223: My Kid Left Her HW at Home, Should I Take It to School for Her? Jessica Lahey, a NYT Bestseller Weighs In

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Welcome to episode 223. Do you rush to fix your child's mistakes, shielding them from failure? Many moms do! Maybe it's a forgotten homework assignment or a missed deadline. This episode is your guide! New York Times bestselling author Jessica Lahey shares a relatable story of when she had to decide: intervene and save her daughter, or let her face the consequences of forgetting homework.

In this episode, you'll learn: • How Jessica handled the homework situation (and the surprising lesson her daughter took away!) • The #1 thing moms can do to avoid over-parenting or under-parenting • How to create situations where your child feels empowered to solve their own problems • Techniques to raise a confident, capable child who embraces challenges • Empower your child, not enable them! Listen to this episode now!

This podcast is perfect for you if: • You want your child to learn from mistakes and build resilience. • You're worried you might be preventing your child from developing independence. • You crave tips on raising a strong, capable adult. • Don't miss out on these valuable strategies! Tune in today!

Love this episode? Let's connect: https://www.instagram.com/melissallarena/

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Official bio for Jessica Lahey

Jessica Lahey is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed and The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence. Jess was awarded the Research Society on Alcohol’s Media Award for “outstanding journalistic efforts of writers who cover empirical research on alcohol” […] “for her book The Addiction Inoculation and advocacy for the recovery community.” Over twenty years, Jess has taught every grade from sixth to twelfth in both public and private schools, and spent five years teaching in a drug and alcohol rehab for adolescents in Vermont. She has written about education, parenting, and child welfare for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and her biweekly column “The Parent Teacher Conference” ran for three years at the New York Times. She designed and wrote the educational curriculum for Amazon Kids’ award-winning animated series The Stinky and Dirty Show, and was a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee. Jess holds the dubious honor of having written an article that was later adapted as a writing prompt for the 2018 SAT. She co-hosts the #AmWriting podcast from her empty nest in Vermont.

Links to connect with Jessica Lahey

• https://jessicalahey.com

• https://www.instagram.com/teacherlahey/

• https://www.facebook.com/jessicapottslahey/

TRANSCRIPT

Enjoy the conversation. Jessica Lahey. Thank you so much. And welcome to unimaginable wellness. I am thrilled to have you here. How are you?

I am great looking out on a snowy Vermont woods through my office windows.

Oh, New England. I remember, New Hampshire and I got a big, thick coat that was for the Arctic weather.

Sounds about right. Yeah, that's about right. And that started at the end of October. So that's, that was always interesting, but yeah. Thank you so much for being here. And why don't you share with listeners a little bit about you, your book, your wisdom, and then we will jump into something that listeners definitely need help with, which is our mental bandwidth.

So take it away, Jessica.

Thank you. So I was a teacher for 20 years. I've taught every grade from sixth to 12th grade, but my heart, I have to admit, lies in middle school. I love, love, love teaching middle school. I also taught for five years in a drug and alcohol rehab for adolescents. So I've sort of taught in hoity toity private schools and in public schools and all across the, the range.

And about the same time that I was teaching middle school, I had kids in middle school and I was Finding that a lot. And I was also at the, at the same time writing, I was a education journalist. So I, as a teacher and as a parent, I was really interested in how kids learn, how to create a situation, a home, a home life that sort of got kids excited about.

Inquiry and curiosity and all that sort of stuff. And at the same time, sort of battling my demons of how much do I step in and help with my kids? And how much do I step back and encourage them to be independent? And then saw my students, a lot of my students parents were doing things that were sort of doing an end run around a lot of learning opportunities.

And that was getting frustrating to me. And so I was on kind of a high horse about that and, and sort of, Just irritated with some of the parents of my students, which is really bad, like the better the homeschool relationship is the better kids learn. We know that. But then the journalist side of me, I was writing for the Atlantic and the New York Times and eventually started writing a column for the New York Times called the Parent Teacher Conference, which was a biweekly column sort of for the Parents wanting to ask questions about education and teachers wanting to ask questions about sort of the, it was at the intersection of education and parenting.

And so my brain was constantly thinking of what is the impact of this learning environment or this parenting thing. And, you know, what I was sort of seeing was that some aspects of over parenting, whether it's highly directive parenting or controlling parenting, were undermining. Learning in many respects, but I wasn't really clear on how that was happening or even if that was happening.

