May 5, 2025 • 37 mins
Parents are never perfect - but their mistakes can have a lasting impact on their children. We all carry with us ideas and attitudes planted in us during childhood - and they're not always very helpful for leading a happy life. How can we unlearn some of these things and also prevent ourselves from passing them on if we have kids?
Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach have raised three children together - so have lots of thoughts on this topic. The couple behind the hit podcast We Can Do Hard Things (and a new book We Can Do Hard Things) tell Dr Laurie how they've learned from their upbringings and decided to do a better job with their own family.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Modern parenting has its challenges, lunches to prep laundry, to
do homework, to help with soccer drop offs, to shuttle
There's just a baseline level of stress and busyness that
comes with being a mom or dad today. But life
sometimes turns in ways that sends these usual parental burdens
into stress overdrive, like when there's a scary health diagnosis,
(00:42):
or a death in the family, or a job loss.
What wisdom can moms and dads turn to during these
extra difficult parenting moments? What can you do to find
solace as a caregiver when it feels like you're the
one that needs care Well, today's two guests have some answers.
As the power couple hosts of the hit podcast We
Can Do Hard Things, best selling author Glennon Doyle and
(01:03):
soccer legend Abby Wambach are used to handling tough family situations.
Since getting married years ago, the pair have navigated the
typical challenges of raising three teenagers, but recently, as Glennon explains,
life decided to hurl a series of nasty plot twists
their way.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
A couple of years ago, all within like a six
month period. I was diagnosed with anorexia. Abby lost her
beloved brother Peter, and our sister Amanda was diagnosed with
breast cancer. And this weird thing happened was you know
how in your friend groups or in your family, there's
usually like one person who is okay, And so when
(01:39):
you lose your shit, you like you can go to
somebody to remind you of who you are or of
what it's true. And so I think for the first time,
everybody was unmoored.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
How do you cope when your entire family support system
is falling apart, when everybody is unmoored? Well, Glennon and
Abby decided to turn to what they do best on
their show, sharing short bursts of wisdom with one another.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Like for Abby, I was writing things down for her
about grief. A lot of the things that we had
talked about on the pod, like moment that were anchoring
and grounding to remember Abby was doing for my sister
in terms of like health and recovery and resilience. And
I and Abby were collecting moments of wisdom about body
peace and all of this stuff I was going through.
(02:23):
I think, when I think about it now, I think
we couldn't find the hope and wisdom inside of ourselves,
so we were externalizing it and they became these like
little treasure chests that we just kept returning to over
and over again. I ended up sending it to a
friend who said, well, this is the most helpful thing
that anyone's ever sent me. And she was joking, but
she said, can you make something like this for every
(02:43):
category of life? And so we laughed, and then I said, wait,
we should do that because I've always wondered why in
moments of like challenging moments in life, the times when
you most need to access what you know and your wisdom,
you lose it. So we just thought, why not have
an answer to that where you can go to this
one place and remember everything that you have learned and
(03:06):
what other people have learned by walking these paths will
light your way.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
That one place where Glennon and Abbie can remember everything
they've learned, They've decided to share it with their fans
in the form of a new book, co authored with
Glennon's sister Amanda Doyle. Like their podcast, it's called We
Can Do Hard Things. And this little treasure chest of
advice in book form wind up becoming much larger than
at least Abbey expected.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Actually, le let me tell you what she said when
she opened the package with the book in it. Yesterday
we got the book. She opens it up, she holds
it up, and she goes, I cannot believe that I
wrote a book that's four hundred and ninety six pages
ninety seven, And I was like, why is that the
thing you're It's so weird.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
It's just so uncommon for a former athlete to produce
and publish a lot Like my books are shortish.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
The new book is a very long book, and it's
incredible for so many topics, especially the one that we're
talking about here today, which is parenting. Is an apt
way to put it, because Glennon and Abbey's book tackles
at least two hard topics that I wanted to dive
into during this special series on Happier Parenting. First, how
(04:18):
can we parent our own kids in ways that don't
repeat the mistakes our parents made? And second, how can
we reparent ourselves in order to fix what our.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Own caregivers got wrong?
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Take, for example, the challenge of understanding what we really
want out of life.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Even as adults, many.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Of us are walking around with a set of outdated
scripts about the way we should be living, scripts that
our parents wrote for us many years ago, and that
simply may not fit with our current goals or identities.
If we're not careful, these outdated narratives can keep us
from becoming the people we want to be. And this
is one reparenting challenge that Glennon and Abbey talk about
a lot.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
We are a lesbian couple. We talk about this all day,
every night. We don't we don't need to just understand
each other. We need to overstand each other sory. This
is something that we spin around constantly because I think
we do have a moment where we kind of wake
up and we go, wait, is this who I really am?
I've developed a certain facade personality. I mean, in my
(05:15):
childhood home, what was important was that I was like
sweet and polite and small and controlled and disciplined, that
I was always achieving. My dad used to say, you
can rest when you're dead. He's a football coach.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
So I think all of us, everyone listening, can probably
relate to the moment where you look at yourself in
the mirror and you're like, have I met you yet?
And besides that, there's a family role that we all
get put into. I have a sister who was the
hero of the family. I was an addict and had
a lot of mental health challenges. I was kind of
like the designated patient, and she had to be perfect.
(05:55):
And now she's still trying to have a life where
she doesn't have to be perfect. I mean, you Abby,
you talk about the facade that you had to create.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
I'm the youngest of seven, so the particular family system
that I came from was of fend for yourself. You
got to get what you get, whether it was a
second helping of food at dinner or the true, unbridled
attention that I was longing for from my parents. It's
(06:25):
virtually impossible with that many human beings in one space,
and that projected onto me in a way that made
me make decisions as a person, as a kid, as
a young adult, that got me pretty far down the
sports route.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
You know.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
I played for the United States and I won gold medals. Literally,
they handed me a trophy that said I was the
best player in the world, which is insanity when you
think about it, like that's impossible. And then when I
look at myself in the mirror, the night after I
get that award, I'm assuming, I'm thinking that this is
going to finally make me feel the thing that I
(07:04):
have been in search of, right, the worthiness, the love, roughness.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Right, you will be enough finally with this trophy.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Right.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
And so I looked in the mirror and I thought,
you are the same. You still have that same weird acne.
You just look the same, you feel the same. And
so I mean, the way that we both were brought
up has shaped so much of the people we now
know ourselves to be. But when have we ever given
ourselves a space to really analyze, like why, actually am
(07:33):
I like this? How did I become the person that
thinks the way that this person thinks, so the person
that reacts in the way that this person reacts.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
And this is the problem, right, is these incredibly loving,
well intentioned parents who are trying to protect you, who
are trying to do right by you, wind up pushing
this kind of thing that's not you, it's not your
real self, and it becomes this facade. But the sad
thing is that I feel like often parents do this
out of care and love. There's something that they're scared about.
They're worried that you're going to be rejected for some
(08:02):
aspect of your identity, and they're like, don't be like that,
Like it's just this misguided attempt to protect and Abby.
I know you've talked about how that played out out
in the context of your queer identity, especially too, right.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
Yeah, And I think our parents really were trying.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
The best that they could and doing the best that
they knew how and making decisions in the way that
was best for them at the time. I want to
give them the most compassion and put them in the
light most favorable and also say that it wasn't what I,
in my particular personhood needed, and I was able to
(08:38):
do some really awesome stuff with it. So the paradox
of it all blows my mind on a consistent basis,
the paradox of wondering what if things were different, how
would I have turned out? And I wouldn't change a thing.
Some of the stuff that I experienced fortified me. And
I was explaining this to Glennon there's a part of
(08:59):
me that feels so grateful to my parents for in
some ways not really accepting my sexuality at a young age.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Wow, that for.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
Putting me in a position to like, really be striving
towards this love and worthiness and acceptance because I created
my life in a lot of ways off of the
foundation of that. And she just said, yeah, honey, I
get that. And also I wonder what could have happened
if love took that place, if acceptance took that place.
