October 21, 2025 • 25 mins
A grainy home video from 1993 opens a door many parents avoid: the thin line where love and control blur. From that single forced smile, we follow the thread into cognitive dissonance, exploring why we promise ourselves we won’t yell and still end up yelling, and why small justifications feel so necessary when our identity as a “good parent” is on the line. Leon Festinger’s doomsday research gives language to our everyday contradictions, showing how, when identity is threatened, we don’t change our minds.... we change reality.
We bring this science home with two stories. Lisa’s body remembers what her beliefs reject, and the old neural pathways fire when her child pushes back. Then Tina Payne Bryson shares a vivid, practical moment at a “sticky theater,” modeling how to regulate first, lead with curiosity, validate a child’s feeling, and hold the boundary without collapsing into punishment. The method is simple but not easy: calm nervous systems, shorter stories, cleaner choices, and consistent repair when we miss. Shame tightens the loop; curiosity loosens it.
There’s a deeper conflict beneath tactics: loyalty. When Daniel chooses a new approach and his mom hears, “So we did it all wrong,” the tension isn’t about timeouts—it’s about belonging and gratitude. We talk about honoring our parents’ love while retiring what harmed us, letting love and harm share the same page. That lens scales up to national myths too, where competing truths demand better storytelling. The payoff is quiet and powerful: a parent who almost prompts a thank you—and waits. The child thanks on his own. The cycle doesn’t shatter; it thins, and light gets through.
If this conversation gave you a new way to see your past or a tool to try tonight, tap follow, leave a quick review, and share this episode with one parent who needs it. Your recommendation helps more families find practical calm and truthful hope.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
There's a video I can't stop watching.
It's 1993.
The lighting's bad.
The fashion is worse.
There's a dad with a mustachetucked in polo, leaning over his
daughter's shoulder as she opensa present.
She's five.
He whispers something.
(00:20):
She freezes.
Then forces a smile.
Later, the camera pans acrossthe room, and you can see the
mom in the background, armscrossed, tired, but proud.
They look like good parents.
And in so many ways, they were.
(00:40):
When you watch closely, yourealize that something else is
happening.
A tiny fracture.
Invisible to everyone then,obvious now.
A moment where love and controloverlap so tightly that you
can't really tell them apart.
That's what I want to talk abouttoday.
(01:13):
You start digging through yourown childhood, dusting off
beliefs, brushing the dirt offof your old habits, and
sometimes you find artifactsthat don't fit the story that
you've been telling.
When we do that, we often saythat we want to break the cycle.
Raise our kids differently thanhow we were raised.
But the minute we try, somethinguncomfortable often bubbles up.
(01:37):
Because breaking the cycle isn'tjust behavioral, it's
existential.
It means asking forbiddenquestions.
Questions like, if my parentsloved me and hurt me, what does
that say about love?
And if they were good people,and I'm trying to do the
opposite, what does that makeme?
(02:05):
To understand what's going on inall these questions, what's
going on in us when we becomenew parents, I want to take us
back on what might feel like adiversion.
More than 70 years.
In 1954, a young psychologistnamed Leon Festinger snuck into
(02:27):
a doomsday cult.
For those who are unfamiliar,doomsday cults are exactly what
they sound like.
They're cults, usually foundedand led by a charismatic leader
that predicts the end of theworld.
In Festinger's case, he wasstudying a relatively small,
unknown cult, led by a Chicagosuburban housewife named Dorothy
(02:49):
Martin.
Martin claimed to have been toldby a mysterious extraterrestrial
group, a group that she calledthe Guardians, that the world
would end on the wintersolstice, December 21st, 1954,
via global flood beginning inthe Arctic Circle.
That prediction might soundtotally random, but it actually
(03:10):
shares a lot of typical doomsdaycult motifs.
It usually starts with oneotherwise typical person
receiving a message from somesuperhuman or superior being.
Maybe it's God, angels, or inthis case, aliens.
December 21st, as those who mayremember from the famous 2012
(03:31):
Maying calendar DoomsdayProphecy, is the most common day
for apocalyptic prophets toplace their Armageddon
prediction.
Global floods, stretching backliteral millennia, are the most
common means of destruction,both for future predictions and
also in a plethora of ancientreligious myths.
The Arctic Circle, a fixture inother conspiracies like Atlantis
(03:54):
and Flat Earthism, with itsuninhabited mystery, is the
prototypical place for such anevent to find its genesis.
In fact, if you look at thepopular disaster movie 2012,
starring my fellow Evanston,Illinois native John Cusack, and
you replace the mysteriousaliens known as the Guardians
with nerdy scientists who no onelistens to, it seems like
(04:17):
Dorothy Martin could have beenthe screenwriter.