And so the journalist in me got to go out and research that for like two years, and then write a book about what I found in terms of how parenting styles affect learning, motivation, engagement, all that kind of stuff. And, and then I had to get real about my own parenting. Cause it turns out I was doing the same thing.

To my own kids that I was irritated for the parents of my students were doing. So it became something I had to look at both as a parent and a teacher. And it became personal for me, which was where I had to be quite humbled to take a deep breath and look at my own, my own, my own habits and what I was doing to my own kids.

I love how you brought both sides of the same coin together, just like being part of the experiment and then also like trying to figure out what's going on in this experiment, like, are we too involved? Are we not? Well, no, we are definitely not not involved. But it's it's just interesting how then you had to almost take your own medicine in a way.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Like I said, Humbling, especially since, well, so much of what I write about, I mean, the gift of failure was my first book and it was very much about the impact of parenting styles over parenting, directive parenting and autonomy, the alternate, the alternative autonomy, supportive parenting and what that does to kids ability to learn and their motivation and stuff like that.

And that's based on research that's out there in the field. And then my second book. Was about my coming to terms of the fact that I am an alcoholic and getting control of my own drinking, not really getting control of it, but not drinking anymore, and then having to think about, okay, well, what has the impact been on my children and what will the intact impact continue to be on my children in terms of their own risks?

So I have really what I consider to be one of the coolest jobs in the world, which is to get curious about a topic and then. Go in my hidey hole in the woods of Vermont and research the heck out of it for a couple of years and then translate that research for people who don't necessarily want to go around reading studies and, and having to learn the statistics and all that other stuff in order to translate it to real life and how that actually translates to parenting and education and what we do in the classroom and all of that sort of stuff.

It's, it's a really, it's perfect for me as a job. Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting, too, that you have this like, or had this fascination for middle school. May I ask, before we move on, why? Because I have kids in middle school and I'm like, who would be fascinated with middle school? Well, I actually, uh, my very first teaching gig was with kids, was at the Duke Talent Identification Program.

And it, there were, they were sort of gifted or really advanced middle school kids, but they weren't, they were so mature for their age in many ways that it, so I moved directly into teaching. And I thought that's where I would stay. And I had applied for a new teaching job in a high school that I really admired.

And I got a note from the head of a middle school saying, is there any way you would come and interview for this job? Would really love to talk to you about it. And I'm like, Middle school. I, I, I don't know. They, they freak me out. I didn't like middle school myself. I can't imagine that I would want to teach kids that young.

And she said, look, just come meet them, which was the kiss of death. I went and I met them and I fell in love with them immediately. And it was, there's something about the fact that they are still. Children, in the sense that their guard isn't completely up, they still need hugs, they still, there's, there's something really magical about this, this age, and I think the more you understand about the adolescent brain and cognitive development during adolescence, the more You can understand why middle school is so magical.

They, we give them far more than they can handle from the perspective of where their brain development is. And so the expectation is if you're a middle school teacher who absolutely loves this age group, and I don't know why you would teach middle school if you didn't, because it would be maddening. The expectation is, is that we will watch them screw up all day long over and over and over again, and find those learning moments because Kids aren't always teachable on our schedule.

Sometimes it requires us to sort of step back and say, okay, in the back of my mind, I know I'm going to have to talk to this kid about his total lack of organization, but I can't do it right now because he hasn't had lunch yet or his Guinea pig died last night or whatever is happening at home. His parents are getting divorced and now isn't the best time to be talking.

It's more than he can handle. So you wait for just that right moment. And over. I was really lucky. I got to teach sixth grade and seventh grade and eighth grade. So I had these kids for three full years, something that education is, is really starting to realize is important, which is sort of tracking teachers along with kids for more than one year.

You really get the opportunity to get to know them. And so if anyone's ever parented a middle school kid, sixth grade and eighth grade are like two different planets. So getting to watch them grow from sixth grade to the end of eighth grade and heading off to high school. It just, it's amazing. It's incredible.

I love it so much. I have a seventh grader, so I'm smack in the middle. I'm seeing a little metamorphosis. It's kind of like, oh my goodness, what's coming out on the other side. But, but I'll say this, I'll say this. I think as far as this idea of how much a kid can handle, depending on their age. Is it, oh, of course.

It's an idea that even it involves us moms too, and how much we can handle. And on that note, I thought we would totally talk about one of your viral videos. I'm going to say Instagram with regards to a topic that I think a lot of us. might not be able to handle. Like if we have kids and, and we're kind of focused on grades and we want to be sure that they get to like the right high school, the right college and all of that, the topic that you shared your perspective on was my kid left her homework at home.

