EP 20: Recapping & Reviewing Season 2
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:00] NV: Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatics and social justice practitioner, and founder of Come Back to Care. Adopt connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation.
If you're on a journey to transform your daily parenting into a social justice practice that nurtures your child's development and promotes intergenerational family healing, I am so glad that you're here. On this podcast, we explore how social justice, child development science, parenting, and family systems intersect with one another. If you've been looking for ways to align your parenting with a social justice values, you're in the right place. Together, we find our way back to our true home. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineage and come back to care together. So come curious, and come as you are. Let's move at the speed of care, and let's do this.
[EPISODE]
Welcome to episode 20 and the final episode of Season 2 of the Come Back to Care Podcast. This episode is a little different from the rest of the season. Because I want to invite you to go behind the scenes with me as we revisit each episode from episode 12 to episode 19. I’ll pull out one highlight from each episode and share my creative process and the inspiration behind each episode. So this episode is less about learning new information and more about integrating what we’ve learned together so far. I’m imagining you and I sitting and recapping the season together. I have my boba tea in hand and I hope you have your favorite beverage ready too. Or if you’re doing laundry or cooking, I see you too.
Rest & Digest
I’d like to begin with why. Why are we reflecting on the whole season and recapping each episode? The sweetest and shortest answer is so that we can intentionally slow down enough to appreciate and integrate the decolonizing work of unlearning and relearning we’ve done together. That is to slow down before quickly moving on to the next goal, the next productive thing, or the next item on the to-do list in the name of capitalistic growth.
When we don’t have structural support like universal childcare or paid parental leave, we’re forced into survival mode where we go through the motions of checking off each item on the never-ending parenting to-do list. In survival mode raising a child can quickly get reduced to getting through the day in one piece and waking up the following day to repeat the process. It goes without saying that this survival is necessary. Yet it often comes at the cost of slowing down, pausing, and smelling the flowers or diapers. We go, go, go, survive, survive, and survive so much that we forget to appreciate and celebrate our hard work of healing. We might even forget to delight in our child’s development too. You’ve been growing your family in a pandemic for the past three years. And on top of that you’ve been unlearning and healing internalized oppression wounds from racism, ableism, classicism, and more.
While we’re surviving systemic oppression together, we can strengthen our internal resources by slowing down and celebrating these little wins along the way. That’s why you might have noticed that in each episode there’s an intentional space carved out for you to slow down and reflect on different questions about your triggers, habits, or values. To unlearn oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns, we need to know what we’re uninstalling first before downloading the updates, right? We can’t just keep downloading new apps and programs or learning new information all the time. Learning means taking time – just like we’re doing now -- to integrate all of these pieces into your lived experience.
My hope is as we take a moment to review and reflect on each episode, you get to reflect on what you’ve learned or unlearned from the episode and what you’ve experimented with. And I invite you to celebrate yourself and delight in your own work. I mean if we can’t appreciate ourselves, how can we appreciate the children we’re raising?
Ep 12: Three Ways to Turn Toddler Tantrums into Teachable Moments
If you’re ready to rest & digest; review & integrate your learning, let’s start with the first episode of the season, Ep 12: Three Ways to Turn Toddler Tantrums into Teachable Moments
For the past 10 years that I’ve worked with parents and young children from newborn to three years old, I’ve talked about behavior challenges, tantrums, meltdowns, and everything in between every single day. With my educational privilege, I got to learn the quote unquote behavioral management strategies from different perspectives like brain development, social-emotional development, psychodynamic psychotherapy, and behavioral psychology. When I partner with parents to understand their children’s meltdowns, these fields give me so much evidence-based knowledge I can draw from. But what’s really fun for me is inviting parents to look at popular tantrum strategies, strategies like time in and time out, taking toys away, or ignoring the tantrums through the lens of social justice, specifically transformative justice. Together we wonder how these strategies might be a copy and paste version of white supremacist violence. And how we can use these strategies in ways that are more aligned with our values.
A lot of tantrum advice out there is rooted in how to decrease crying, hitting, biting…you name it. And when they don’t take into account a child’s whole development, they’re often another version of white supremacy’s norms of control, coercion, and domination. On the other hand, some popular advice is centered on a complete lack of boundaries or consequences to promote quote unquote attachment. So, in this episode you’ll hear me bust some myths about popular Internet advice like “decrease your child’s bad behaviors,” “ignore the tantrums,” and “be consistent.”
One key invitation no matter which tantrum strategies you like -- from time in to time out -- is to try your best to understand the tantrum-- aka this plea for help-- from your child’s perspective and let that discernment guide which strategy in your parenting toolkit you’d like to use.