Festinger and his colleagues, inother words, have found the
perfect group to infiltrate toget the full doomsday
experience.
Specifically, what Leon wantedto study was what would happen
to the cult members if he wasright and the world didn't come
to an end.
And spoiler, I should mention hewas right.
(04:39):
The world didn't end.
And yet the cult didn't endeither.
In fact, the cult members becameeven more convinced.
Festinger called this peculiarphenomenon cognitive dissonance,
the unbearable tension betweentwo conflicting and
irreconcilable truths.
Often, when the stakes are nothigh and people are faced with
(05:01):
competing realities, we justchange our minds to resolve the
conflict.
But what Festinger found waswhen our identity is at stake,
we don't change our minds.
We change reality.
When we're talking about a cultof a couple dozen people in
Chicagoland, that sounds insane.
But if we're being honest, mostof us have become very
(05:22):
acquainted with cognitivedissonance when we try to
parent.
Her dad's rule, don't talk backor else.
(05:46):
Now she has a four-year-old whonegotiates everything.
Bedtime, broccoli, socks.
And every night Lisa says thesame thing to herself.
I will not yell.
But then, there it is.
Coming back as my grandmotherused to say, like a bad penny.
The heat in her chest, the flashof, how dare you?
(06:10):
And suddenly, she's yelling.
Immediately afterward, the guiltfloods in.
Why did she do it?
Why is she becoming her father?
Why does it feel like her bodybetrayed her?
Maybe it's because it did.
Just like the members of DorothyMartin's cult after her failed
(06:33):
prophecy is another version ofcognitive dissonance.
Lisa lives in two contradictoryand competing realities.
She knows that her dad yellingat her was not good parenting.
She knows that she doesn't wantto yell at her kids.
But she also believes, somewheredeep down, that yelling is what
it means to be parental.
Two competing realities existingat the same time in one person.
(06:59):
How is it even possible?
It's possible because it's aboutidentity and baggage and trauma.
Lisa's nervous system rememberswhat her intellect rejects.
In the moment of defiance, herpast re-emerges and her
daughter's actions feelthreatening.
She doesn't decide consciouslyto yell, and yet, suddenly,
(07:22):
she's yelling.
The same neural pathways thatfired when we were defiant as
kids and were met with anger,punishment, or pain, like Lisa,
fire when our kids are defiantwith us.
Here's how I explain it in mybook, in the section on this
phenomenon.
We all have implicit memories,even if we weren't hit for our
(07:43):
mistakes or defiance.
We all have times when ourparents punished us by shaming
or yelling or otherwise sendingus into our fight or flight
response.
Because of this, we remember,but not always explicitly.
And the younger we were when ithappened, the less we will
remember explicitly.
Then when our children do thestuff that we used to do, the
neural pathways associated withthose old, often implicit
(08:06):
memories fire back up.
It's no wonder that so many ofus are triggered by our kids.
There's no time in the mind, andour nervous system sometimes
flat outs forgets that what'shappening to our child is not
happening to us.
And when that happens, we snap.
Whether it's the kind of parentwe believe we should be or not.
(08:55):
Festinger paid participants toreview a bad product that they'd
been paid to endorse.
Some people got one dollar.
Others got twenty.
You would think that the peoplewho were paid more would
naturally be more passionateabout the product.
But actually, the opposite wastrue.
The people who were paid onlyone dollar found much more that
(09:18):
they liked about thisobjectively bad product because
their brains couldn't justifylying about the bad product for
almost nothing.
Instead, they had to convincethemselves of a new reality.
Convince themselves that theyactually believed the review
that they were giving.
Now you might be thinking, likeI did when I heard about it, why
didn't the people who got twentydollars feel the same way?
(09:41):
After all, it's only twentydollars.
But remember, it's the 1950swe're talking about here.
The average monthly mortgagepayment was only$25.
For the people who got twentydollars, it was worth admitting
to themselves that they werelying for the money.
But what about for the peoplewho got twenty times less?
(10:01):
They couldn't handle thecontradiction.
And so they rewrote reality intheir minds, changed the story
until it fit.
Parenting for us is full ofthese one dollar
rationalizations.
He needed to learn a lesson.
She knows that I love her.
It was just a bad day.
These little edits are the onesthat help us to grapple with the
(10:26):
question that we're all askingourselves.
If I do this stuff, am I still agood parent?
When I initially recorded thisepisode, I moved right from this
moment on to a story about myfriend named Daniel.
(10:47):
But I wanted to take a littlebit of a diversion before we get
there.
Because I realized that I neverreally answered this question.