Should I take it to school for her? And the reason why that topic resonated with me is because here's my theory. My theory is. The reason why a lot of moms are challenged in terms of their mental bandwidth, like, why does it feel so stretched? My hypothesis is because they're also taking ownership of our kids burdens and challenges and problems to solve.

And along the lines of how much they can handle and how much we can handle, I would love your thoughts. thoughts on this idea of, of homework. It's like, I feel like there's got to be a lot more to it than just a piece of like paper giving to school. There's got to be a lot behind that. So say more. Yeah.

So this story actually is in the book, the gift of failure and is It's a cool story because since gift to failure came out, there has been a long period of time in which I've seen how the choices I made that day have played out over a long period of time. So you have to understand the backstory, which I explained in gift to failure, which is that my daughter had real issues with organization.

I mean, again, this was for her, this was fourth grade, but this is something that could come up any, at any period in time. And what. We understood was that she just at first was that her homework just wasn't getting done. That's what I heard from the teacher like homework is not happening. Well, it turns out that wasn't exactly true.

What we did was we talked to her about the homework issue. And what we found out was that actually the homework was getting done. It was just that she was either not handing it in. It was getting lost. It was stuck in the bottom of her backpack. So what was fascinating about that to me is that my assumption was that she was just not doing it.

That's Turns out wasn't true. It was a whole different piece of this. So we had to lay out really clear expectations for homework and then really clear consequences for if she didn't hand it in. So our really clear expectations were you'll do it, you'll do it to the best of your ability. You'll put it in your backpack, you'll take it back out of your backpack and you will hand it in to your teacher so that your teacher can give you feedback because homework is all about feedback.

And So by the time this homework was left on this coffee table and my daughter was already out at the bus stop. And we knew that her major problem was putting the homework in the backpack, taking it out of the backpack, handing it to the teacher. And we'd had a whole conversation about this and we'd been working on this specific thing.

And so I went back and forth and back and forth. Do I take it? Do I not take it? In fact, I had to go to the school for something later that day anyway, so it would have been super easy for me to take it. And I actually even went to Facebook and put up on Facebook that this was a challenge for me. I was right in the middle of writing the gift of failure.

What I do, blah, blah, blah. And a friend of mine who helps run this website called Grown and Flown and wrote the book Grown and Flown about helping your older kids sort of out of, out of the nest, she said, Jess, I really respect you and I love your work, but I disagree if, if. If this were your husband and he forgot his, his charging cord at home, then you'd take it to him.

Right? Because family, if no one else has your back, right? We show each other, we have their backs and we love each other. And if no one else in the world supports us, our family supports us. And I'm like, Oh crud, what do I do now? Because my instinct is I can't take the homework and not just because my entire very small community knew I was writing a book called the gift of failure about this exact thing.

And so I didn't take the homework that day because I realized no, yes, I would take the, the charging cord to my husband, but my husband, always remembers his charging cord. Like that's not an issue we're working on with him. He's an incredibly careful and meticulous person. And so it would be an oddity, an outlier for him to forget something like that.

But with my daughter, this is a very specific thing we've been working on. So I didn't take it. I'm also, by the way, not raising my husband. I was raising my daughter with this very specific blind spot in her, in her executive function skills. And so I didn't take it. And what ended up happening was her teacher got fed up.

Wonderful Mr. Dano. I love him so much. I talk about him all the time. Mr. Dano kept her in from lunch, which plus a minus I'm not in agreement with that. We, Kids need exercise, but kept her in from recess and said, this is something that's been going on for too long. It's time that you just, you have to come up with a strategy, like how is tomorrow going to be different from today?

And that day, the day I didn't take the homework and did not rescue her, she was forced to sit down and come up with a strategy that would work for her. And that strategy won PS, I had been recommending for ages that she didn't. Listen to came up with her own strategy, which again was the one I had been recommending you forever, but it was the one that she thought she came up with all on her own, which is what matters, which was a checklist, like having a checklist at home so that she remembers everything.

And what was so cool about that was. She's very proud of herself when she told me all about this checklist thing. She had come up with clearly all on her own, but it's the, the tool she used, the strategy she used all the way through middle school, all the way through high school. I kept all of them. She would remake them from time to time, depending on what she needed.

And she's in college now, and it continues to be the way she thinks about it. What she needs to leave house with or the dorm room with or whatever And it stuck because it was her Strategy and if I had taken the homework that day She wouldn't have had this moment where she had to talk to an adult about how She needed to be supported in coming up with a solution to this ongoing problem that she wasn't hearing from me and I'm forever indebted to Mr.

