volunteering with their kids,
and pesticide free parks. I found it hard to know
where I'm supposed to step in, both as a person
(02:34):
and as a parent. See and reading it, it made
me think a lot about privilege, because it's there's so
much pressure on parents to make sure they're doing everything
just perfectly, reading the right books, having the right toys.
But at the end of the day, it's about survival
and love, and not everyone has the means to curate
(02:54):
the perfect bubble for their child. There's no such thing
as perfect parenting. So let's just put that out of
our minds. All parents, in their various situations, sum are
(03:16):
having a tough time month after month making ends meet.
You know. Everybody's got different pressures, different challenges, and also
different rewards, you know, but we're all doing our best.
And the point of conscious parenting is to be conscious
of how we are parenting, how we were parented, what
(03:39):
that instilled in us that might be passed on to
our children. So it's a call to conscious living. Raphae's
child honoring vision might sound a little esoteric, but I
have to give the guy credit. He knows when and
who to ask for help. He called up the top
thinkers and environmental health education, business, in psychology, you name it,
(04:04):
to test his ideas and shape his philosophy. I would
like to think that before I met Rafiel, I was
doing child honoring work. This is Dr Sharna Olfman, a
Canadian expat living in Pittsburgh. She co wrote Raphael's Child
Honoring book and happens to be a leading expert in
developmental psychology. One of the many reasons I'm excited to
(04:25):
talk to you um today is because you're an expert
in all of this and I am a sponge that
wants to soak in all this knowledge with you. Well,
I want to be really clear that the child honoring
philosophy is Raphael's philosophy, but we're part of this community.
(04:46):
The solutions require the work and the ideas of people
in many, many different professions. In her book series called
Childhood in America, Sharna writes about some controversial educational reforms
that she believed were harming our children, and Raffie was
all about it. What were you trying to communicate to
(05:07):
the world at that time? There were kind of a
confluence events that led to the creation of that book,
So maybe it would help to unpack that a little bit.
If you were in preschool in the nineties, you most
likely spent your days playing with ghak and sitting on
a carpet square singing Barney songs. It was pretty chill.
(05:28):
Playtime was the popular curriculum. Then flash forwards two thousand
and two, Former President George W. Bush had just passed
the highly criticized No Child Left Behind Act, and suddenly
schools became very test driven, meaning preschool kids spent more
time sitting at their desk taking tests than they did
outside learning how to play. As a clinical psychologist, I
(05:56):
was aware of this very big up surge in the
number of children who are being diagnosed with attention deficit
disorder and who are also being prescribed stimulants. So there
were like one in ten kids being prescribed riddle in
there are these kind of formal preschool settings, and also
there was this uptick in play getting translated to screen time.
(06:26):
At the time, my son had just lost a person
that was very, very important to him, and it was
a very very traumatic event for my son. So I'm
looking at all of these different trends and I'm thinking
about my child, and I'm thinking that these preschool settings
don't feel right for him. This was how I felt
(06:49):
as a parent, but it is also how I felt
as a developmental psychologist. If you take a bunch of
kids and you sit them at desks when they're meant
to be playing creatively, and then you know they spend
their leisure time in front of screens, it's going to
create some developmental issues. I look back and I think
(07:11):
about my childhood and I was a very energetic boy
that sat in a desk in a Catholic school all
day and then watched TV at night, and I think
my teachers and then my parents thought that I was
just a bad student or incapable of learning. I ended
up going to UC Berkeley, one of the best colleges
(07:33):
in the world, but I stumbled out of the gates
because I don't think I was meant to sit in
a chair and then watch The Simpsons all night. Afterwards,
in my own head, I almost saw myself as a
bad student, even though I wasn't, because I just couldn't
participate in that environment absolutely, And then those labels risks
(07:57):
sort of becoming self fulfilling prophecies. You know. The the
issue isn't that you can't get there from a lesson
optimal beginning, but why make it so hard? Um? Should
I be paying you for this session? And is this
become a therapy session? Now? I feel like I feel
so much. I'm like, you're right, and you know it
wasn't my fault and if only that would have happened,
(08:18):
I figured it out, But you know I shouldn't. I
shouldn't have had to. Um. Can you tell me about
the first time you met Raffie? So you know, Raffie
heard about my work and Ralphie was kind enough to
fly out to Pittsburgh and he uh met me at
my home. At the time, Sharna's kids were six and
(08:40):
nine years old, prime Raffie years. So when we finished
our meeting, Raffie grabbed a banana from my kitchen, put
it to his ear and his mouth like he was
holding a banana phone from just like the cover art
on his famous Banana Phone album, and he greeted the
(09:01):
kids and he talked to them through the banana. It
was just a really wonderful a first meeting, and my
kids just were enthralled. Ring ring ring, ring, ring ring ring.