Are we still good parents if wedon't always break the cycle?
If we don't always get it right,if we still in some ways embody
that stuff that comes from ourchildhood, the ways that we were
(11:10):
wounded, and carry those forwardinto the future?
And I think the answer, prettydefinitively, is yes.
And to answer that question morefully, I wanted to cut back to a
clip from an earlier episode.
An earlier episode that manypeople never listened to.
It was a really longconversation with my dear friend
(11:31):
Tina Payne Bryson, who wrote TheWhole Brain Child.
She's probably one of theforemost parenting experts alive
in the world today.
Certainly she sold more copiesof books than just about anybody
else about parenting.
And she tells this story about amovie theater and her reactive
response to her kids.
And in the process, she gives ussome alternatives, some ways
(11:55):
that she has slowly andmeticulously and painstakingly
changed the neural pathways thatshe has to be more responsive,
to be more effective as aparent, to break that cycle.
She even mentions that it mighthave come from her childhood
wounding in this clip.
(12:16):
So I wanted to play that for youbecause we do have a little bit
of time in this episode.
And then I'll return back toDaniel and we'll conclude our
conversation about cognitivedissonance.
SPEAKER_01 (14:01):
I think again you came back to that the F-word,
fear, uh, fear-based parenting.
And I will say that when Ireflect after I've been the
parent I hope not to be, whichhappens all the time.
And I will say has happened lessand less and less over time as
I've practiced this approach toparenting, and it's become more
(14:22):
wired in my brain to be moreautomated.
Almost always my um my momentswhen I'm not the parent I want
to be, and I go against what Ibelieve in terms of this lens
that we've been talking about,are always rooted in fear for
me.
I I love to tell a story about atime my um my kid, he was
probably seven or eight at thetime, and I had offered to pick
him up after school and take himto the sticky theater.
(14:42):
It's not actually called that,but it's a discount theater, so
it's really it was gross.
So I was like, hey, I'm gonnapick you up after school, and he
was like, Really?
Oh, that's so fun.
Like he was super excited,grateful, just the response I
wanted from him.
And then he says, Can I getpopcorn?
And I said, No, we're notgetting popcorn today.
We've already had too much junkfood.
I'll bring a snack and when Ipick you up.
And he he pouted, you know, armsfolded, you know, pouting.
(15:04):
And so what happens immediatelyfor me is it moves me from like
it's now that's not what Iexpected, it's not what I hoped
for, but it immediately moves meto a fear-based place that my
kid is entitled, he's spoiled,he's a brat, he doesn't
understand the how the how muchprivilege he has, you know, all
of these things.
And so that leads me to want tobe like, I'm not taking you to
(15:25):
the movies, which is totallypunitive.
You know, it makes me my firstresponse, even knowing
everything that I know andpracticing, is to say, guess
what?
I am in charge here.
I'm in control of you, and I'mgonna take this away from you.
That's my first instinct, is tosay, fine, we're not going to
the theaters.
If you're gonna pout, you don'tget to go.
But what I did instead in thatmoment, which is it's much more
(15:46):
helpful because I'd have tonsand tons of terrible parenting
moments throughout my, likeafter playing Yahtzee with my
boys, I threw the dice acrossthe room, yelled at them because
they were fighting, and I lostmy mind.
Um, so I had lots and lots ofparenting fails.
But in this moment, I firstregulated myself, and then I
said to him, um, something justhappened when I said, Go to the
(16:08):
movies, you got so excited.
When I said no popcorn,something happened.
What happened?
So I start with curiosity.
And he says, I'm disappointed.
I love movie popcorn.
I don't get it very often, andI'm just, I really wanted it.
And so I say, Yeah, sometimeswhen we want something and we
don't get it, that can feelreally disappointing.
(16:29):
And I said, now we're notgetting popcorn, but we can
still go to the movies.
Would you still like to go?
So I'm still holding my boundaryof no popcorns.
I'm not saying fine, you canhave popcorn.
So that's where I'm emotionallyresponsive, connected, gentle,
and I'm using air quotes when Isay that, while holding the
boundary.
But I think let's say I hadscreamed at him, taken away the
movies, um, you know, told himhe was a spoiled brat.
(16:52):
What I need to do in that momentafter that is to start with
curiosity with myself, becauseshame spiral just actually makes
me more likely to be reactiveagain the next time.
Shame actually primes ournervous system to be more
reactive.
So instead I go to curiosity.
I really want to be gentle withmyself and say, okay, Tina, that
was not ideal.
(17:13):
What got in the way?
This is the question I literallyasked myself, what got in the
way of you being the parent youwould have wanted to be in that
moment?