Dano for, for being that person that really pushed her to come up with something. So it was really hard to stay home that day, especially since it was for a subject that. She was having trouble with, it was kids who were starting to tease her about being the kid that forgets everything. I could have saved her from that if I had just taken the homework that day, but, and it would have made me feel great, but I had to put off my own, Need to feel good about here's how much I love you.

Here's visible evidence of how much I love you for what would benefit her long term, not necessarily that day. And I would have stolen that learning opportunity from her. And to your point, it's not great at there's another story that I tell in the book, which is that former. Student of mine, we were working on some stuff together about her anxiety and her anxiety around homework and all that stuff.

And it was because her parents were so, so invested in helping her with homework every single day, like literally on top of her. And it was causing major chaos, not just chaos, but anxiety in the home. When it came time for her to go off to college and I asked her what she was excited about, she's like, Oh yeah, I'm so excited for this, that, and the other thing.

She said, but I'm really, really worried about my parents because I don't know what they're going to do with their time because she had never seen her parents have a life outside of her needs and wants and schedule. And that's bad for kids. Like we shouldn't. They need to see that we have a life outside of their needs and wants and lives and that we are full people outside of our children.

That's how we teach our children to be their own parents who can have a life outside of their own kids and think about things like their relationships and their career and their whatever those other things are outside of kids. So I think it's, we really, really have to balance that stuff and be thinking about what's important for our kids in the long term and what's important for us in the long term.

Absolutely. And as I think about what you're sharing, I'm thinking to myself, okay, so this was like a, a little moment that became a huge learning opportunity, lifelong benefits for your daughter. And I'm curious about for yourself and just like, is this now something that you never had to think about again?

Like, how did it like. Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that be nice if I never had to think about it again? No, it was fourth grade and you know, this, she continued to be the kind of kid who needed more supports, especially for executive function stuff. And for those people who don't know, executive function stuff is frontal lobe stuff.

It's adulting stuff. So the brain develops from the bottom up. We start with like the ability to breathe and the ability and reflexes and the ability to see our heart. But the higher up in our brain, we go, the more we're thinking about like time management, resource allocation, how we segue from one thing to another, starting a task, finishing a task, all that kind of like adulting stuff.

That's all frontal lobe stuff. And that is the very last part of the brain to come online. And many, many. Kids, fourth grade, middle school, high school, that part of the brain is not fully online yet. It's not fully online until the early to mid twenties, which if you read my other book about substance use, it's the reason that using addictive substances is so much more harmful to the adolescent brain than it is to an adult brain that's done forming.

So for me, I constantly had to think, okay, where is my kid along this continuum of developing executive function? And she's 20 now. Is she fully cooked yet? No, she, her brain won't be fully cooked until the early to mid twenties. My older kid happened to get there a little bit sooner and my younger kid is getting there a little later and that's totally normal.

But how I react to one kid might be a little different from how I react to my other kids simply because. I know, I have a pretty good sense of where they are in terms of what they need, and it's when we start assuming that they need help all the time, when we start assuming that they're not competent enough to do stuff themselves, that's when we start sort of stepping in, doing too much, being overly directive, and possibly fostering what's called learned helplessness, which is teaching our kids Oh, no, I don't think you can do that thing.

And then they start to believe it too. And so their immediate reaction becomes, Oh, I need help with this. I can't do it myself. There's no way I could do this on my own. And I see it from the classroom side as a teacher. And I see it at home from my own kids, it still pops up, but it still rears its ugly head sometimes, because is it easier to pretend you can't do it?

So mom will do it. Absolutely. And that goes from laundry to loading the dishwasher to pretending that you didn't know that if the dishwasher is already clean, then you can unload it before you drop your stuff in the sink and just walk away. There's that learned helplessness thing is a really tempting thing to fall into for kids until they're done developing and sometimes beyond.

What's so what's so interesting, Jessica, in terms of just like my own experiences, is that. This dynamics of like an overly involved parent doing things for you is alien territory to me. I'm like, oh, that's so fascinating. I, I have a totally different life experience. So here's the challenge that I want to just share with you.

Like how, How would a listener who has the opposite experience where she had to grow up very quickly because she was raised by a mom with manic depression? Like, how does someone like me and you, Jessica, teach our kids without breaking them? Because I don't know what they're capable of, but I'm really trying to figure out what are the edges and like, how does one before?