(09:31):
I wonder how much more you might have been able
to grow and to become. And that was tough to
hear because there's so much truth in that. And I've
got what I've got. I had what I had, and
so I feel like I made the best of it.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
You know. Yeah, if this is what like terrible trauma
and your parent's not accepting you, looks like, you know,
it's not so bad in your case, Abby.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
Yeah, the best in the world.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
This gets to another blueprint that parents inadvertently give kids.
It's this idea of like what love looks like. It's
not always the healthiest version.
Speaker 5 (10:05):
Abby.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
You had a story from the book about learning that
love was transaction that I think point out with your.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Kids if you wouldn't mind sharing it.
Speaker 5 (10:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
When I was younger, my dad paid me for scoring goals.
The better I did on the field, the more quote
unquote pride they would have for me. And then the
story in the book I think that we talked about
was at the cake pop story.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Oh gosh, yes, she tried to buy their love for life.
Speaker 5 (10:31):
So I'm very new to the family.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
I'm still like getting to know the kids, and I
just thought, okay, I'm going to really try to court them.
So we were in line to get a coffee and
I see that they have got cake pops in the
menu in it, and I turned back and I was.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
Like, hey, girls, you guys want a cake pop?
Speaker 4 (10:48):
And they said yes, and so I ordered the cake
pop At the drive through. They said, yeah, how many
do you like? And I said, I'll take all of them.
And Glennen was like, wait, no, no, no, that's not parenting.
And I'm like, oh really, Now it's like a family
joke because I'm like, what do you guys want and
they're like, oh, like all of them, all the everything.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah. But it's so easy to fall into, right, because
you want to kind of get your kids to think
that something's rewarding.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Your dad maybe not the best strategy, but he wanted
you to think that, like scoring goals was rewarding. So
it's like, I'll slap this other external thing on you.
I'll pay you to do it. And what we forget
is that our psychology is set up that when you
add an extrinsic reward to something, you pay somebody, or
you give love and cake pops, then that makes you
kind of feel completely empty when it comes to the
intrinsic rewards, Like that's the quickest way to make your
(11:39):
kid hate soccer or feel like the only goal of
soccer is just so you can get the money afterwards
or something.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Even the pride I do try to think about the
thing that I'm saying feels like a gift. I'm proud
of you feels like a gift. But what is the
shadow side of saying that? Like I'm proud of you
because you did well in a game. Implicit in that
is I am less proud of you when you do
not do well anything.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
There's a because in there. I'm proud of you because
dot dot dot right.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
One of the things I'm very con of now we
have a young daughter, our youngest She plays soccer. One
of the things that's the most important to me is
to not get too high or low about any kind
of performance that she has because I want her to
know that, whether she does well or doesn't do well,
that I just love her period.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Right, So that's just another form of what we were
talking about in the beginning, Like you learn what makes
people happy, and then you amplify those parts of your personality,
and you find out what makes your parents are family uncomfortable,
and you knew those parts of your personality and then
you turn forwarding and you want to while you're half
a person, right, So asking these questions, like even saying
(12:50):
why am I like this is the beginning because inherent
in the question is the moment where you start to
notice the water you're swimming in, which is being conscious.
Like if you don't notice the water you're swimming in,
you just think that's the way it is. But if
you can figure out what parts of your personality you
amplified and muted, then there's a bit of a hero's journey.
(13:12):
You can go on to like explore the parts you
muted and start to amplify those so that you can
become more fully human and you're not just like playing
a role your whole life.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
I just want to say one thing really quick about
the pride thing, because I just had this like aha
moment in my body. I think parenting what it comes
down to is if we can control the centering of ourselves,
then I think that a lot of parenting issues would
get solved because when I say that I'm proud of you,
I am now centering my opinion of you more than
(13:43):
you your life and your experience.
Speaker 5 (13:45):
So what we say is I'm.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
So happy for you because that is how I feel.
I feel so happy for you, and it gives them
the autonomy of the experience, and it also takes my
experience and what matters to me out.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
I love that because there's so much science that backs
up that. If you're allowing it to be their intrinsic
reward that's about them, that's not about the idea that
you want for them as a parent, then that's going
to be the thing that drives them into the future. Right,
You're helping them develop their real self as opposed to
whatever facade you want for them. That's good, but it's
very hard.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Yes, when I get back from the break, we're going
to hear what you learned about how to do this
better for your own kids, and also what the science
shows about healthier strategies we can do to kind of
reparent ourselves if we didn't get that from our own parents.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
So the Happiness Lab We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
In their new book, We Can Do Hard Things, podcasters
Glennon Doyle and Abby Wombach explore the complex experience of
raising three children while trying to come to terms with
their own complicated childhoods. For Glennan, the process of truly
confronting the past began at the start of her parenting journey,
when she was forced to really start thinking about her future.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
When I found out I was pregnant with Chase and
I was twenty five, I had been lost to addiction
from the time I was ten, like, believing in alcoholism, drugs,
the whole thing. So when I found out I was pregnant,
I think I just really had a moment of Oh,
this is it. I felt very close to debt, Like
I felt like either I clean it up now or
I don't ever clean it up. And I largely became sober,
(15:24):
became a human being by figuring out what would this
kid's mom do? Like I formed a personality completely based
on mom because I didn't have a developmental track like
most people. Because I was last to addiction for so long,
so I really didn't go through all the things that
(15:45):
one is supposed to go through, which has made the
kids growing up, I think harder for me than the
average bear. I've really been struggling a lot with them
growing up and growing away because my only identity, not
only my only identity, but my only feeling of belonging.
And I think that's what I've really noticed about this time,
(16:07):
which is that I am a person who struggle mightily
to feel like she belongs anywhere, and the little microcosm
in this family has been the only environment I've ever
felt belonging. So to lose that now sending all my
love to all the people who are losing their belonging
in identity.
Speaker 4 (16:24):
Because we're coming up we and a year and a
little bit, we are going to be empty nesters. We
also have artists, so likely they will be back in
living in our house.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
But I think this is something that so many parents
go through. You know, the parents that I work with
most closely, our parents whose kids are going off to college,
and you have parents who set up their whole identity
like I am a mom or I am a dad,
and then a lot of kids are needing you less
or less in the ways that you got used to.
And I think this can be incredibly hard as an
identity change for parents, And so how do you navigate
(16:58):
that while doing what we suggested before the break of
not centering yourself.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
I've found that every phase of parenting just requires a
completely different self because it feels like what they need
from me is so different. I think if I could
go back and do anything different, I think that I
a little bit too much created in every scenario this
feeling in them of Mom's got me. And I thought
(17:24):
that that was good parenting. What I'm trying to do
now is more of like responses that say, oh, you've
got you, You've got you. That is a big frickin difference.
Like I had this weird moment recently where I was
thinking about okay, me on my deathbed, the kids all
around me, and I've always thought that what I wanted
(17:45):
in that moment was for them to think she was
the best mom that ever lived. And then I thought,
oh my god, that's not what I want them thinking.
What I want them thinking is I've got this, I'm okay,
not I'm not okay now because my guide my life
my everything is leaving, But I want to have parented
(18:08):
them in a way where in that moment they think, oh, yeah,
I'm good, which is two different things, right.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
And I think parents can again, loving parents who have
incredibly good intentions can like mess this up. You made
this claim that it's worth pushing back on this idea
that we need to mold our children like that. That's
not the right metaphor. What's a better metaphor for parents
to think about.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
I think that there is this idea that goes back
to what we were talking about in the beginning, that
there's a world out there and that we have to
prepare our kids for that world, which really means that
whatever your world view is based on your childhood trauma,
your own your kid's this poor Bonzie tree, and you're
just like cutting parts off and you're doing it out
of love because you think, well, like in an Abbey's situation,
(18:53):
bless her mom's heart, she's Catholic, she thought the world
was going to crush Abby yeah, with her queerness, so
she crushed it first. Yeah, But what we forget is
like we are the world for our kids, so we
bring them the rejection that we're afraid they're going going
to experience outside because we think we have to prune
(19:13):
them to make them able to grow out there. But
that doesn't work. I guess the metaphor because I'm obsessed
with metaphors and can't do anything literally would be. It
feels more to me like they're not lumps of clay
to mold, because the last thing I want to do
is mold anybody in my own image. Like, good God,
I'm working hard enough to change my own situation, right,
(19:35):
and they know more than we do, Like that is
almost like moving backwards. I always think about that line
from the Khalil Lebron poem about like they are life's
longing for itself, like they belong to the future where
we can't even go in our dreams. I think they're
more like seeds. They have everything in them when they're
born that they need to become, and so our job
(19:58):
is not to touch it. Actually, our job is just
to create a fertile soil that allows them to grow
into whatever they were meant to be without pruning too much.