Ep 13 Decolonizing Discipline: Replacing Punishment with Boundaries & Accountability
Episode 13 is part II of this decolonizing discipline series, titled Decolonizing Discipline: Replacing Punishment with Boundaries & Accountability. In this episode I went a little deeper on looking at discipline through the lens of social justice actions like Dr. King’s Nonviolence and transformative justice so that we’re more mindful when social conditionings that push us to dominate, control, and coerce those who have less power than we do, in this case our children, kicks in.
In this episode you’ll also find a free 30-minute self-guided audio workshop that you can listen to to map out a tantrum plan for you and your child. You’ll listen to guided prompts to explore what you’d like to do before, during, and after the meltdowns. It’s a framework for handling meltdowns that is trauma-informed, developmentally focused and social justice oriented. Instead of listing out 5 things to say to your child during tantrums, it’s so much more satisfying to me to provide you with a framework like this where you can play with it and make it fit your style and your child’s development.
Offering a framework that you can put your own spin on is my way of undoing the mainstream hierarchy where parents have been historically trained to disregard their own voice and expertise in order to follow quote unquote expert advice. Your observations and intuitions are as powerful as my clinical reasoning so why don’t we both-and them together?
Ep 14: How to Start Healing Inner Child Wounds & Practicing Decolonized Parenting
I know we kicked the season off with a hot topic like decolonizing discipline. I felt really amazing to get it out of my head and off my chest.
Then we dove right into the heart and soul of our work of decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational parenting in episode 14 which is How to Start Healing Inner Child Wounds & Practicing Decolonized Parenting. This episode was surprisingly difficult to put together. I’m Sagittarius rising meaning I love getting to the bottom of the truth as much as I can. I could go on and on and on about why we need to get off our knees and stand in our power by raising our children by our values, parenting by our own parenting playbook instead of the playbook that’s written by the outdated family patterns and oppressive social norms. I wanted to give you my dissertation.
Because the work we’re doing here cross pollinates among many different fields so there’s so much information to explore. For example, re-parenting our inner child is essentially about healing attachment injuries. This field of attachment alone, specifically the adult attachment interview, has 30 years plus of research behind it. And we’re layering information on neuroscience and somatic psychotherapy on top of it. I know I’m a nerd and I love it. There’s so much information and it was really hard for me to pick only a few things to share as an introduction. It was hard but a wonderful challenge for sure.
And it’s the same challenge when it comes to decolonized parenting too. Because we’re integrating child development sciences and social justice action. It’s really fun for me to connect the dots and make them actionable for parents who are already busy and tired. Whenever I think about social justice and parenting, I want to emphasize the integration between the two so you can be about social justice, meaning embodying your social justice values in how you interact with your child and going beyond the surface-level actions like buying dolls with skin colors or reading books with trans characters.
One key invitation from this episode is to think about accountability. As a social justice practitioner, accountability could range from being actively anti-oppressive, repairing hurt and harm, or holding space for those with less power and privilege to be seen and heard. All wonderful actions. How about as a parent? Accountability for a decolonized parent, in a way, can look like knowing who needs your attention right now: your inner child from the past or your actual child in the present. Because once you know that, you can continue healing your inner child while raising your child.
If you’ve been enjoying this podcast and you have loved ones in your circles who want to make their parenting an act of social justice and who want to re-parent their inner child, please consider sharing this podcast with them. It might just be something caring and nourishing they need today. Thank you so much for helping us grow our community of decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational families. I’m so grateful for you. Alright, back to the episode.
Ep 15: Four Ways to Practice Interdependence in Parenting
Onward to episode 15, Four Ways to Practice Interdependence in Parenting. When I was putting this episode together, the US’s Independence Day or 4th of July was around the corner, and I was plain tired of the hyper individualism that capitalism keeps feeding to us. So, I knew I really wanted to talk about an alternative like interdependence, but I didn’t want to just give you a definition and call it a day. I decided to go back to the roots of it all…human evolution. People often say competition is in our human nature. Well, cooperation and interdependence are also in our human nature since the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. To layer more nuances on top of this evolutionary perspective, I pulled from the indigenous practice of reciprocity and gratitude between us, humans, and the land which mirrored so beautifully Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching on Inter-be that I grew up with.
Making this episode made me feel, for the first time, that I had a podcast. I remembered that I was looking at all the color-coded highlights from six different books that I spread across my work table. Then it hit me that “I get to make a podcast for you.” I can get stuck in doing and doing, but that moment that I had to pause, look out my window, and savor the moment for a second. What an honor to share my passion with you through this medium…truly.
This episode really hits home. I feel like other episodes are mostly me presenting the problem of oppression to you that keeps seeping into our daily parenting and daily living. But this episode is all about an alternative to systemic oppression which is interdependence…an alternative that’s been here all along. This episode truly gives me hope. Did I cry putting the episode together? You bet I did.