For already, like what one kid could handle or not, how do you start like testing this just like, Oh, I think they got this or, Oh no, break them. If they do that. Yeah. So I love this question because I hardly ever get this question. I, I was raised in a home with an alcoholic parent. I was raised along with some other stuff that I choose to keep private that I had to grow up really fast and I was in charge of all my stuff.

But part of that was really wonderful because part of it was that my parents trusted me to make good decisions and they, and I, you know, Very much wanted to fulfill that expectation. And so from my perspective, some of that was really great. Like they trusted me to navigate the world and be able to speak up for myself.

And they expected that I would speak up for myself and that I would be able to navigate the world. But there is, as you mentioned, so there's, There's a really interesting divide between kids who have, there's this thing called self efficacy, which is the feeling that if you take action, that you can change things.

Like, let's say for example, I'm. I really don't like my college roommate. We're just not getting along and I really think we should switch roommates. And so I know that I could go speak to an advisor or go talk to the college or talk to the roommate and either resolve things or change things up. That's a feeling of self efficacy.

I know I can do that. So I tend to have a fairly high level of self efficacy, but there are two kinds of kids who have very low levels of self efficacy. And not only is that. which is terrible for them emotionally, but it's also a really big risk factor for substance use. Kids who grow up in the foster care system, group homes, homes where they're being neglected or abused, where you want to change the fact that you're getting hit or that you don't have anyone to turn to, but there isn't much you can do.

Do to change that situation, a kid in foster care may have no control whatsoever over where they're living next week. And that can cause some kids to have really low levels of self efficacy. Like no matter what I do, nothing will change kind of thing. But then there are also kids who grow up with every support and financial support and parents doing everything for them.

And even those kids can end up in a situation where they're like, well, I don't need to make decisions about things because all decisions are being made for me. Someone is going to figure that out for me. And that's also can foster a really low level of self efficacy. And these are the kids that I saw in my rehab classroom a lot, these two kinds of kids.

And so I think One of the best things we can do is really get to know the kid that we have really well. What are their needs? What are their wants? What are, what are the things they love? And let them know that we love them no matter what the outcome is That we're, that we're really interested in the process of becoming, learning, practicing that when we focus overly on the end product, the trophy, the score, the grade, the points, that what we're saying is we don't care how you get there.

We just want you to provide these results and. The way we react when they do or don't provide those results. Can make them can make a lot of kids feel like they are loved more when they get high grades and less when they Get low grades. And in fact, I poll kids on this when i'm in schools And it's really stunning how many kids say?

Yeah, I really do believe that i'm loved More when I get high grades and less when I get low grades so doing a lot of this sort of process talk will also get at the topic of Well, do you need support here? Do you want me to step back a lot of Parents don't think to ask those questions, especially when your come kids, your kid comes to you and they're really upset and like we go into that defensive mode and we just want to fix it for them because it's so horrible to hear about our kids being in distress.

But a lot of teens will tell you that they don't want the problem solved. They just want to talk about it. They just want to be heard. So. Making sure your kid feels heard is the number one thing that we can do to make sure that we're not under parenting or over parenting because they're going to tell us if they trust us and if they feel supported in the process of becoming and whoever it is, they're going to be, as opposed to just in the end product, then they hopefully will trust us enough to tell us when they need help and when they need support, and that's when you can get to know Are they asking for help because they're being helpless here, or are they asking for help because they really, really need help?

And it becomes fairly, it's different with each kid, but if I can learn it in a classroom of 30 students, I knew when my students needed real help or were just copping out for the day. And I knew when a student was in distress and not asking for help. That's a matter of looking and listening, listening, listening.

And paying attention to who the kid is. And there's one thing I say a lot when I'm talking in schools, talking to parents about gift to failure stuff, which is that we have to love the kid. We have not the kid we wish we had, because when we love the kid, we have not some imaginary version of our child.

We really do get a feel for their emotional state and their, their levers for what they want and need from us. And, and that's. Knowing the kid you have and, and not just the kid you wish you had is sort of the most important thing that I think we can do as a parent. Yeah, I would agree totally. I think some kids can handle more than other kids, which is an obvious point.

But I think as a parent, it's the onus is on us to really like understand, like maybe what are their limits and challenge them a little bit. I mean, I have several anecdotes, which I'll definitely share in the show notes a bit more, but. Yeah. Thank you, Jessica, for this. I think this is important. And so one final question before you share all your socials and where we could get your books and such, but here's the question.

