From Pain to Purpose: Healing Childhood Wounds With Courage and Grace

Keywords

conscious parenting, inner child, reparenting, emotional intelligence, childhood trauma, authenticity, spirituality, parenting strategies, adult children, healing


Summary

In this episode, James Moffitt interviews Lisa Watson, a transformational life and parenting coach, discussing the principles of conscious parenting, the importance of understanding and healing the inner child, and the process of reparenting oneself. Lisa shares her journey into parenting coaching, emphasizing the significance of emotional intelligence, authenticity, and spirituality in fostering healthier family dynamics. The conversation provides practical strategies for parents of adult children, encouraging them to support their children's autonomy while also addressing their own past traumas.


Takeaways

Lisa Watson is a transformational life and parenting coach.
Conscious parenting involves being present and aware in the moment.
The subconscious mind is formed in the first seven years of life.
Healing childhood trauma is essential for personal growth.
Reparenting oneself can change disempowering belief systems.
Authenticity is crucial for emotional well-being.
Parents should validate their children's feelings and experiences.
Spirituality can enhance emotional intelligence in parenting.
It's important to model behaviors rather than just lecturing children.
Parents should support their adult children without judgment. 


Sound bites

"I help people to reparent themselves."
"All we have is the now moment."
"You are worthy and you are deserving."


Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Conscious Parenting
02:32 Lisa's Journey into Parenting Coaching
05:16 Understanding Conscious Parenting
08:23 Reparenting Yourself and Your Inner Child
11:12 The Role of Authenticity in Parenting
14:02 Healing Family Dynamics through Emotional Intelligence
17:04 Spirituality and Parenting
19:50 Practical Strategies for Parents of Adult Children

Richard Jones. I am an RN with over 34 years of Nursing Experience, much of that experience working with young adults in the corrections system. 

Parenting Adult Children Call To Action 

Transcript

James Moffitt (00:00.92)
Hello and welcome to ABC's of parenting adult children podcast. My name is James Moffitt. I'll be your host today. I have Lisa Watson as a special guest on the podcast episode. Lisa, how are you?

Lisa Watson (00:11.826)
I am fantastic, thank you.

James Moffitt (00:15.096)
Yeah. Hey, do me a favor and introduce yourself to the listening audience.

Lisa Watson (00:20.529)
As James said, my name is Lisa Watson and I am a transformational life and parenting coach as well as an author of children's books.

James Moffitt (00:32.992)
Awesome. Well, I appreciate you being here today.

off on your, I'm just going to read your little blurb that you have on your pod match profile. And we can just kind of launch off from that. so Lisa Watson's expertise could guide a transformative dialogue on nurturing emotional intelligence and healing childhood trauma, emphasizing inner child work and re parenting. The episode could empower parents navigating the complexities of adult children transitioning into autonomy.

James Moffitt (01:06.542)
So that's very good.

Lisa Watson (01:08.746)
Yes, I love to help parents of little ones and big ones.

James Moffitt (01:15.064)
Yeah. tell, tell us how you got it. Got into this, how you got involved in.

Lisa Watson (01:21.632)
that's quite a story.

James Moffitt (01:22.35)
parenting, adult children and all of that.

Lisa Watson (01:26.166)
Well, I got into it back in 2015. I had been married for quite some time, like over 25 years to my children's father. I have two kids. They're currently in their early thirties and I got a divorce in 2015 and I decided I wanted to start living life on my terms. was kind of, it was not kind of, it was a toxic relationship and I didn't have

a lot of my own autonomy. And I've always been really into spirituality and personal development. Being a mother is something that I tell people like I came here with the archetype of mothering because it just comes very naturally to me and it's the thing I love the most. And so I'm very much into children and nurturing them. And so I decided to get into life coaching and I

was doing coaching certifications on life coaching, a lot of spiritual life coaching. I also had a spiritual awakening during this time in 2017. So that kind of shifted things in my focus. I really became interested in, while studying to be a life coach, I became interested in some other things such as the subconscious mind and understanding that our belief systems are what

create our reality. And I coupled that with what I was learning as a life coach and what had been presented to me about conscious parenting, which I had never heard about conscious parenting before. I would say that I was a fairly conscious parent, but I'd never heard that term before. And it really, really interested me. And I had been working to heal my own wounding. I realized that my life was just a

a manifestation of the belief systems that I held about myself. So in my training to become a life coach, what I did was just work on myself. And I really started doing a deep dive into just healing, healing the trauma that I have had since I've had a challenging life when it comes like so many of us have.

Lisa Watson (03:49.676)
when it comes to my upbringing and then a 25 year toxic relationship. And I had put, know, I wasn't, I hadn't abandoned myself. didn't, there wasn't a lot of self love going on there, which I think we've been kind of trained to be as a society. And so I decided I just really wanted to change that. And so I focused a lot on where these subconscious beliefs had come from, like why I held these beliefs and how could I change them so that I could begin to

create the reality that I was looking for, know, a loving, stable partnership, financial freedom, you whatever it is that I didn't have that I was looking for. And that led me to learning more about childhood development because I learned that in the first seven years is when the subconscious mind is really formed. it's how we speak to children in those first seven years. I learned that children are in the

theta brainwave state, which is the state they put you in when they put you under hypnosis for the first seven years. And they walk around literally just absorbing everything into their subconscious programming as truth. And so this coupled with my coaching certifications that I went through a couple, I actually went back to school to get my PhD in integrated health medicine. So it's just studying a lot of different things and the conscious parenting.