Speaker 5 (20:09):
That's really good.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
It's kind of a faulty system too, because it's like
this thing that we do by creating this big identity
around parent mother, rather than creating the mindset that I
am raising this child, I'm guiding this child through all
the different phases of their life so that I can
leave them.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah, that's like the point. That's the goal eventually, is
they can do it on their own, right.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
Yeah, exactly, And bless our hearts.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
It's a heartbreaking, terrible sirstem. No, I'm not giving five
stars to the system. I think it's awful, but it
is in fact the situation, that's all I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
And it winds up helping you because if your child
wasn't a seed, if it was really up to you
to mold them, then you'd have to do that perfectly, right,
Your every mistake as a parent would be deeply messing
them up. And this is something I know you've both
talked about a lot in the book, right, is that
striving to be the perfect parent is actually incredibly dangerous
and probably really harmful for your child. Part of what
(21:06):
you need to do as a parent is that you
have to show your humanness, right.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Yes, what I've been playing with lately is becoming aware
of your repetitive behaviors and how those affect your children
and I'll give you an example, because this was like
a breakthrough for me that just happened. I am doing
a lot of work on myself with eating disorder stuff
and yadiyada. I have like one song. I've learned that
(21:32):
huntback whales have like one song. They sing their whole lives.
I just have one song, and it's this eating shit,
and I just will keep spinning around it forever. Anyway,
in therapy, I have learned that I am very judgmental. Okay,
I use judgment as a way of keeping people away.
I'm scared of people. I use judgment to keep myself
(21:55):
safe and my family safe. So my family has experienced
that for me many hundreds of times. Meaning they will
bring someone up or something up, and they will hear
Mom go into a list of the reasons why this
person is bad, why they should stay away from this person,
et cetera, et cetera. Recently, I was doing that at
the dinner table. I saw my little one kind of
dim I saw it in real time, A mean I
(22:15):
talked about it. We took her to dinner and I
said to her, here's the thing. I learned some strategies
when I was young because I am scared of people.
One of the strategies I've learned is judgment. So when
you hear me going through a list of reasons why
someone is bad and you should stay away from them,
that is my very unhelpful attempt to keep you safe,
(22:36):
and it has nothing to do with the person I'm
talking about. So when you see your mom doing that,
I want you to not look at the person I'm
talking about. I want you to only look at your
mom and think, oh, she's doing that thing again. Because Laurie, like,
I don't know what to do with the gap, Like,
I know this isn't what I want to teach my kids.
(22:58):
I know I don't want to be doing this, but
I have this gap where my body keeps doing the thing.
So how we deal with the gap is we just
point out the gap, because what we do to our
kids is we put our dirty lens over their eyes
and they don't know that that's the water they're swimming in.
They just think that's the way it is. But I
(23:19):
want her to not put my dirty lens on. I
want her to see the world with her lens, which
is better than mine. It's more open, it's more trusting,
So that is I think a way that's like the
next step. It's identifying the patterns that we don't want
to pass on completely, and even when we can't stop them,
at least pointing them out to our kids so that
(23:41):
they see it as our worldview.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
You also on the book talk about these cases where
you really encourage kids to push back against adults, whether
those adults are you know, their parents, or other authority
figures of their life, so that they can develop their
own views and their own story. Glenn, I think you
had a version of this with your daughter and her
high school guidance counselor recently.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Could you share that one.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
I mean, look, everybody out there trying to teach their
kids to be brave and stand up to authority figures
like just look out, because we did that and now
our kids are just really.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Buyer beware I guess on this one, but.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Yeah, wow, I mean we're so proud but also constantly terrified.
So I think the moment you're talking about is when
our middle child came home and she said, look, my
counselor wants me to join all these clubs, and I
don't want to join the clubs. I'm not like a
club person and I said, okay, well, what's the big deal,
just don't join the clubs and she said, I don't
want to disappoint him. And that was a big moment
(24:37):
for me because I really think that our job, and
what I told her is like we need to just
walk around every day with the express goal of disappointing everyone.
That should be not something we avoid, something we strive
for because even that word disappoint think about it, it's
like disappointing someone else as the decision maker of your
(24:59):
life and reappointing yourself. So I said, oh, honey, you
got to disappoint your counselor you got to disappoint everybody,
so you don't have to disappoint yourself. And she said, oh,
even you, And I said, oh, especially me. Like I
know people who are doing like the biggest, huge lives
and they're all still just living, not to disappoint their parents.
(25:19):
Their parents aren't even alive anymore. It's the most important
thing we can do in our entire lives is to
stop recreating what we think our parents would have wanted
us to and create what we want to.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Create, creating the life we want to create. It's such
an important goal, but it can be surprisingly hard to
actually do.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
So.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
When we get back from the break, we'll look at
strategies we can use to become the people that we
really want to be in spite of what our parents
may have wanted.
Speaker 5 (25:46):
Well.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Here Glennon and Abbey's tips on successfully reparenting ourselves and
not making the same mistakes with the next generation when
the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. It's no secret
that parenting can bring up lots of unresolved experiences from
(26:07):
your own childhood. Watching your child mess up might trigger
your own memories of feeling criticized. A big move or
divorce may lead you to reflect on how your parents
navigated big life transitions. In their new book We Can
Do Hard Things, Glennon Doyle and Abby Wombach explain that
we can embrace these moments as opportunities not just to
do better for our own kids, but also to reparent ourselves.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
I had this experience with my kid early on when
I got into the family. We do kind of nightly
ritual where we lay in bed and we'll take a
moral inventory of the day and things that didn't sit
right with us. And one of the things that wasn't
sitting right. Was the way that I responded to our
youngest who came to me and said, my knee hurts,
(26:50):
and I just went into the way I was parented.
I basically said, you know, you'll be fine in not
so many.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
Words, deffin up buttercup.
Speaker 4 (26:58):
Yeah, And it felt very like I was pushing her away,
And that was kind of the way that I was raised.
And I think in this moment when I was telling
Glennon just said, well, you can apologize to her. And
I was like, I'm sorry, excuse me, and yes, I'm like,
but parents don't do that. Parents don't apologize. That had
(27:23):
never happened in my whole life. So the next morning,
I wake up and Amma's eating her cereal and I
kind of explained the story, like, this thing happened last
night and you came to me with your injury and
I didn't handle it right, and I'm so sorry, and
I want you to always feel confident and comfortable coming
to me with anything, even if it's a toenail that
(27:44):
you're feeling uncomfortable about.
Speaker 5 (27:46):
And she just was like eating her cereal and she.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
Was like, okay, great, moving on, And it was this
really important moment for me that not only did it
feel unnatural to apologize to a child, my own child,
but it also felt very healing. Like I think that
what we get wrong is that we think that we
are just the way that we are and this is
(28:08):
the way that it will be. But parenting is this beautiful,
unique opportunity to reparent ourselves. And so in this apology
with my child, I was having this experience. I felt uncomfortable,
I felt scared, and then it happened, and she was
so great about it and loving that I just thought, Oh,
I bet you there were probably a lot of things
(28:30):
my mom wanted to apologize for and maybe she can't
find the words for it.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Abby, you brought up the idea specifically of parenting ourselves,
like reparenting ourselves, why is it so important?
