Abbie: Hello and welcome to the CosmoParenting Podcast brought to you by the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution. In this space, we invite you to see yourself as someone who is curious about and actively participating in creating your own meaning around parenting.
This is our ‘Communicate’ episode, in which the fourth episode of each month we will wrap up our theme by offering some ideas for communicating with your children, co-parents, or whoever else might be a part of your parenting, to start having conversations about the things you are learning here. Let’s begin.
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Abbie: Today, I am joined again by Don Waisanen. Don is a father to three boys. He's a professor, a consultant, author, and improviser. Hello, Don. Welcome back.
Don: Hey, Abbie. Good to be back.
Abbie: So today we're talking about order and chaos, and I'm especially excited to hear what you have to say on this topic, since you've shared with me that you experience a lot of chaos in your life as a parent and maybe in many different roles as well.
What Stephanie added for us this past week was to talk about some ‘Mindfulness Strategies.” So I think what she was really referencing was kind of this internal ordering chaos that can happen.
Don: That’s Right.
Abbie: Yeah. And so she's given me a lot of great language that I wasn't as familiar with before around like dysregulation and regulation strategies. That's something she thinks about a lot as a gifted educator. So I'm curious to know what you would build off of that as far as how people that are parenting could be communicating around order and chaos.
Don: I love that, by the way, about regulation and dysregulation and recognizing those moments where human biology is getting in the way of the ability to communicate well and to grow and develop.
And I think if anything, I just piggyback off of that, anything I've learned about regulation and, you know, when kids’ brains are really flooded, as well, is that you have to wait and hit the pause button.
Sometimes things are so chaotic with kids that in order to have any kind of order, the best thing you can do is hit the pause button, say, let's come back to this later when everybody's a little bit more regulated and executive function is a little more available up there.
And that way we can reflect. Sometimes you just pour gas on the fire sometimes with trying to approach chaos with reason, especially. So I love this framing of order and chaos. I think it encapsulates, I would say, anyone who's in a parenting role of some kind, this is a big part of life.
And especially when kids are screaming and things are going awry and they don't know what to do. They're flooded. Trying to maintain some kind of resilience in the face of that is key. One of the things I've learned and, you know, I obviously talk a lot about improvisation. I think it's one of the most important skill sets any of us can continue to work on throughout life to improvise well, not just to improvise, but to improvise well, adapt well in situations. I think it's really important to accept the chaos in a way.
About seven years ago, one of my kids got really sick, we were in the hospital. And I remember thinking at the time that improv was some of the best training I'd had for that because I could have railed against the reality. I didn't have to like it. I didn't like it. No one liked it. You know, my heart went out to my kid, especially. And the effect on our family was huge. But I did go, this is what what is right now. And let's work with it. Let's have some resilience, some bounce-back-ability amidst the situation, bad situation.
So I think that ability to improvise through chaos can kind of help bring order to some very difficult life situations. Being comfortable not knowing, being able to sit in uncertainty and ambiguity and find the hope of we're going to find a way through this is really critical.
One of my favorite bits on this is a guy named Peter Gray. He has a talk on YouTube. He's an anthropologist and he looked at structure and unstructure in the lives of children across societies. And I think of this often when I think of order and chaos. What is it to bring, I would say, structured spontaneity to parenting and to our kids' lives? Just enough structure to improvise on, but also allow room for disorder, unstructure, unstructured time. And he says that a lot of kids' lives have just become completely overscheduled. It's parents running them to music class and to sports and all these things where it's really the rules and situations set up by grownups at the end of the day.
Here, go inhabit this versus that kind of go out and play and run around the neighborhood and find what's under that rock and do things of your own will. And I just think about that a lot because I do think there's a lot that's happened across societies with this where kids' lives are too ordered.
Abbie: Mmhmm.
Don: And so when we say order and chaos, it's almost like, oh, order is good. Chaos is bad. Right? But I often wonder if it's actually the other way that kids lives are far too structured and ordered and we should allow some room for chaos.
Abbie: Yeah, absolutely. I think it makes a lot of sense. And you're speaking to something that I think will feel true for a lot of people that when presented with the idea of something like chaos, the kind of first place you would go is, well, we should limit that chaos, or we should control that chaos, that the answer would be to control the chaos. Because like you said, we maybe have this story, this assumption that chaos is bad.
Don: Yeah.
Abbie: But what we're asking people to do is kind of pause and question that assumption. And instead, when faced with chaos, not try to control the chaos. I mean, you know, again, not to say that there's never a moment you need to control the chaos and rein it in. Sometimes chaos is something that needs to be controlled.
Other times, like you're saying, especially in parenting, especially with kids in their lives, chaos is something that you can be, how am I conceptualizing this chaos right now? How am I relating to it? How am I acting into it and doing the reflecting on yourself a little more?
Don: Yeah, there is the side that's just Lord of the Flies, right?
Abbie: Yeah, we don't want to minimize that either.
Don: It's completely running things themselves. You know, that was a whole great book for a reason. It was TV show spinoffs. But I do think there's something to that. And I'll say I'll say one last thing on this, which I was really impacted recently by this book by Nick Obolensky called Complex Adaptive Leadership. And I think there's applications to parenting here.
He says, and I've done some exercises around this with different groups, that the more you go from simple challenges to more complicated challenges to complex and then chaotic challenges, the more you go in that direction, the less traditional forms of leadership and authority will work. And this is a very powerful idea for 2025 and moving into the future, because I think with parenting challenges to go, yeah, we play authority figures. We have power. And you and I have talked about that a bit, but literally the more chaotic things get, the more away from order we get, the less traditional authoritative parenting might work. The more you need to collaborate with your kids to find solutions to things. And that introduces a, the need for communication structures, which help us all. And I've been thinking about that a lot lately. It seems to be a truism for our organizations as well as our personal lives and parenting, especially.
Abbie: Mmhmm. Yeah, I love that. I think a really great note to leave people with, I think, leaving people with lots of things to think about in terms of ordering chaos in their lives and their parenting. So thank you, Don, for what you shared today.
And to everyone listening, thank you for joining us too. Don't forget to check out www.cosmoactivities.com for all our other resources in this series. Those are all available for free. And be sure to comment on this podcast episode on the CosmoParenting Substack. Great way to be in dialogue with our community and learning from each other. We're so grateful to be on this journey with you and we will see you next week for the first episode of our Perspectives theme.
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