And I would say to my kid, Oh, Iwish I hadn't done that.
Um, can I have a do-over, right?
And then I might say to myself,you know what?
I act that way because I haven'thad anything to eat all day.
I haven't peed by myself inthree years, and I'm exhausted.
(17:33):
Or I might say, when my kid doesthat, it reminds me of my dad,
who really wanted me, you know?
Or makes I'm pissed at myhusband, or whatever it is.
But it begins to then create aspace for me to say, what is it
that I need so that I'm ready tostay receptive and get my kid
receptive.
SPEAKER_00 (18:03):
I want to talk about another one of my friends.
He's also in his 30s, like Lisa.
His name is Daniel.
Every Sunday, Daniel calls hismom.
He tells her about his week, hiskids, his job.
I often think to myself, Ishould be more like Daniel.
One day, Daniel mentions to hismom that after reading a
(18:27):
parenting book, and out ofhumility, I won't tell you which
one, he started letting hisdaughter cry and complain
instead of just sending her toher room or putting her in
timeout.
There's silence on the line.
His mom says, So you're sayingthat we did it all wrong?
Daniel's quiet.
(18:47):
Because how do you answer that?
He's not saying that they did itall wrong.
He's saying that he's doing itdifferently.
But to his mom, those sound likethe same thing.
And herein lies the twist, theplace where we've been trying to
go this whole time.
The reality that breaking cycleshas never actually been about
(19:10):
what we do in parenting at all.
It's about loyalty.
Our deepest dissonance isn'tbetween old school parenting
techniques or new brain-basedparenting strategies.
The conflict is between loyaltyto our family of origin and the
family that we're trying tobuild today.
Loyalty to the people who raisedus and the person that we became
(19:32):
as a result, and loyalty to theperson that we're still
becoming.
We think we're arguing aboutbedtime or screen time, but what
we're really asking is, can Ihonor where I came from while
walking away from parts of it?
And to do that, we have to letlove and harm coexist in the
same story.
(19:53):
Which means dismantling one ofour favorite illusions: that
good parents and bad parentslive on separate planets.
This tension between love andrevision isn't unique to
families.
Nations do it too.
On Monday in the United States,we actually wrestled with this
(20:13):
reality as our nation celebratesColumbus Day.
A man who, by his own accounts,in his own journal entries, was
a serial child abuser.
He was hateful, greedy,vindictive.
And yet, undoubtedly, he washistorically significant to the
country that we have now.
We wrestle with the competingrealities that America is
(20:36):
founded on genocide of theindigenous and settler colonial
violence, and built on the backsof slaves, and also at the same
time, was founded with someobjectively good ideals in mind.
Things like democracy andfairness, due process and
liberty.
The Declaration of Independencereads We hold these truths to be
(20:59):
self-evident, that all men arecreated equal.
But it was written by men whodid not think that all men
included Africans or theindigenous, the Chinese, or for
that matter, women at all.
These founding fathers, muchlike our own parents, were not
all good or all bad.
Humans, in other words, areincredibly messy.
(21:21):
Some of that we seek to change,and some we cannot.
And so we change our reality toharmonize the dissonance.
To end our episode, I want to goback to the home video.
The girl with a forced smile.
She's a parent now.
Her own son just had a birthday.
(21:42):
There was no VHS this time, justan iPhone propped up against the
cake.
That girl.
Now mom catches herself almostsaying thank you.
Almost.
Instead, she smiles and waits.
Her sun beams.
(22:04):
Unprompted.
He looks up and whispers.
Thanks.
It's such a small thing.
There's no dramatic music here,no grand epiphany, just a
microscopic repair in thetimeline.
The illusion doesn't shatter allat once.
It just thins a little bit.
(22:25):
And in that thin place, a littlebit of light leaks through, just
enough to see what love lookslike when it stops defending
itself.
And so I ask those of us who arevery rightfully trying to break
cycles (22:44):
what if breaking the cycle isn't actually about
rejecting our past?
What if it's about telling thetruth beautifully enough that
everyone in it, the parents, thechildren, the ghosts in between,
can finally rest.
(23:22):
I have three quick favors to askyou before we end the episode.
Number one, if you got anythingout of this episode, if it made
you think, if you felt like youhave something new to try with
your kids or it made you abetter parent, please take a
moment to go and leave a reviewand rate this podcast five stars
wherever you're listening to it.
It's the single best way to helpmore parents find this show.
(23:42):
It'll take you less than aminute, just scroll down on your
podcast app, tap those stars,and if you've got an extra 30
seconds, leave a couple wordsfor me to let me know how this
podcast has been helping you.
I read every single review.