Speaker 4 (28:41):
Being the youngest of seven, I was always watching my
parents and my brothers and sisters and trying to like
figure out what what worked for me, what I would
do different, And then you get to do that with
your kids. You get to then express your own idea
of parenting on your children. But I didn't know that
there was so much possible healing in it for me.
(29:02):
In the ways that I wasn't parented that I might
have needed. And we do have to analyze and think
about really from the beginning, like why am I so
anxiously attached? Oh, probably because my mom didn't hold me
as much as I needed to be held, because there
were six other people that she was having to fend
(29:23):
off of her body. Probably because every single one of
my brothers and sisters left to go to college. In fact,
when my sister, when the oldest, went to college, she
was kind of my second mom. She was the one
that was holding me and changing my diapers. And when
she went to college, I was starting to act out.
Said they brought me to a therapist like a school counselor,
(29:44):
and I said, like, I think that my sister Beth
died and nobody is telling me about it. And so
parenting and reparenting has to begin with actually really doing
a deep dive on the environment that you grew up with.
Speaker 5 (29:58):
And if we're.
Speaker 4 (29:59):
Really present and really awake with this idea of what
parenting can be, what it was for us as children,
what it might currently be for you as a person
right now in your parenting life, Like there are ways
for healing Honestly, I've never felt more happy in my
(30:19):
life in just watching these children experience the lives that
they're creating for themselves.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Yeah, and this idea of kind of mindfully noticing what
you missed, mindfully noticing what you need, it kind of
fits with something that we talk about a lot on
the Happiness Lab, this idea of giving yourself self compassion,
which I think is one of the fastest ways to
kind of parent yourself, like mindfully noticing I'm struggling right now,
this is not feeling good, I'm sucking. But then it
(30:46):
comes also with this idea of like, this makes sense.
No parent is perfect, no childhood is perfect. I'm just dealing.
But then also treating yourself with kindness, and I know
that this is something that both of you have struggled
with at various points. Any strategies for parents or anybody
who's struggling with this and trying to reparent themselves of
giving themselves some kindness.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
I feel unable sometimes to figure out what I want
for myself without seeing it through the lens of what
I want for my kids first, And I wish I
could do that, but I'm not yet able to do that.
So what I would say is I think that when
we talk to parents about just be kind to yourself,
(31:28):
we're so obsessed with doing things right or well that
that feels a little bit like BS until you start
to think, Okay, then forget about yourself for a minute.
You think about your kid, and when your kid makes
a big mistake at school, or your kid feels left out,
or your kid says something awkward, or your kid loses
(31:48):
a job, what do you want them to do after that?
You probably don't want them to feel like I'm such
an idiot. Guys suck. I just am like, Okay, So
if that's not what you want for them, because the
only thing we know about human beings really is that
they're just going to keep screwing up constantly, like that's
just what we do. So that's the model we have
(32:10):
to work with. We know that's going to happen to them.
The only way that they're going to have a self
compassionate inner voice is if they've seen that. That's what
got me. I wish what got me is just like,
obviously you should be kinder to yourself, but thinking what
I want my kids to have as their inner voice
when they screw up is what I have to become
(32:30):
and model. That's what reparenting is.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Yeah, and I think that's such great advice because there's
evidence from Kristin neflab Butt U T.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
Austin.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
If you want your kid to develop a self compassionate voice,
you have to model that self compassionate voice and ideally
model it out loud, like Abby your story about apologizing
of like mom messed up. I probably should have been
nicer to you about not feeling well. I'm going to
try to do differently in the future when it takes
some time to think about this. That's so much nicer
than secretly beating yourself up insideer than watching the consequences
(32:59):
of you secretly beating yourself up inside. Allowing yourself to
be vulnerable actually helps your kids because then they get
to sort of see how you do it, which is
so important for their own development. Yea.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Even naming the patterns like I could have gone to
Amma and said, I suck. I'm just so judgmental, that's
not the whole story. Like I learned that as a
coping mechanism, and I said, Amma, like, I'm doing my
best with this. This is something that I learned to
keep myself safe. It's not my favorite part of myself,
but this is how human beings work. So when she's
(33:31):
forty and she's okay, when she's forty nine and she's
talking to her kid, I don't want her beating herself
up about her coping mechanisms. But I do want her
telling my granddaughter what hers are because I feel like
all we're trying to do each generation is like you
get a certain hue of paint from your parents and
(33:52):
you just add more white to it or whatever. You
just try to like clear it a little bit each generation.
So all we're doing is trying to get each other
to look at our stuff and say, I'm not going
to take that with me.
Speaker 4 (34:03):
And compassion has been really difficult for me personally. It's
been my life's journey self love right worthiness, And so
for the listener who also struggles with this, like I
totally get it, and it is extraordinarily hard, Like I'm
my biggest critic, right if I didn't get it perfect,
(34:26):
if I didn't get it exactly right. There are therapists
that are really helpful around cultivating a practice of this,
because it has to be a practice. I mean I'm
a very optimistic person, and I see the very best
in so many people around me, and yet when it
comes to myself, I can be so critical and so unloving.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
You're so not alone.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
I often joke that if people could hear what we
say to ourselves, and we'd all get fired because hr
would be like, you know, would put us all up
for harassment, unless we're so mean to ourselves.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Harassment. Oh that's crazy, and.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
So it is difficult. But I think when Glennon told
me that too, this is early days. She said, you know,
one of the most important things around parenting that we
can offer our children is just the modeling of the
way we live. That really got me thinking, like, oh yeah,
my dad drank every day and that was something I
aspired to do. Oh yeah, then I became an alcoholic.
(35:21):
Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like I
put my dad and his drinking ability on a pedestal.
That's something that I wanted to become, and the same
thing happens.
Speaker 5 (35:33):
And it might not be.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
As obvious and as detrimental as alcoholism. It might be snark,
it might be judgment, judgment. It might be what kind
of food you choose to eat, like modeling therapy, Like
if I'm not getting this compassion for myself thing right,
I'm modeling to my kids. I go to therapy every
single week and they know it.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
And the modeling is so useful because one of the
things we know from the research is that a very
quick emotion that parents go to is guilt. And when
you start to realize that treating yourself nice, working on yourself,
putting in that work, that's actually parenting for the future.
That's so like when your kid's forty nine, they'll talk
to you know, your grips and daughter in a really
nice way. I think that can just give parents permission
to take the time and put in the work to
(36:15):
take care of themselves, which they wouldn't normally do, but
when it's for their kids, they do it. There's so
much good wisdom in this book. I hope all the
parents listening and all the non parents listening go out
and check out your book so that they can get
as many gloomorerous from you as I have. Glenn and Abby,
thank you so much for coming on the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
You're the best. You make us happier. Laurie. We just
love hanging out with you.
Speaker 5 (36:35):
Thank you, thanks for having us.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Parenting young children while simultaneously reparenting yourself is tough, but
as the title of Glennon and Abbey's book suggests, we
can do hard things, and while reflecting on the past
may be hard, it often comes with the opportunity to
shape a more intentional future, both for ourselves and for
our kids. And showing that you're willing to take care
(36:58):
of yourself is pretty much the best way to teach
your kids that they can also navigate life's challenges with
self compassion. In next week's special episode on Happier Parenting,
we'll dive into what we can learn from parents who
live in the happiest countries on the planet. We'll meet
a mom from Denmark who's found that adopting a Scandinavian
approach to parenting can lead to way less stress and
(37:18):
surprising increases in family resilience.
Speaker 6 (37:21):
For a Danish parent, it would be no good if
your child was top of the class but miserable and
actually aspect to some parents in Finland, he said, they
sort of told their children to study a bit less.
