LJ019: Celebrate the Child in Front of You [Parenting]

We're back with another episode in our Parenting series, in which we explore our relationships with our children. In today's episode, we're talking about celebrating the child in front of you. Most of us bring ideas to parenting about what childhood should look like and what our children should be like, but this can create disconnect in our relationships and make it harder to see the real, amazing people in our lives. Giving space for our children to be themselves and to be different than we were expecting leads to all kinds of amazing places!

We hope today's episode sparks some fun insights for you and we invite you to dive deeper with our Episode Questions. Join us on Instagram or YouTube to continue the conversation and share your reflections.

Let’s dig deep, challenge paradigms, choose connection, and live joyfully!

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EPISODE QUESTIONS

Download a printable PDF of this week's questions here.

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1. In what ways have you celebrated your child for the person they are?

2. What does your child love? How do you see that as part of who they are?

3. What visions did you hold of having children? How has that vision helped or harmed your relationships with them? 

4. Take some time this week to think about your family and how you are all individuals, see and celebrate the differences. 

THINGS WE MENTIONED

The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik

TRANSCRIPT

ANNA: Hi! And welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We're happy you're here exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world.

If you're new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier episodes. We started with some foundational relationship ideas and just really have enjoyed how they're all building. And if you've already been enjoying the podcast, we'd love it if you would subscribe and share. We really appreciate your support as it grows.

Today's episode is part of the Parenting series, and we're going to be talking about celebrating the child in front of you. Parenting can bring up a lot of things for people. And we want to do our best. We want to do all that we can. We want to do right by these children. We want to make sure that they have every opportunity to live their best life. And while all of those things and more come from this very loving place, it can sometimes lead us to developing expectations for our children and pushing them towards the things that we think are best. All the while, we're holding out this endpoint, this goal of a child successfully raised and a job well done.

When we bring the lenses we've been talking about on the podcast to this idea, it can really help: being open and curious, there's plenty of time, consent, connection. All of the topics we've talked about before are critical to bring it to this relationship with our children or we may miss who they actually are and what they want from this life.

PAM: Yes, yes, yes. Everything we talk about on the podcast applies fully to all our relationships with the people we love of any age. Now, I do imagine that for some listeners, while it's been interesting to consider these ideas with regards to relationships with other adults, for the most part, they might not seem very applicable to relationships with children. And if that's you and yet you're still curious why you might want to consider doing things differently and what that might look like, I invit