Alright, the key invitations from this episode are the 4 ways I invited you to explore interdependence in your community and in your home. These were things like supporting land sovereignty actions and talking with your child about enoughness. I love these small but concrete actions.
EP 16: What Children Can Teach Us About Change & Liberation Through Emergent Strategy
The following episode is a special one too. My formal training is in child development which goes with my natural curiosity about what children can teach me about life, about the extraordinary in the most ordinary moment. I know that I express myself more fully and love more deeply because of the infants and toddlers I’ve worked with for the past decade. So, this episode is my love letter to my tiny teachers with a twist. The twist is a focus on how my babies and toddlers have taught me about social justice action, specifically a framework called the Emergent Strategy.
I originally put this presentation together for the Allied Media Conference and I had so much fun sharing it with the organizers and cultural workers who were also parents. So, I wanted to make it available to you via this podcast too. When I design the arc of a season, I always leave room for one episode to nerd out with you about infant and toddler development. This season we have 2 episodes about child development- this one and episode 12 on tantrums.
One key invitation from this episode is to delight in the juicy lessons the children in the episode have taught me about accountability, iteration, decentralization of power, interdependence, and nonlinearity. Perhaps, this reflection can enrich your own observations of what your child is teaching you about social justice action.
EP 17 and 18: Why it’s so hard to get free Pt.1 &2
We have three more episodes left to cover as we’re winding the season down. So far, each episode explored how to raise our children differently by healing our inner child and internalized oppression wounds. I really believe that upgrading our parenting begins with re-parenting our inner child so we can heal the pain from our childhood while raising our children. Then, we can take things a step further and incorporate different social justice actions into our daily parenting practice. Imagine if we model things like power-with, accountability, and solidarity with our children so that they never have to attend a diversity, equity, and inclusion training! It’s great, right? But I haven’t really spent a lot of time acknowledging how extremely difficult this work is.
We’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. But doing this requires that we break free from the status quo and that’s so scary…to the point that our inner resistance might get in the way… despite our social justice values and good ally intentions. So I dedicated episodes 17 and 18 to exploring some of the reasons why it’s a human thing to not want to break free from the status quo and what we can do to live our values, get off our knees, and stand in our power. Episode 17 is about why it’s so hard to break free from oppressive social norms. Then, episode 18 is about why it’s so hard to break free from outdated family cycles, even when we know we don’t want to pass them down to our children. These two episodes have reflection questions for you to get real about your inner resistance to change.
Apart from acknowledging how hard this work is, I really want to name how guilt and shame often show up too. Anytime you learn about another way to parent, you might notice that guilt also pops up. Perhaps, it’s a thought like “ugh why didn’t I know this already?” or “I wish I had this information when I was a new parent.” Does that resonate with you?
So I really had to find a balance between honoring that parental guilt that might pop up when you learn new information about parenting and inviting you to do this hard thing of liberation together anyway. I often use the metaphor of when a body part falls asleep because you’ve been stuck in the same position for so long. It may hurt and feel tingly at first as the body is waking up. To tend to this pain, you may want to move the body, shake it off, and mobilize. In a similar way, the guilt and pain from learning this new way to raise a child can be soothed when you “get up and move” by organizing and mobilizing into action.
EP 19: Social Justice Parenting For The Long Haul
Now that we’ve explored some of the things that get in the way of our liberation, EP 19: Social Justice Parenting For The Long Haul, looks at what habits we need to let go and what skills we need to cultivate if we commit to this liberation in action for the next 7 generations. We get real in this episode, but we make it cute too with another metaphor: we’re going on a long road trip to liberation where we need to unpack and pack really well to make this hard journey as joyful as we can
One key invitation from the episode is to explore ways to be with our discomfort and uncertainty long enough to break the automatic habit of reacting to triggers and then reverting to old patterns to get rid of the discomfort as quickly as we can. If we can stay in the discomfort long enough, we can pick another tool or action that’s more adaptive. Befriending discomforting is a skill I’m practicing daily too and I’m happy to say it gets more and more manageable each day. Still hard but manageable.
Closing
Well, that’s a wrap for season 2. What an honor to be with you each episode…unlearning outdated family patterns as we’re re-parenting our inner child and unsubscribing from oppressive social norms to heal the internalized oppression wounds that our ancestors couldn’t. We’re shifting our culture to be rooted in dignity, humanity, and compassion and creating a legacy for our future generations. Thank you for taking this journey back home to your lineage, your body, and the goodness within. Thank you for coming back to care…together.
See you in November for Season 3. You can always email me at nat@comebacktocare.com with questions or connections.
As always, in solidarity and sass. Until November, please take jazzy, juicy, and delicious care.