It really means the world to me.
Number two, after you rate itand review it for the masses, I
really want to encourage you tothink about what we talked about
in this episode and send it toone parent in your phone who you
(24:04):
feel like might benefit fromthis specific episode.
It's great to have ratings andreviews, and yes, they help so
much, but there's nothing like apersonal recommendation from a
friend, hey, you gotta listen tothis.
It's really been helping me.
Last, if you want to go deeperwith me, get exclusive parenting
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(24:26):
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You can sign up atwholeparentacademy.com or just
go to the show notes below andthere'll be a link there.
Alright, that's it for now.
Thanks again for listening, andthank you in advance for doing
those three quick favors for me.
This has been the Whole ParentPodcast.
There's a video I can't stop watching.
It's 1993.
The lighting's bad.
The fashion is worse.
There's a dad with a mustachetucked in polo, leaning over his
daughter's shoulder as she opensa present.
She's five.
He whispers something.
(00:20):
She freezes.
Then forces a smile.
Later, the camera pans acrossthe room, and you can see the
mom in the background, armscrossed, tired, but proud.
They look like good parents.
And in so many ways, they were.
(00:40):
When you watch closely, yourealize that something else is
happening.
A tiny fracture.
Invisible to everyone then,obvious now.
A moment where love and controloverlap so tightly that you
can't really tell them apart.
That's what I want to talk abouttoday.
(01:13):
You start digging through yourown childhood, dusting off
beliefs, brushing the dirt offof your old habits, and
sometimes you find artifactsthat don't fit the story that
you've been telling.
When we do that, we often saythat we want to break the cycle.
Raise our kids differently thanhow we were raised.
But the minute we try, somethinguncomfortable often bubbles up.
(01:37):
Because breaking the cycle isn'tjust behavioral, it's
existential.
It means asking forbiddenquestions.
Questions like, if my parentsloved me and hurt me, what does
that say about love?
And if they were good people,and I'm trying to do the
opposite, what does that makeme?
(02:05):
To understand what's going on inall these questions, what's
going on in us when we becomenew parents, I want to take us
back on what might feel like adiversion.
More than 70 years.
In 1954, a young psychologistnamed Leon Festinger snuck into
(02:27):
a doomsday cult.
For those who are unfamiliar,doomsday cults are exactly what
they sound like.
They're cults, usually foundedand led by a charismatic leader
that predicts the end of theworld.
In Festinger's case, he wasstudying a relatively small,
unknown cult, led by a Chicagosuburban housewife named Dorothy
(02:49):
Martin.
Martin claimed to have been toldby a mysterious extraterrestrial
group, a group that she calledthe Guardians, that the world
would end on the wintersolstice, December 21st, 1954,
via global flood beginning inthe Arctic Circle.
That prediction might soundtotally random, but it actually
(03:10):
shares a lot of typical doomsdaycult motifs.
It usually starts with oneotherwise typical person
receiving a message from somesuperhuman or superior being.
Maybe it's God, angels, or inthis case, aliens.
December 21st, as those who mayremember from the famous 2012
(03:31):
Maying calendar DoomsdayProphecy, is the most common day
for apocalyptic prophets toplace their Armageddon
prediction.
Global floods, stretching backliteral millennia, are the most
common means of destruction,both for future predictions and
also in a plethora of ancientreligious myths.
The Arctic Circle, a fixture inother conspiracies like Atlantis
(03:54):
and Flat Earthism, with itsuninhabited mystery, is the
prototypical place for such anevent to find its genesis.
In fact, if you look at thepopular disaster movie 2012,
starring my fellow Evanston,Illinois native John Cusack, and
you replace the mysteriousaliens known as the Guardians
with nerdy scientists who no onelistens to, it seems like
(04:17):
Dorothy Martin could have beenthe screenwriter.
Festinger and his colleagues, inother words, have found the
perfect group to infiltrate toget the full doomsday
experience.
Specifically, what Leon wantedto study was what would happen
to the cult members if he wasright and the world didn't come
to an end.
And spoiler, I should mention hewas right.
(04:39):
The world didn't end.
And yet the cult didn't endeither.
In fact, the cult members becameeven more convinced.
Festinger called this peculiarphenomenon cognitive dissonance,
the unbearable tension betweentwo conflicting and
irreconcilable truths.
Often, when the stakes are nothigh and people are faced with
(05:01):
competing realities, we justchange our minds to resolve the
conflict.
But what Festinger found waswhen our identity is at stake,
we don't change our minds.
We change reality.
When we're talking about a cultof a couple dozen people in
Chicagoland, that sounds insane.