So you personally, as a mom, as an author, a New York Times bestselling author, help us understand how you personally have bubble wrapped your sanity along your journey. Yeah, at the, my ability to say no to things has gotten better. When I first sold The Gift of Failure, I was working full time over more than full time as a middle school teacher.

I was teaching six, six class. So I was teaching six individual different classes out of seven periods a day. And I was also working part time as an education journalist. And then I sold my book and I did not want to stop teaching. But I also. I had to weigh sort of what I wanted from my career, and I had always wanted to be a writer, and this was my big chance to sort of do it or not do it right.

And I had to, I, the day I quit, I was just Weeping. It was awful. I luckily was able to find a part time job teaching so that I was able to juggle everything, but I couldn't do everything I wanted to do. And granted, this isn't from a perspective of, Oh my gosh, I have choice. That's a place of incredible privilege.

And I totally understand that. But being able to say no to some of the things that are shiny objects that I would love to like have on my CV, or that I think could sell a couple extra books, or that might give me, give me another opportunity. I've had to realize that I can't be all things to all people.

I can't do everything. In order to be the parent that my teenagers needed, I couldn't also. Teach full time. I just couldn't do it no matter how much I wanted to stay. And it was really sad, but it was a decision that was really, really good and allowed me, as I said, to find a part time job that did allow me to have a taste of this and a taste of that, and still be there for my kids when they needed me to be.

Thank you for that. I think that's helpful. I think saying no is ultimately saying yes to the thing that you really want. So it makes, it makes sense. And I know it's really, really hard, especially when those objects are extra super shiny. So Jessica, share with us where we can continue to follow along your journey and buy your books and support you and learn more about them.

Your gift of failure. So everything is at Jessica Lahey. com, including the daily videos. I was putting up for a while and I'm hoping to return to both on the addiction inoculation and the gift of failure. I do that on Instagram but they're all indexed in the little table of contents on there. You can find out about more about.

Possibly getting me to come to your kid's school or some nonprofit organization in your area to speak about either topic. But again, everything is at Jessica Lahey. com and I'm on all of the social places at, at Jess Lahey. Thank you so much. Or at Teacher Lahey, sorry, at Teacher Lahey. Someone over on Instagram took at Jess Lahey, so I couldn't have it.

So I'm at Teacher Lahey over on Instagram. Thank you so much, Jessica. I appreciate this. Thank you so much. This is such, such a fun conversation. Absolutely. Thanks again. What an amazing conversation with Jessica, and here's why I was so smitten to have a conversation with her. First of all, I think it's so interesting that the topic of over parenting is such a big deal these days because I see it, I'm a witness, I understand it visually.

But personally, and maybe you too, I wasn't over parented. I don't know if I would say I was under parented, but maybe right sized parented for my personality and my abilities. So, it's something for you to consider. I think there's two ends, two ways of approaching parenting, probably several. But ultimately, it's something important to understand as far as For each individual child.

So here's my quick recap. Number one, kids do need to see that we have lives outside of our kids. And I think that is even more important and possible with the internet, making it more accessible to us. Second point, we have to give kids more credit. We can't assume that they don't know how to do something.

I will even add this point. Not only can we not assume that they don't know how to do something. But dare I say, and I'm just saying this cause it's easier to say than to do. What if they actually can do something more simply and better? Right? So that's an opportunity that I think is really helpful.

Here's the third one, self efficacy. So for different kids, there's different quote unquote. Levels of abilities, right? And capabilities. So it's beyond just the age because you could have two 12 year olds that have totally different ways of handling the exact same stressful moment. And I think. You see that in one home where you have siblings who see certain situations favorably, potentially, and others, not as much.

So it's really important for us as moms, even at the helm of really growing businesses. To really pay attention to the different parenting style needs that our individual children have. And as someone with identical twins, that goes for me too, and maybe for you too. So hope you enjoyed the conversation.

I definitely want to invite you to learn more about Jessica. She shared how to reach out to her. And I also want to invite you to head on over to fertile ideas. com. When I say that I am beyond, beyond excited that I am sharing. You know, everything that I've learned over these four years on how to rediscover my own imagination so that this way I could actually have a business that thrives and something that I'm excited about and I feel fully aligned to, which is supporting mom entrepreneurs.

It is not an understatement. Your imagination is something that you might not even know has been paused for a decade. And once we hit that play button. And that is a little bit of a pun because that is part of my framework playing with your imagination. There's no telling at how many wonderful ideas you could activate and turn into reality and actually make an impact in the world and on your terms.

So head on over to www.fertileideas.com