Banana phone Ying Yang Yin Yang Yin Yang ying yan fool.
(09:21):
It's a real live mama and Papa phone, a brother
and sister and a doga phone, a grandpa phone, and
a Granma phone to oh yeah, my cell learn Ralph
(09:42):
he saw something in Sharna's work that he'd been trying
to articulate for the last several years. How we treat
our children is the key to building a sustainable world.
A few months after their first meeting, Ralfie flies Sharna,
her husband Dan, and their two young children out to
his home on a small island off the coast of Vancouver,
and I like to say we were living the child
(10:05):
honoring life. You know, it really was a beautiful, idyllic
two weeks. Main Island is this beautiful island off the
coast of British Columbia, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean. We
timed the visit to coincide with this amazing nature camp
(10:29):
that was taking place that my kids were able to
participate in. And it was such a magical camp, wooded, beautiful,
and the kids spent all day every day in nature,
tramping around the woods, splashing around in the ocean, collecting shells,
and putting on little plays, et cetera. Evenings, he would
(10:54):
often join us for dinner and we would spend hours
talking about how how to make the world a better
place for children. I think that Ralphie took me more
deeply into my awareness of you know, issues like global
warming and soil health, etcetera. Yeah, it was absolutely a
(11:17):
pivotal experience for me, and it was just a wonderful
way to kind of launch the work that we did
together over the course of the next couple of years
bringing the book to fruition. What would you say is
was the vision or the goal for this book. So
(11:41):
the Child Honoring Philosophy is both profound and elegant, I
would say, in its simplicity. But I would say that
probably the first impulse for Rafie in creating The Child
Honoring Philosophy was his concern about the health the physical planet.
(12:02):
You know, his concern about global warming, his concern about water, air, soil.
You know, at the core, we're literally killing our children's home,
We're killing their planet. And if we want to turn
this ship around and we want to create a healthy
planet and a healthy world, not in which children can survive,
(12:23):
but in which they can fully thrive and fully self actualize,
then all of us need to lead with the question
is what I'm doing, what I'm saying, how I'm acting
in the best interests of the young child. So I
would like to say that the child Honoring Philosophy could
(12:43):
also be thought of as a value. When we lead
with that value, then we create a world that is
fit for children. When we don't, we end up with
the dying planet and kids who are eating junk food
and getting sick and not thriving and feeling like they
can't find a place for themselves in the world. It's
(13:07):
putting kids first and their well being, and by doing that,
everything will fall in place exactly. So sometimes we get
like blinders even when we're working. Oh, it's all about
the soil health, it's all about legislation, it's all about education,
it's all about mental health. Now, it's all about all
(13:28):
of these things because they all are integrated and they're
all interdependent. And that's the child honoring philosophy, understanding that
it's not just one issue, but it's all of the above.
I mean it it's where, Yeah, I'm just taking a
moment to absorb all this. It's a lot. If I
(13:57):
sound hesitant, it's not that I disagree with the one
aspect of this philosophy or what it hopes to do,
but like, how am I supposed to meet a tiny
humans most basic needs twenty four hours a day while
also considering how my every action impacts the world she's inheriting.
I mean, from my vantage point, it's a lot for
(14:17):
a new parent to take in because you're talking about
humongous systemic issues. Because I have to admit, doctor, I
started when we knew we were having a child. I
jumped in. I was I was reading so much and
then you have a child, and you become a zombie
for about three months, and then you crawl out. You
(14:39):
you come out of the thaw, and then you no
longer have time to read or understand anything. How do
I take this in? Where do I step in? Help
me out here? That's a really really good question. Ironically,
in the effort to curate that perfect bubble, sometimes parents
are moving their kids away from what they need most.
We want children's create civity to come from within, like
(15:03):
go on a nature trail. It's free, there's nothing better,
you know. But at the end of the day, what
your child needs from you is your love and your time,
and everything else is optional. I love allowing that space
for leniency because so many of his philosophies are incredible
(15:25):
in theory, but in practical application are they even possible? Right? So,
I think the idea is they're aspirational, but we do
what is healthiest for the family system. I don't know
(15:46):
if we have a system. It's more of a putting
out fires than saving the world kind of thing. Honestly,
we're just trying to make it to bedtime. And my
parents didn't have much of a system either. As I've
said before, or they both had difficult upbringings, lived under
an oppressive regime, and as immigrants moved to an unfamiliar
(16:07):
country where they didn't speak the language or have much support.