It doesn't matter about being top of the class, it
matters about being happy.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Until then, don't forget to check out my new free
online course, The Science of Well Being for Parents. You
can learn more by heading to doctor Lauri Santo's dot
com slash parents. That's dr Lauri Santos dot com slash parents.
We'll see you back soon for the next installment on
happier parenting here on the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor
(37:54):
Lauriy Santos,
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Modern parenting has its challenges, lunches to prep laundry, to
do homework, to help with soccer drop offs, to shuttle
There's just a baseline level of stress and busyness that
comes with being a mom or dad today. But life
sometimes turns in ways that sends these usual parental burdens
into stress overdrive, like when there's a scary health diagnosis,
(00:42):
or a death in the family, or a job loss.
What wisdom can moms and dads turn to during these
extra difficult parenting moments? What can you do to find
solace as a caregiver when it feels like you're the
one that needs care Well, today's two guests have some answers.
As the power couple hosts of the hit podcast We
Can Do Hard Things, best selling author Glennon Doyle and
(01:03):
soccer legend Abby Wambach are used to handling tough family situations.
Since getting married years ago, the pair have navigated the
typical challenges of raising three teenagers, but recently, as Glennon explains,
life decided to hurl a series of nasty plot twists
their way.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
A couple of years ago, all within like a six
month period. I was diagnosed with anorexia. Abby lost her
beloved brother Peter, and our sister Amanda was diagnosed with
breast cancer. And this weird thing happened was you know
how in your friend groups or in your family, there's
usually like one person who is okay, And so when
(01:39):
you lose your shit, you like you can go to
somebody to remind you of who you are or of
what it's true. And so I think for the first time,
everybody was unmoored.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
How do you cope when your entire family support system
is falling apart, when everybody is unmoored? Well, Glennon and
Abby decided to turn to what they do best on
their show, sharing short bursts of wisdom with one another.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Like for Abby, I was writing things down for her
about grief. A lot of the things that we had
talked about on the pod, like moment that were anchoring
and grounding to remember Abby was doing for my sister
in terms of like health and recovery and resilience. And
I and Abby were collecting moments of wisdom about body
peace and all of this stuff I was going through.
(02:23):
I think, when I think about it now, I think
we couldn't find the hope and wisdom inside of ourselves,
so we were externalizing it and they became these like
little treasure chests that we just kept returning to over
and over again. I ended up sending it to a
friend who said, well, this is the most helpful thing
that anyone's ever sent me. And she was joking, but
she said, can you make something like this for every
(02:43):
category of life? And so we laughed, and then I said, wait,
we should do that because I've always wondered why in
moments of like challenging moments in life, the times when
you most need to access what you know and your wisdom,
you lose it. So we just thought, why not have
an answer to that where you can go to this
one place and remember everything that you have learned and
(03:06):
what other people have learned by walking these paths will
light your way.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
That one place where Glennon and Abbie can remember everything
they've learned, They've decided to share it with their fans
in the form of a new book, co authored with
Glennon's sister Amanda Doyle. Like their podcast, it's called We
Can Do Hard Things. And this little treasure chest of
advice in book form wind up becoming much larger than
at least Abbey expected.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Actually, le let me tell you what she said when
she opened the package with the book in it. Yesterday
we got the book. She opens it up, she holds
it up, and she goes, I cannot believe that I
wrote a book that's four hundred and ninety six pages
ninety seven, And I was like, why is that the
thing you're It's so weird.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
It's just so uncommon for a former athlete to produce
and publish a lot Like my books are shortish.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
The new book is a very long book, and it's
incredible for so many topics, especially the one that we're
talking about here today, which is parenting. Is an apt
way to put it, because Glennon and Abbey's book tackles
at least two hard topics that I wanted to dive
into during this special series on Happier Parenting. First, how
(04:18):
can we parent our own kids in ways that don't
repeat the mistakes our parents made? And second, how can
we reparent ourselves in order to fix what our.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Own caregivers got wrong?
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Take, for example, the challenge of understanding what we really
want out of life.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Even as adults, many.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Of us are walking around with a set of outdated
scripts about the way we should be living, scripts that
our parents wrote for us many years ago, and that
simply may not fit with our current goals or identities.
If we're not careful, these outdated narratives can keep us
from becoming the people we want to be. And this
is one reparenting challenge that Glennon and Abbey talk about
a lot.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
We are a lesbian couple. We talk about this all day,
every night. We don't we don't need to just understand
each other. We need to overstand each other sory. This
is something that we spin around constantly because I think
we do have a moment where we kind of wake
up and we go, wait, is this who I really am?
I've developed a certain facade personality. I mean, in my
(05:15):
childhood home, what was important was that I was like
sweet and polite and small and controlled and disciplined, that
I was always achieving. My dad used to say, you
can rest when you're dead. He's a football coach.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
So I think all of us, everyone listening, can probably
relate to the moment where you look at yourself in
the mirror and you're like, have I met you yet?
And besides that, there's a family role that we all
get put into. I have a sister who was the
hero of the family. I was an addict and had
a lot of mental health challenges. I was kind of
like the designated patient, and she had to be perfect.
(05:55):
And now she's still trying to have a life where
she doesn't have to be perfect. I mean, you Abby,
you talk about the facade that you had to create.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
I'm the youngest of seven, so the particular family system
that I came from was of fend for yourself. You
got to get what you get, whether it was a
second helping of food at dinner or the true, unbridled
attention that I was longing for from my parents. It's
(06:25):
virtually impossible with that many human beings in one space,
and that projected onto me in a way that made
me make decisions as a person, as a kid, as
a young adult, that got me pretty far down the
sports route.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
You know.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
I played for the United States and I won gold medals. Literally,
they handed me a trophy that said I was the
best player in the world, which is insanity when you
think about it, like that's impossible. And then when I
look at myself in the mirror, the night after I
get that award, I'm assuming, I'm thinking that this is
going to finally make me feel the thing that I
(07:04):
have been in search of, right, the worthiness, the love, roughness.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Right, you will be enough finally with this trophy.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Right.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
And so I looked in the mirror and I thought,
you are the same. You still have that same weird acne.
You just look the same, you feel the same. And
so I mean, the way that we both were brought
up has shaped so much of the people we now
know ourselves to be. But when have we ever given
ourselves a space to really analyze, like why, actually am
(07:33):
I like this? How did I become the person that
thinks the way that this person thinks, so the person
that reacts in the way that this person reacts.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
And this is the problem, right, is these incredibly loving,
well intentioned parents who are trying to protect you, who
are trying to do right by you, wind up pushing
this kind of thing that's not you, it's not your
real self, and it becomes this facade. But the sad
thing is that I feel like often parents do this
out of care and love. There's something that they're scared about.
They're worried that you're going to be rejected for some
(08:02):
aspect of your identity, and they're like, don't be like that,
Like it's just this misguided attempt to protect and Abby.
I know you've talked about how that played out out
in the context of your queer identity, especially too, right.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
Yeah, And I think our parents really were trying.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
The best that they could and doing the best that
they knew how and making decisions in the way that
was best for them at the time. I want to
give them the most compassion and put them in the
light most favorable and also say that it wasn't what I,
in my particular personhood needed, and I was able to
(08:38):
do some really awesome stuff with it. So the paradox
of it all blows my mind on a consistent basis,
the paradox of wondering what if things were different, how
would I have turned out? And I wouldn't change a thing.
Some of the stuff that I experienced fortified me. And
I was explaining this to Glennon there's a part of
(08:59):
me that feels so grateful to my parents for in
some ways not really accepting my sexuality at a young age.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Wow, that for.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
Putting me in a position to like, really be striving
towards this love and worthiness and acceptance because I created
my life in a lot of ways off of the
foundation of that. And she just said, yeah, honey, I
get that. And also I wonder what could have happened
if love took that place, if acceptance took that place.