But if we're being honest, mostof us have become very
(05:22):
acquainted with cognitivedissonance when we try to
parent.
Her dad's rule, don't talk backor else.
(05:46):
Now she has a four-year-old whonegotiates everything.
Bedtime, broccoli, socks.
And every night Lisa says thesame thing to herself.
I will not yell.
But then, there it is.
Coming back as my grandmotherused to say, like a bad penny.
The heat in her chest, the flashof, how dare you?
(06:10):
And suddenly, she's yelling.
Immediately afterward, the guiltfloods in.
Why did she do it?
Why is she becoming her father?
Why does it feel like her bodybetrayed her?
Maybe it's because it did.
Just like the members of DorothyMartin's cult after her failed
(06:33):
prophecy is another version ofcognitive dissonance.
Lisa lives in two contradictoryand competing realities.
She knows that her dad yellingat her was not good parenting.
She knows that she doesn't wantto yell at her kids.
But she also believes, somewheredeep down, that yelling is what
it means to be parental.
Two competing realities existingat the same time in one person.
(06:59):
How is it even possible?
It's possible because it's aboutidentity and baggage and trauma.
Lisa's nervous system rememberswhat her intellect rejects.
In the moment of defiance, herpast re-emerges and her
daughter's actions feelthreatening.
She doesn't decide consciouslyto yell, and yet, suddenly,
(07:22):
she's yelling.
The same neural pathways thatfired when we were defiant as
kids and were met with anger,punishment, or pain, like Lisa,
fire when our kids are defiantwith us.
Here's how I explain it in mybook, in the section on this
phenomenon.
We all have implicit memories,even if we weren't hit for our
(07:43):
mistakes or defiance.
We all have times when ourparents punished us by shaming
or yelling or otherwise sendingus into our fight or flight
response.
Because of this, we remember,but not always explicitly.
And the younger we were when ithappened, the less we will
remember explicitly.
Then when our children do thestuff that we used to do, the
neural pathways associated withthose old, often implicit
(08:06):
memories fire back up.
It's no wonder that so many ofus are triggered by our kids.
There's no time in the mind, andour nervous system sometimes
flat outs forgets that what'shappening to our child is not
happening to us.
And when that happens, we snap.
Whether it's the kind of parentwe believe we should be or not.
(08:55):
Festinger paid participants toreview a bad product that they'd
been paid to endorse.
Some people got one dollar.
Others got twenty.
You would think that the peoplewho were paid more would
naturally be more passionateabout the product.
But actually, the opposite wastrue.
The people who were paid onlyone dollar found much more that
(09:18):
they liked about thisobjectively bad product because
their brains couldn't justifylying about the bad product for
almost nothing.
Instead, they had to convincethemselves of a new reality.
Convince themselves that theyactually believed the review
that they were giving.
Now you might be thinking, likeI did when I heard about it, why
didn't the people who got twentydollars feel the same way?
(09:41):
After all, it's only twentydollars.
But remember, it's the 1950swe're talking about here.
The average monthly mortgagepayment was only$25.
For the people who got twentydollars, it was worth admitting
to themselves that they werelying for the money.
But what about for the peoplewho got twenty times less?
(10:01):
They couldn't handle thecontradiction.
And so they rewrote reality intheir minds, changed the story
until it fit.
Parenting for us is full ofthese one dollar
rationalizations.
He needed to learn a lesson.
She knows that I love her.
It was just a bad day.
These little edits are the onesthat help us to grapple with the
(10:26):
question that we're all askingourselves.
If I do this stuff, am I still agood parent?
When I initially recorded thisepisode, I moved right from this
moment on to a story about myfriend named Daniel.
(10:47):
But I wanted to take a littlebit of a diversion before we get
there.
Because I realized that I neverreally answered this question.
Are we still good parents if wedon't always break the cycle?
If we don't always get it right,if we still in some ways embody
that stuff that comes from ourchildhood, the ways that we were
(11:10):
wounded, and carry those forwardinto the future?
And I think the answer, prettydefinitively, is yes.
And to answer that question morefully, I wanted to cut back to a
clip from an earlier episode.
An earlier episode that manypeople never listened to.
It was a really longconversation with my dear friend
(11:31):
Tina Payne Bryson, who wrote TheWhole Brain Child.
She's probably one of theforemost parenting experts alive
in the world today.
Certainly she sold more copiesof books than just about anybody
else about parenting.
And she tells this story about amovie theater and her reactive
response to her kids.
And in the process, she gives ussome alternatives, some ways
(11:55):
that she has slowly andmeticulously and painstakingly
changed the neural pathways thatshe has to be more responsive,
to be more effective as aparent, to break that cycle.