One of the unintended consequences that affected how they raised
me was anxiety. For example, my parents food insecurity growing
up poor in Cuba translated to over feeding me and
rushing through meal times. I still eat like the secret
(16:28):
police is going to take my plate away. And though
I've been fortunate enough to not have to flee my homeland,
I don't want to mirror my anxieties about the world
directly onto Sunny. You know, while I have you here.
(16:58):
Um I just something I think about a lot recently.
I'm the first American born son of Cuban refugees, and
um so one thing I think about a lot is
inherited family trauma, generational trauma. As people talk about these days,
how something that happened to, say, my great great grandpa,
(17:19):
affects me today and how it may have affected my
the rest of my family, either physically or emotionally or
something like that. How do I avoid passing that trauma
down to my daughter, to Sunny, I think a common
mistake is for the pendulum to swing so far the
other way, like, I'm not going to do it that
(17:40):
way because that's you know, or I'm working from a
place of fear, and so I'm going to do the
diametric opposite, which is also not always the best way
to go about it. So first is consciousness, so that
we can think through our choices and how they affect
us and what triggers us. And knowing that your daughter
(18:02):
will carry less of that trauma and will have other
opportunities because you are doing the work of trying to understand. Yeah,
I don't know if anyone in my family's ever had
almost the privilege to think about this. You know, they've
they've just been trying to survive and then, um, you
know these cycles they're vicious and they just almost automatically
(18:25):
happen unless you take a moment to acknowledge it, become aware. Absolutely,
I would agree with that. And you know, a conversation
that Raphie and I had on more than one occasion was,
you know the difference between being child centered and always
putting child at the center of everything. You want to
(18:50):
give your children to the best of your ability with
the means at hand, living in this very imperfect world
that we live in the best opportunity to meet their
developmental needs. But at the same time, you don't want
to raise a child who feels that they are at
the center of the universe and only their needs matter.
(19:11):
So part of being a child honoring parent is honoring
yourself and honoring your needs and honoring your wellness so
that children also grow up to understand that they are
part of a family system. Well, dr, this has been
so helpful. Um, should we just pencil in one of
these for next week as well? And then uh, we
(19:33):
could just make this a regular thing because it's just
been so lovely and h yeah, thank you so much
for talking to me today. You're very very welcome, and
I can see with great clarity that you are a
child honoring parent and that Sonny is very lucky to
have you as a father. And it's been a pleasure.
(19:55):
Um speaking with you. Has developing the child honoring philosophy
(20:15):
been healing to you in a similar way, like do
you feel like it allows you to kind of break
the cycle of past traumas or hell part of you? Well,
I imagine it has been that way for me. I
think what child honoring has also given me is a
window into the truth of how we live and how
(20:40):
we become our true selves. It's like when you discover,
you know, the foundational experience of what it feels to
be human as being in those early years. Well, you
want to shout it from the rooftops. You want to say, Hey,
it's not just the university degree. In fact, more important,
it's how we raise these impressionable, vulnerable, susceptible people. We
(21:09):
just want to co create a world that doesn't inflict
so much trauma. Honest children, that's what we want. We
want to create a child honoring world, and that is
my deepest passion. Next time, on Finding Raffie, we dive
(21:40):
into how one family made sure their daughter was always
seen and heard for who she really was. Their parenting
journey is Raffie's philosophy come to life, radical, disruptive, and
child rearing like few in the West have experienced. This
is what child honoring really looks like. But does it work?
(22:05):
My parents did this crazy thing. They sacrifice so much financially, emotionally, whatever,
They made this amazing thing, and oh boy, I better
turn out well I'm the one. As an example of
look I turned out like this, so that means it works.
(22:27):
Finding Raffie is a production of My Heart Radio and
Fatherly in partnership with Rococo Punch. It's produced by Catherine Findalosa,
Meredith Hanig, and James Trout. Production assistance from Charlotte Livingston.
Alex French is our story consultant. Our senior producer is
Andrea swahe Emily Forman is our editor. Fact checking by
(22:48):
Andrea Lopez Crusado. Raphae's music is courtesy of Troubadour Music
Special thanks to Kim Layton at Troubadour. Our executive producers
are Jessica Albert and John parad at Rococo Punch, Ty Trimble,
Mike Rothman and Jeff Eisenman at Fatherly and Me Chris
Garcia thank you for listening.
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