(09:31):
I wonder how much more you might have been able
to grow and to become. And that was tough to
hear because there's so much truth in that. And I've
got what I've got. I had what I had, and
so I feel like I made the best of it.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
You know. Yeah, if this is what like terrible trauma
and your parent's not accepting you, looks like, you know,
it's not so bad in your case, Abby.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
Yeah, the best in the world.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
This gets to another blueprint that parents inadvertently give kids.
It's this idea of like what love looks like. It's
not always the healthiest version.
Speaker 5 (10:05):
Abby.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
You had a story from the book about learning that
love was transaction that I think point out with your.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Kids if you wouldn't mind sharing it.
Speaker 5 (10:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
When I was younger, my dad paid me for scoring goals.
The better I did on the field, the more quote
unquote pride they would have for me. And then the
story in the book I think that we talked about
was at the cake pop story.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Oh gosh, yes, she tried to buy their love for life.
Speaker 5 (10:31):
So I'm very new to the family.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
I'm still like getting to know the kids, and I
just thought, okay, I'm going to really try to court them.
So we were in line to get a coffee and
I see that they have got cake pops in the
menu in it, and I turned back and I was.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
Like, hey, girls, you guys want a cake pop?
Speaker 4 (10:48):
And they said yes, and so I ordered the cake
pop At the drive through. They said, yeah, how many
do you like? And I said, I'll take all of them.
And Glennen was like, wait, no, no, no, that's not parenting.
And I'm like, oh really, Now it's like a family
joke because I'm like, what do you guys want and
they're like, oh, like all of them, all the everything.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah. But it's so easy to fall into, right, because
you want to kind of get your kids to think
that something's rewarding.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Your dad maybe not the best strategy, but he wanted
you to think that, like scoring goals was rewarding. So
it's like, I'll slap this other external thing on you.
I'll pay you to do it. And what we forget
is that our psychology is set up that when you
add an extrinsic reward to something, you pay somebody, or
you give love and cake pops, then that makes you
kind of feel completely empty when it comes to the
intrinsic rewards, Like that's the quickest way to make your
(11:39):
kid hate soccer or feel like the only goal of
soccer is just so you can get the money afterwards
or something.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Even the pride I do try to think about the
thing that I'm saying feels like a gift. I'm proud
of you feels like a gift. But what is the
shadow side of saying that? Like I'm proud of you
because you did well in a game. Implicit in that
is I am less proud of you when you do
not do well anything.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
There's a because in there. I'm proud of you because
dot dot dot right.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
One of the things I'm very con of now we
have a young daughter, our youngest She plays soccer. One
of the things that's the most important to me is
to not get too high or low about any kind
of performance that she has because I want her to
know that, whether she does well or doesn't do well,
that I just love her period.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Right, So that's just another form of what we were
talking about in the beginning, Like you learn what makes
people happy, and then you amplify those parts of your personality,
and you find out what makes your parents are family uncomfortable,
and you knew those parts of your personality and then
you turn forwarding and you want to while you're half
a person, right, So asking these questions, like even saying
(12:50):
why am I like this is the beginning because inherent
in the question is the moment where you start to
notice the water you're swimming in, which is being conscious.
Like if you don't notice the water you're swimming in,
you just think that's the way it is. But if
you can figure out what parts of your personality you
amplified and muted, then there's a bit of a hero's journey.
(13:12):
You can go on to like explore the parts you
muted and start to amplify those so that you can
become more fully human and you're not just like playing
a role your whole life.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
I just want to say one thing really quick about
the pride thing, because I just had this like aha
moment in my body. I think parenting what it comes
down to is if we can control the centering of ourselves,
then I think that a lot of parenting issues would
get solved because when I say that I'm proud of you,
I am now centering my opinion of you more than
(13:43):
you your life and your experience.
Speaker 5 (13:45):
So what we say is I'm.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
So happy for you because that is how I feel.
I feel so happy for you, and it gives them
the autonomy of the experience, and it also takes my
experience and what matters to me out.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
I love that because there's so much science that backs
up that. If you're allowing it to be their intrinsic
reward that's about them, that's not about the idea that
you want for them as a parent, then that's going
to be the thing that drives them into the future. Right,
You're helping them develop their real self as opposed to
whatever facade you want for them. That's good, but it's
very hard.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Yes, when I get back from the break, we're going
to hear what you learned about how to do this
better for your own kids, and also what the science
shows about healthier strategies we can do to kind of
reparent ourselves if we didn't get that from our own parents.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
So the Happiness Lab We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
In their new book, We Can Do Hard Things, podcasters
Glennon Doyle and Abby Wombach explore the complex experience of
raising three children while trying to come to terms with
their own complicated childhoods. For Glennan, the process of truly
confronting the past began at the start of her parenting journey,
when she was forced to really start thinking about her future.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
When I found out I was pregnant with Chase and
I was twenty five, I had been lost to addiction
from the time I was ten, like, believing in alcoholism, drugs,
the whole thing. So when I found out I was pregnant,
I think I just really had a moment of Oh,
this is it. I felt very close to debt, Like
I felt like either I clean it up now or
I don't ever clean it up. And I largely became sober,
(15:24):
became a human being by figuring out what would this
kid's mom do? Like I formed a personality completely based
on mom because I didn't have a developmental track like
most people. Because I was last to addiction for so long,
so I really didn't go through all the things that
(15:45):
one is supposed to go through, which has made the
kids growing up, I think harder for me than the
average bear. I've really been struggling a lot with them
growing up and growing away because my only identity, not
only my only identity, but my only feeling of belonging.
And I think that's what I've really noticed about this time,
(16:07):
which is that I am a person who struggle mightily
to feel like she belongs anywhere, and the little microcosm
in this family has been the only environment I've ever
felt belonging. So to lose that now sending all my
love to all the people who are losing their belonging
in identity.
Speaker 4 (16:24):
Because we're coming up we and a year and a
little bit, we are going to be empty nesters. We
also have artists, so likely they will be back in
living in our house.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
But I think this is something that so many parents
go through. You know, the parents that I work with
most closely, our parents whose kids are going off to college,
and you have parents who set up their whole identity
like I am a mom or I am a dad,
and then a lot of kids are needing you less
or less in the ways that you got used to.
And I think this can be incredibly hard as an
identity change for parents, And so how do you navigate
(16:58):
that while doing what we suggested before the break of
not centering yourself.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
I've found that every phase of parenting just requires a
completely different self because it feels like what they need
from me is so different. I think if I could
go back and do anything different, I think that I
a little bit too much created in every scenario this
feeling in them of Mom's got me. And I thought
(17:24):
that that was good parenting. What I'm trying to do
now is more of like responses that say, oh, you've
got you, You've got you. That is a big frickin difference.
Like I had this weird moment recently where I was
thinking about okay, me on my deathbed, the kids all
around me, and I've always thought that what I wanted
(17:45):
in that moment was for them to think she was
the best mom that ever lived. And then I thought,
oh my god, that's not what I want them thinking.
What I want them thinking is I've got this, I'm okay,
not I'm not okay now because my guide my life
my everything is leaving, But I want to have parented
(18:08):
them in a way where in that moment they think, oh, yeah,
I'm good, which is two different things, right.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
And I think parents can again, loving parents who have
incredibly good intentions can like mess this up. You made
this claim that it's worth pushing back on this idea
that we need to mold our children like that. That's
not the right metaphor. What's a better metaphor for parents
to think about.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
I think that there is this idea that goes back
to what we were talking about in the beginning, that
there's a world out there and that we have to
prepare our kids for that world, which really means that
whatever your world view is based on your childhood trauma,
your own your kid's this poor Bonzie tree, and you're
just like cutting parts off and you're doing it out
of love because you think, well, like in an Abbey's situation,
(18:53):
bless her mom's heart, she's Catholic, she thought the world
was going to crush Abby yeah, with her queerness, so
she crushed it first. Yeah, But what we forget is
like we are the world for our kids, so we
bring them the rejection that we're afraid they're going going
to experience outside because we think we have to prune
(19:13):
them to make them able to grow out there. But
that doesn't work. I guess the metaphor because I'm obsessed
with metaphors and can't do anything literally would be. It
feels more to me like they're not lumps of clay
to mold, because the last thing I want to do
is mold anybody in my own image. Like, good God,
I'm working hard enough to change my own situation, right,
(19:35):
and they know more than we do, Like that is
almost like moving backwards. I always think about that line
from the Khalil Lebron poem about like they are life's
longing for itself, like they belong to the future where
we can't even go in our dreams. I think they're
more like seeds. They have everything in them when they're
born that they need to become, and so our job
(19:58):
is not to touch it. Actually, our job is just
to create a fertile soil that allows them to grow
into whatever they were meant to be without pruning too much.