She even mentions that it mighthave come from her childhood
wounding in this clip.
(12:16):
So I wanted to play that for youbecause we do have a little bit
of time in this episode.
And then I'll return back toDaniel and we'll conclude our
conversation about cognitivedissonance.
SPEAKER_01 (14:01):
I think again you came back to that the F-word,
fear, uh, fear-based parenting.
And I will say that when Ireflect after I've been the
parent I hope not to be, whichhappens all the time.
And I will say has happened lessand less and less over time as
I've practiced this approach toparenting, and it's become more
(14:22):
wired in my brain to be moreautomated.
Almost always my um my momentswhen I'm not the parent I want
to be, and I go against what Ibelieve in terms of this lens
that we've been talking about,are always rooted in fear for
me.
I I love to tell a story about atime my um my kid, he was
probably seven or eight at thetime, and I had offered to pick
him up after school and take himto the sticky theater.
(14:42):
It's not actually called that,but it's a discount theater, so
it's really it was gross.
So I was like, hey, I'm gonnapick you up after school, and he
was like, Really?
Oh, that's so fun.
Like he was super excited,grateful, just the response I
wanted from him.
And then he says, Can I getpopcorn?
And I said, No, we're notgetting popcorn today.
We've already had too much junkfood.
I'll bring a snack and when Ipick you up.
And he he pouted, you know, armsfolded, you know, pouting.
(15:04):
And so what happens immediatelyfor me is it moves me from like
it's now that's not what Iexpected, it's not what I hoped
for, but it immediately moves meto a fear-based place that my
kid is entitled, he's spoiled,he's a brat, he doesn't
understand the how the how muchprivilege he has, you know, all
of these things.
And so that leads me to want tobe like, I'm not taking you to
(15:25):
the movies, which is totallypunitive.
You know, it makes me my firstresponse, even knowing
everything that I know andpracticing, is to say, guess
what?
I am in charge here.
I'm in control of you, and I'mgonna take this away from you.
That's my first instinct, is tosay, fine, we're not going to
the theaters.
If you're gonna pout, you don'tget to go.
But what I did instead in thatmoment, which is it's much more
(15:46):
helpful because I'd have tonsand tons of terrible parenting
moments throughout my, likeafter playing Yahtzee with my
boys, I threw the dice acrossthe room, yelled at them because
they were fighting, and I lostmy mind.
Um, so I had lots and lots ofparenting fails.
But in this moment, I firstregulated myself, and then I
said to him, um, something justhappened when I said, Go to the
(16:08):
movies, you got so excited.
When I said no popcorn,something happened.
What happened?
So I start with curiosity.
And he says, I'm disappointed.
I love movie popcorn.
I don't get it very often, andI'm just, I really wanted it.
And so I say, Yeah, sometimeswhen we want something and we
don't get it, that can feelreally disappointing.
(16:29):
And I said, now we're notgetting popcorn, but we can
still go to the movies.
Would you still like to go?
So I'm still holding my boundaryof no popcorns.
I'm not saying fine, you canhave popcorn.
So that's where I'm emotionallyresponsive, connected, gentle,
and I'm using air quotes when Isay that, while holding the
boundary.
But I think let's say I hadscreamed at him, taken away the
movies, um, you know, told himhe was a spoiled brat.
(16:52):
What I need to do in that momentafter that is to start with
curiosity with myself, becauseshame spiral just actually makes
me more likely to be reactiveagain the next time.
Shame actually primes ournervous system to be more
reactive.
So instead I go to curiosity.
I really want to be gentle withmyself and say, okay, Tina, that
was not ideal.
(17:13):
What got in the way?
This is the question I literallyasked myself, what got in the
way of you being the parent youwould have wanted to be in that
moment?
And I would say to my kid, Oh, Iwish I hadn't done that.
Um, can I have a do-over, right?
And then I might say to myself,you know what?
I act that way because I haven'thad anything to eat all day.
I haven't peed by myself inthree years, and I'm exhausted.
(17:33):
Or I might say, when my kid doesthat, it reminds me of my dad,
who really wanted me, you know?
Or makes I'm pissed at myhusband, or whatever it is.
But it begins to then create aspace for me to say, what is it
that I need so that I'm ready tostay receptive and get my kid
receptive.
SPEAKER_00 (18:03):
I want to talk about another one of my friends.
He's also in his 30s, like Lisa.
His name is Daniel.
Every Sunday, Daniel calls hismom.
He tells her about his week, hiskids, his job.
I often think to myself, Ishould be more like Daniel.
One day, Daniel mentions to hismom that after reading a
(18:27):
parenting book, and out ofhumility, I won't tell you which
one, he started letting hisdaughter cry and complain
instead of just sending her toher room or putting her in
timeout.
