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 for the last time by Don Waisanen, who is a father, a professor, consultant, author, and improviser. Hello, Don. Thanks for joining me for this last conversation together.
Don: Thanks, Abbie. Good to be back again.
Abbie: Today, we're talking about change, and I think it's a fitting last theme for us to leave people with as life will only continue to change from here.
Last week, Stephanie talked about a strategy that has really stuck with me: the ‘Three C Strategy’- how is our thinking confirmed, challenged, or changed is what she offered. And I think that's such a great, very simple sounding practice for us to be reflecting with. So with that in mind, I'm curious what you would add to the conversation we're having around change.
Don: Yeah, this is really pronounced in my life right now because my 13 year old, especially, his voice is dropping by the day. So it's constant change. I think there's a really interesting balance when it comes to parenting, watching your kids grow and change.
And I think one of the most productive perspectives we can take on this comes from the work of Cathy Salit and Lois Holzman. They talk a lot about putting ourselves in places between being and becoming, where we need to recognize not only our strengths as individuals as we grow, but also who are we not yet? What performances need to be had? What are new selves and new identities that we could aim for?
And just like learning to ride a bike, when you get on the bike, the state of being is you don't know how to ride a bike, but you just pedal and you go lopsided a little bit and you make your way through. And then the next thing you know, you performed your way into a new role. And that's all of life.
There's always room for growth and change. And I just watch this with my kids and I think, I know there's a lot that's said about growth mindset and fixed mindset, but there really is a lot to that, that kids very easily get into a fixed mindset about a lot of things.
And I think over time, I've just seen a major role of parenting being constantly pointing toward the becoming aspect of being a kid. First of all, validating their strengths and saying, you're great and you are valuable and affirming their humanity.
But then also saying on top of that, look at all these exciting ways to stretch and grow these different identities that we can each play. And I love that movies, frankly, like Inside Out have have brought that into a lot of the public consciousness.
Abbie: Yeah, right.
Don: It gives you those kinds of things, give you a great resource for talking about these things. Like, oh, you know, like Internal Family Systems therapy, which is all about there's different parts of ourselves that come to the fore or get submerged and, oh, right now our feeling angry- that seems to be in central control, you know, but there's a core self beneath that that is compassionate, caring, that has character. There's integrity there. I know that's there. You've done that so many times, you know.
So I think thinking a lot about the language and the discourse we use to talk with our kids about this stuff is worth every parent's full attention at some point. It makes a big difference.
Abbie: This is the theme that makes me think about resilience and how you could foster that in children. I think about change as something that can be really scary and really disorienting if you're not equipped to navigate it, if you're not taught to expect change, if you're not modeled this growth mindset that you've talked about.
Don: Yeah, and I think that resilience has to do with contexts a lot. Learning to work with different contexts is huge because if we think about it, our kids are often in very small, limited social worlds. When I when I hear my six year old or nine year old talk about what's happening at school, I love it, frankly… This is going on. There's a concert next week. And oh, there's a pizza thing. Oh, and can we go to Chipotle tonight? Because there's a fundraiser. It's all about what's happening at school.
Abbie: Yeah.
Don: … all the little events and things that they're excited about. But it also shows like they're in these very limited worlds where everything seems so important and right. And I often have to say to my kids, it's like, well, the school is one context, but there's others. And let's zoom out. What would a bigger picture on this look like?
So my favorite thing on all of this ever, if anybody listening has never seen this, it's worth your time. Go on to YouTube, put in “pale blue dot.” And watch the I think it's a two or three minute video from Carl Sagan. I think it's near the end of Carl Sagan's life. He did this video where he showed Earth. It was all zoomed in on Earth and the context of what was happening on Earth. And the whole video just zooms out to the rest of the universe till you see nothing in the distance but the pale blue dot. And there you can barely see it at all. And Sagan says, you know, think of all that human beings did they thought was so important. All the wars, all the, our economic system, all the talk about this is the most important thing in time in history. And then you zoom out to that pale blue dot.
Now, what does that level of context make you think and see? And I'm doing an imperfect job, but as a parent that's one thing I can help pass on to my kids- when changes happen, zoom out, get a higher level context.
Abbie: Yeah, I think that's such a great thing to leave people with about change. And just as we are wrapping up this month, and this year of the CosmoParenting podcast, I just want to give you one more opportunity- is there anything else you'd want to leave people with?
Don: A few things. One is just to try new performances and experiment. Do things you haven't done before. We talked about raising and lowering status. Give that a shot and take stock. Do I usually play high status with my kids? Do I play low status? Do the opposite. Play around a little bit.
And I think the second thing is just that structures can really help. We- you and I- talked about order and chaos and things like that, but putting in a weekly Sunday night dinner where we have this four part structure every single week. It's a ritual.
What was good from your week here?
Let's talk about what's going to happen this week.
Anybody have any concerns, any problems or challenges we should talk about as a family?
And then last thing, we're going to play a game.
Just rituals. I've found structures do so much work in maintaining a family structure, offering spaces for kids to communicate and collaborate with parents. Otherwise, a lot of parenting just seems like everything is happening… It's all reactive. So I think those are two things: new performances and adding some structures to where we can improvise our way through parenting and family life or caretaking, whatever it is, we can do those well, are really important.
And then the last thing, what we just talked about, zoom out. Zoom out to higher level contexts when possible, because when everyone's flooded and dysregulated and yes, that really is what happens with dysregulation. It's all about the now. Very little sense of past or future or larger contexts at play.
So accessing higher level contexts, zooming out for big, bigger picture. I think that's really critical too. Boy, do I need all of those things? Just me, myself. Yes.
So, to bring it to the level of parenting, I think it's only heightened.
Abbie: Yeah. Well, I'm really happy with what's kind of emerged over the course of all these episodes we've done together because the title of the week four episode each month is communicate. And there might be some people having listened to these episodes saying, hey, where are you telling me the words that I'm supposed to say? I'm not hearing any of that.
And so I think by now people will get the sense of what you just kind of touched on, that when we're talking about communication, it's about the space we're creating to act into. It's more than just the words we say.
So when we're talking about communicating around parenting, it's in your behavior. It's in those non-verbals. It's in the modeling that you do. And so I really hope that people feel like what they're taking away is this kind of, you know, we've talked about it like a toolbox, this kind of whole picture of now I have all these great resources that I'm practicing, I'm playing with, that you're improvising together. You're using all the tools that you just talked about.
So thank you so much, Don, for everything this year and this CosmoParenting.
Don: Thanks. This has been really great.
Abbie: Great. And thank you so much to everyone who's listening and has listened through this whole year. Don't forget to check out www.cosmoactivities.com for all our other free resources in the series. And please comment on this podcast episode on the CosmoParenting Substack. We are so grateful to have been on this journey with you. And we will look forward to joining you for one final episode next week as we wrap up CosmoParenting.
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