Speaker 5 (20:09):
That's really good.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
It's kind of a faulty system too, because it's like
this thing that we do by creating this big identity
around parent mother, rather than creating the mindset that I
am raising this child, I'm guiding this child through all
the different phases of their life so that I can
leave them.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah, that's like the point. That's the goal eventually, is
they can do it on their own, right.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
Yeah, exactly, And bless our hearts.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
It's a heartbreaking, terrible sirstem. No, I'm not giving five
stars to the system. I think it's awful, but it
is in fact the situation, that's all I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
And it winds up helping you because if your child
wasn't a seed, if it was really up to you
to mold them, then you'd have to do that perfectly, right,
Your every mistake as a parent would be deeply messing
them up. And this is something I know you've both
talked about a lot in the book, right, is that
striving to be the perfect parent is actually incredibly dangerous
and probably really harmful for your child. Part of what
(21:06):
you need to do as a parent is that you
have to show your humanness, right.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Yes, what I've been playing with lately is becoming aware
of your repetitive behaviors and how those affect your children
and I'll give you an example, because this was like
a breakthrough for me that just happened. I am doing
a lot of work on myself with eating disorder stuff
and yadiyada. I have like one song. I've learned that
(21:32):
huntback whales have like one song. They sing their whole lives.
I just have one song, and it's this eating shit,
and I just will keep spinning around it forever. Anyway,
in therapy, I have learned that I am very judgmental. Okay,
I use judgment as a way of keeping people away.
I'm scared of people. I use judgment to keep myself
(21:55):
safe and my family safe. So my family has experienced
that for me many hundreds of times. Meaning they will
bring someone up or something up, and they will hear
Mom go into a list of the reasons why this
person is bad, why they should stay away from this person,
et cetera, et cetera. Recently, I was doing that at
the dinner table. I saw my little one kind of
dim I saw it in real time, A mean I
(22:15):
talked about it. We took her to dinner and I
said to her, here's the thing. I learned some strategies
when I was young because I am scared of people.
One of the strategies I've learned is judgment. So when
you hear me going through a list of reasons why
someone is bad and you should stay away from them,
that is my very unhelpful attempt to keep you safe,
(22:36):
and it has nothing to do with the person I'm
talking about. So when you see your mom doing that,
I want you to not look at the person I'm
talking about. I want you to only look at your
mom and think, oh, she's doing that thing again. Because Laurie, like,
I don't know what to do with the gap, Like,
I know this isn't what I want to teach my kids.
(22:58):
I know I don't want to be doing this, but
I have this gap where my body keeps doing the thing.
So how we deal with the gap is we just
point out the gap, because what we do to our
kids is we put our dirty lens over their eyes
and they don't know that that's the water they're swimming in.
They just think that's the way it is. But I
(23:19):
want her to not put my dirty lens on. I
want her to see the world with her lens, which
is better than mine. It's more open, it's more trusting,
So that is I think a way that's like the
next step. It's identifying the patterns that we don't want
to pass on completely, and even when we can't stop them,
at least pointing them out to our kids so that
(23:41):
they see it as our worldview.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
You also on the book talk about these cases where
you really encourage kids to push back against adults, whether
those adults are you know, their parents, or other authority
figures of their life, so that they can develop their
own views and their own story. Glenn, I think you
had a version of this with your daughter and her
high school guidance counselor recently.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Could you share that one.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
I mean, look, everybody out there trying to teach their
kids to be brave and stand up to authority figures
like just look out, because we did that and now
our kids are just really.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Buyer beware I guess on this one, but.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Yeah, wow, I mean we're so proud but also constantly terrified.
So I think the moment you're talking about is when
our middle child came home and she said, look, my
counselor wants me to join all these clubs, and I
don't want to join the clubs. I'm not like a
club person and I said, okay, well, what's the big deal,
just don't join the clubs and she said, I don't
want to disappoint him. And that was a big moment
(24:37):
for me because I really think that our job, and
what I told her is like we need to just
walk around every day with the express goal of disappointing everyone.
That should be not something we avoid, something we strive
for because even that word disappoint think about it, it's
like disappointing someone else as the decision maker of your
(24:59):
life and reappointing yourself. So I said, oh, honey, you
got to disappoint your counselor you got to disappoint everybody,
so you don't have to disappoint yourself. And she said, oh,
even you, And I said, oh, especially me. Like I
know people who are doing like the biggest, huge lives
and they're all still just living, not to disappoint their parents.
(25:19):
Their parents aren't even alive anymore. It's the most important
thing we can do in our entire lives is to
stop recreating what we think our parents would have wanted
us to and create what we want to.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Create, creating the life we want to create. It's such
an important goal, but it can be surprisingly hard to
actually do.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
So.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
When we get back from the break, we'll look at
strategies we can use to become the people that we
really want to be in spite of what our parents
may have wanted.
Speaker 5 (25:46):
Well.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Here Glennon and Abbey's tips on successfully reparenting ourselves and
not making the same mistakes with the next generation when
the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. It's no secret
that parenting can bring up lots of unresolved experiences from
(26:07):
your own childhood. Watching your child mess up might trigger
your own memories of feeling criticized. A big move or
divorce may lead you to reflect on how your parents
navigated big life transitions. In their new book We Can
Do Hard Things, Glennon Doyle and Abby Wombach explain that
we can embrace these moments as opportunities not just to
do better for our own kids, but also to reparent ourselves.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
I had this experience with my kid early on when
I got into the family. We do kind of nightly
ritual where we lay in bed and we'll take a
moral inventory of the day and things that didn't sit
right with us. And one of the things that wasn't
sitting right. Was the way that I responded to our
youngest who came to me and said, my knee hurts,
(26:50):
and I just went into the way I was parented.
I basically said, you know, you'll be fine in not
so many.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
Words, deffin up buttercup.
Speaker 4 (26:58):
Yeah, And it felt very like I was pushing her away,
And that was kind of the way that I was raised.
And I think in this moment when I was telling
Glennon just said, well, you can apologize to her. And
I was like, I'm sorry, excuse me, and yes, I'm like,
but parents don't do that. Parents don't apologize. That had
(27:23):
never happened in my whole life. So the next morning,
I wake up and Amma's eating her cereal and I
kind of explained the story, like, this thing happened last
night and you came to me with your injury and
I didn't handle it right, and I'm so sorry, and
I want you to always feel confident and comfortable coming
to me with anything, even if it's a toenail that
(27:44):
you're feeling uncomfortable about.
Speaker 5 (27:46):
And she just was like eating her cereal and she.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
Was like, okay, great, moving on, And it was this
really important moment for me that not only did it
feel unnatural to apologize to a child, my own child,
but it also felt very healing. Like I think that
what we get wrong is that we think that we
are just the way that we are and this is
(28:08):
the way that it will be. But parenting is this beautiful,
unique opportunity to reparent ourselves. And so in this apology
with my child, I was having this experience. I felt uncomfortable,
I felt scared, and then it happened, and she was
so great about it and loving that I just thought, Oh,
I bet you there were probably a lot of things
(28:30):
my mom wanted to apologize for and maybe she can't
find the words for it.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Abby, you brought up the idea specifically of parenting ourselves,
like reparenting ourselves, why is it so important?