There's silence on the line.
His mom says, So you're sayingthat we did it all wrong?
Daniel's quiet.
(18:47):
Because how do you answer that?
He's not saying that they did itall wrong.
He's saying that he's doing itdifferently.
But to his mom, those sound likethe same thing.
And herein lies the twist, theplace where we've been trying to
go this whole time.
The reality that breaking cycleshas never actually been about
(19:10):
what we do in parenting at all.
It's about loyalty.
Our deepest dissonance isn'tbetween old school parenting
techniques or new brain-basedparenting strategies.
The conflict is between loyaltyto our family of origin and the
family that we're trying tobuild today.
Loyalty to the people who raisedus and the person that we became
(19:32):
as a result, and loyalty to theperson that we're still
becoming.
We think we're arguing aboutbedtime or screen time, but what
we're really asking is, can Ihonor where I came from while
walking away from parts of it?
And to do that, we have to letlove and harm coexist in the
same story.
(19:53):
Which means dismantling one ofour favorite illusions: that
good parents and bad parentslive on separate planets.
This tension between love andrevision isn't unique to
families.
Nations do it too.
On Monday in the United States,we actually wrestled with this
(20:13):
reality as our nation celebratesColumbus Day.
A man who, by his own accounts,in his own journal entries, was
a serial child abuser.
He was hateful, greedy,vindictive.
And yet, undoubtedly, he washistorically significant to the
country that we have now.
We wrestle with the competingrealities that America is
(20:36):
founded on genocide of theindigenous and settler colonial
violence, and built on the backsof slaves, and also at the same
time, was founded with someobjectively good ideals in mind.
Things like democracy andfairness, due process and
liberty.
The Declaration of Independencereads We hold these truths to be
(20:59):
self-evident, that all men arecreated equal.
But it was written by men whodid not think that all men
included Africans or theindigenous, the Chinese, or for
that matter, women at all.
These founding fathers, muchlike our own parents, were not
all good or all bad.
Humans, in other words, areincredibly messy.
(21:21):
Some of that we seek to change,and some we cannot.
And so we change our reality toharmonize the dissonance.
To end our episode, I want to goback to the home video.
The girl with a forced smile.
She's a parent now.
Her own son just had a birthday.
(21:42):
There was no VHS this time, justan iPhone propped up against the
cake.
That girl.
Now mom catches herself almostsaying thank you.
Almost.
Instead, she smiles and waits.
Her sun beams.
(22:04):
Unprompted.
He looks up and whispers.
Thanks.
It's such a small thing.
There's no dramatic music here,no grand epiphany, just a
microscopic repair in thetimeline.
The illusion doesn't shatter allat once.
It just thins a little bit.
(22:25):
And in that thin place, a littlebit of light leaks through, just
enough to see what love lookslike when it stops defending
itself.
And so I ask those of us who arevery rightfully trying to break
cycles (22:44):
what if breaking the cycle isn't actually about
rejecting our past?
What if it's about telling thetruth beautifully enough that
everyone in it, the parents, thechildren, the ghosts in between,
can finally rest.
(23:22):
I have three quick favors to askyou before we end the episode.
Number one, if you got anythingout of this episode, if it made
you think, if you felt like youhave something new to try with
your kids or it made you abetter parent, please take a
moment to go and leave a reviewand rate this podcast five stars
wherever you're listening to it.
It's the single best way to helpmore parents find this show.
(23:42):
It'll take you less than aminute, just scroll down on your
podcast app, tap those stars,and if you've got an extra 30
seconds, leave a couple wordsfor me to let me know how this
podcast has been helping you.
I read every single review.
It really means the world to me.
Number two, after you rate itand review it for the masses, I
really want to encourage you tothink about what we talked about
in this episode and send it toone parent in your phone who you
(24:04):
feel like might benefit fromthis specific episode.
It's great to have ratings andreviews, and yes, they help so
much, but there's nothing like apersonal recommendation from a
friend, hey, you gotta listen tothis.
It's really been helping me.
Last, if you want to go deeperwith me, get exclusive parenting
insights, free resources, andupdates on everything that I'm
doing, go ahead and join myemail list.
(24:26):
It's where I share things that Idon't get to get into on the
podcast.
I also will let you know aboutupcoming episodes and events,
and best of all, it's completelyfree.
You can sign up atwholeparentacademy.com or just
go to the show notes below andthere'll be a link there.
Alright, that's it for now.
Thanks again for listening, andthank you in advance for doing
those three quick favors for me.
This has been the Whole ParentPodcast.
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