Speaker 4 (28:41):
Being the youngest of seven, I was always watching my
parents and my brothers and sisters and trying to like
figure out what what worked for me, what I would
do different, And then you get to do that with
your kids. You get to then express your own idea
of parenting on your children. But I didn't know that
there was so much possible healing in it for me.
(29:02):
In the ways that I wasn't parented that I might
have needed. And we do have to analyze and think
about really from the beginning, like why am I so
anxiously attached? Oh, probably because my mom didn't hold me
as much as I needed to be held, because there
were six other people that she was having to fend
(29:23):
off of her body. Probably because every single one of
my brothers and sisters left to go to college. In fact,
when my sister, when the oldest, went to college, she
was kind of my second mom. She was the one
that was holding me and changing my diapers. And when
she went to college, I was starting to act out.
Said they brought me to a therapist like a school counselor,
(29:44):
and I said, like, I think that my sister Beth
died and nobody is telling me about it. And so
parenting and reparenting has to begin with actually really doing
a deep dive on the environment that you grew up with.
Speaker 5 (29:58):
And if we're.
Speaker 4 (29:59):
Really present and really awake with this idea of what
parenting can be, what it was for us as children,
what it might currently be for you as a person
right now in your parenting life, Like there are ways
for healing Honestly, I've never felt more happy in my
(30:19):
life in just watching these children experience the lives that
they're creating for themselves.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Yeah, and this idea of kind of mindfully noticing what
you missed, mindfully noticing what you need, it kind of
fits with something that we talk about a lot on
the Happiness Lab, this idea of giving yourself self compassion,
which I think is one of the fastest ways to
kind of parent yourself, like mindfully noticing I'm struggling right now,
this is not feeling good, I'm sucking. But then it
(30:46):
comes also with this idea of like, this makes sense.
No parent is perfect, no childhood is perfect. I'm just dealing.
But then also treating yourself with kindness, and I know
that this is something that both of you have struggled
with at various points. Any strategies for parents or anybody
who's struggling with this and trying to reparent themselves of
giving themselves some kindness.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
I feel unable sometimes to figure out what I want
for myself without seeing it through the lens of what
I want for my kids first, And I wish I
could do that, but I'm not yet able to do that.
So what I would say is I think that when
we talk to parents about just be kind to yourself,
(31:28):
we're so obsessed with doing things right or well that
that feels a little bit like BS until you start
to think, Okay, then forget about yourself for a minute.
You think about your kid, and when your kid makes
a big mistake at school, or your kid feels left out,
or your kid says something awkward, or your kid loses
(31:48):
a job, what do you want them to do after that?
You probably don't want them to feel like I'm such
an idiot. Guys suck. I just am like, Okay, So
if that's not what you want for them, because the
only thing we know about human beings really is that
they're just going to keep screwing up constantly, like that's
just what we do. So that's the model we have
(32:10):
to work with. We know that's going to happen to them.
The only way that they're going to have a self
compassionate inner voice is if they've seen that. That's what
got me. I wish what got me is just like,
obviously you should be kinder to yourself, but thinking what
I want my kids to have as their inner voice
when they screw up is what I have to become
(32:30):
and model. That's what reparenting is.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Yeah, and I think that's such great advice because there's
evidence from Kristin neflab Butt U T.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
Austin.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
If you want your kid to develop a self compassionate voice,
you have to model that self compassionate voice and ideally
model it out loud, like Abby your story about apologizing
of like mom messed up. I probably should have been
nicer to you about not feeling well. I'm going to
try to do differently in the future when it takes
some time to think about this. That's so much nicer
than secretly beating yourself up insideer than watching the consequences
(32:59):
of you secretly beating yourself up inside. Allowing yourself to
be vulnerable actually helps your kids because then they get
to sort of see how you do it, which is
so important for their own development. Yea.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Even naming the patterns like I could have gone to
Amma and said, I suck. I'm just so judgmental, that's
not the whole story. Like I learned that as a
coping mechanism, and I said, Amma, like, I'm doing my
best with this. This is something that I learned to
keep myself safe. It's not my favorite part of myself,
but this is how human beings work. So when she's
(33:31):
forty and she's okay, when she's forty nine and she's
talking to her kid, I don't want her beating herself
up about her coping mechanisms. But I do want her
telling my granddaughter what hers are because I feel like
all we're trying to do each generation is like you
get a certain hue of paint from your parents and
(33:52):
you just add more white to it or whatever. You
just try to like clear it a little bit each generation.
So all we're doing is trying to get each other
to look at our stuff and say, I'm not going
to take that with me.
Speaker 4 (34:03):
And compassion has been really difficult for me personally. It's
been my life's journey self love right worthiness, And so
for the listener who also struggles with this, like I
totally get it, and it is extraordinarily hard, Like I'm
my biggest critic, right if I didn't get it perfect,
(34:26):
if I didn't get it exactly right. There are therapists
that are really helpful around cultivating a practice of this,
because it has to be a practice. I mean I'm
a very optimistic person, and I see the very best
in so many people around me, and yet when it
comes to myself, I can be so critical and so unloving.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
You're so not alone.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
I often joke that if people could hear what we
say to ourselves, and we'd all get fired because hr
would be like, you know, would put us all up
for harassment, unless we're so mean to ourselves.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Harassment. Oh that's crazy, and.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
So it is difficult. But I think when Glennon told
me that too, this is early days. She said, you know,
one of the most important things around parenting that we
can offer our children is just the modeling of the
way we live. That really got me thinking, like, oh yeah,
my dad drank every day and that was something I
aspired to do. Oh yeah, then I became an alcoholic.
(35:21):
Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like I
put my dad and his drinking ability on a pedestal.
That's something that I wanted to become, and the same
thing happens.
Speaker 5 (35:33):
And it might not be.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
As obvious and as detrimental as alcoholism. It might be snark,
it might be judgment, judgment. It might be what kind
of food you choose to eat, like modeling therapy, Like
if I'm not getting this compassion for myself thing right,
I'm modeling to my kids. I go to therapy every
single week and they know it.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
And the modeling is so useful because one of the
things we know from the research is that a very
quick emotion that parents go to is guilt. And when
you start to realize that treating yourself nice, working on yourself,
putting in that work, that's actually parenting for the future.
That's so like when your kid's forty nine, they'll talk
to you know, your grips and daughter in a really
nice way. I think that can just give parents permission
to take the time and put in the work to
(36:15):
take care of themselves, which they wouldn't normally do, but
when it's for their kids, they do it. There's so
much good wisdom in this book. I hope all the
parents listening and all the non parents listening go out
and check out your book so that they can get
as many gloomorerous from you as I have. Glenn and Abby,
thank you so much for coming on the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
You're the best. You make us happier. Laurie. We just
love hanging out with you.
Speaker 5 (36:35):
Thank you, thanks for having us.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Parenting young children while simultaneously reparenting yourself is tough, but
as the title of Glennon and Abbey's book suggests, we
can do hard things, and while reflecting on the past
may be hard, it often comes with the opportunity to
shape a more intentional future, both for ourselves and for
our kids. And showing that you're willing to take care
(36:58):
of yourself is pretty much the best way to teach
your kids that they can also navigate life's challenges with
self compassion. In next week's special episode on Happier Parenting,
we'll dive into what we can learn from parents who
live in the happiest countries on the planet. We'll meet
a mom from Denmark who's found that adopting a Scandinavian
approach to parenting can lead to way less stress and
(37:18):
surprising increases in family resilience.
Speaker 6 (37:21):
For a Danish parent, it would be no good if
your child was top of the class but miserable and
actually aspect to some parents in Finland, he said, they
sort of told their children to study a bit less.
It doesn't matter about being top of the class, it
matters about being happy.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Until then, don't forget to check out my new free
online course, The Science of Well Being for Parents. You
can learn more by heading to doctor Lauri Santo's dot
com slash parents. That's dr Lauri Santos dot com slash parents.
We'll see you back soon for the next installment on
happier parenting here on the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor
(37:54):
Lauriy Santos,
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