And I started nanny. I started nannying so that I could get like workshop experience with this new conscious parenting that I was doing. I wanted to be around toddlers and practice what it is that I was learning. And as I was nannying, did that. I was doing it full time and around this time COVID had come. And so that was a whole new thing. And I was nannying during COVID. And I learned that

The books that are out there for children. I wasn't so crazy about understanding Having this new information of how the subconscious mind is formed how belief systems are formed from said You know in these small ages and then reading these really disempowering stories to children I Started questioning that like we I shouldn't be reading this kind of stuff to them like this isn't

James Moffitt (05:54.35)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Watson (06:14.601)
This isn't giving them the framework that they really need to know. Like, know, Cinderella or just so many Disney stories where the power is put outside of us, where we're looking for a savior, or there's so much trauma in the stories that we're reading children like Bambi and Lion King. And there's a lot of fear. And what I realized was that there's so much fear pumped into this reality of ours, you know, through the media, through television, through stories.

And this is where we pick up these fear-based belief systems and because our beliefs create our reality, we end up creating a reality that is full of fear. We end up creating a reality that's disempowering, a reality where we're looking for someone outside of us to save us. We're not taught with what I have learned now is that we are all God-informed capable of alchemizing energy into the reality that we want to.

that we're actually extremely powerful beings, but the powers that be in this reality don't want us to know that. So they pumped a lot of fear-based belief systems, disempowering belief systems into our reality, basically to keep us in control. And so learning that, I decided as I was on an exercise machine one day watching a class for my integrative health medicine curriculum that I was working through,

It was about Eastern cultures and how they teach about the energy bodies. Because a lot of what I'm learning in my class, I go to quantum university. So there's a lot of quantum physics and energy work in what I'm learning. Integrative health medicine, know, integrating allopathic medicine with holistic medicine is what I'm studying. And so this class was about how Eastern cultures typically teach their children about their energy bodies, you know, their chakra systems, their

the meridians and things like that. And it just hit me like a brick on the head basically. I jumped off the machine and I ran to tell my husband that I knew what I needed to do. I'm like, I need to write children's books to teach children who they really are so that they can adopt these into their subconscious mind and easily create a reality that is pleasing to them. And so that's what I started to do.

Lisa Watson (08:41.653)
continued to work on coaching, focus on parenting, conscious parenting. But then it all came together. My brand is now called Reparent Yourself. Reparent-Yourself is one of my websites, my main coaching website. And what I do is I help people to reparent themselves, adults to reparent those belief systems that are disempowering in them. Because all we have is the now moment.

and the past doesn't exist. So through our imagination and through our self-talk, we can go back and we can re-parent new beliefs into ourselves. We can say, you know, what we learned or what we were told about ourselves actually isn't true. Like you are worthy and you are deserving and you are, you know, all these things. And so we can literally change the subconscious programming by working with our inner child and re-parenting it.

And then on the other side of the coin, I write children's books to help children and parents have tools so that they don't grow up having to do all this rewiring that we're having to do because of all these disempowering belief systems that were taught to us.

That's what I do.

James Moffitt (09:57.322)
Awesome. That's a lot of stuff. Yeah, conscious parenting. I don't think I've heard of that before, but that makes a lot of sense.

Lisa Watson (09:59.135)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Watson (10:03.327)
Yeah, conscious parenting is, it's just, it is what it's saying. Like it's really simple. It's just about being conscious, being in the now moment. Because typically what we're doing is our, you know, I'm sure listeners have heard this, maybe you've heard this, that we only operate off of about five or 10 % of our brain. And what that really means is the conscious part of our brain. Everything else is subconscious programming.

It's what was built in those first seven years. It's the autopilot that keeps us going. It's why we can get into a car and drive to work the same route that we go every day and get there and not remember even driving because your autopilot goes on. The human body is so incredibly sophisticated and the subconscious mind, what it does is it actually helps us to reserve energy. We don't have to be consciously thinking about

getting our heart to beat or to do repetitive tasks that we've already learned how to do. But so many belief systems are held within the subconscious mind, just what we believe about who we are or how we should respond or what people should do or when we should be happy or when we should be sad. And so often we most like 99 % of the time we're parenting or even relating within relationships.

through subconscious programming. You we get triggered, we just say certain things, we just say what we were, the behaviors that were modeled for us, the way people spoke around us growing up, that becomes our norm. And so we just do it. And then we later regret it, because maybe we yelled at our kid, or, you know, we weren't kind or something like that. And we're like, I'm so sorry, I shouldn't have done that. You were just acting out of your subconscious mind. You were just acting out of what you were taught and the behaviors that were modeled to you.

And we're really innocent to those things, but we have to take responsibility for them without judgment. It's not our parents' fault. It's not our grandparents' fault. It's nobody's fault. It just happened. It's just what they learned. It's the way this matrix system has been set up to keep us disempowered in these fear-based belief systems. It's what the televisions are modeling for us, the shows, the books are modeling for us. So...

Lisa Watson (12:27.509)
We're innocent to this stuff, but we really have to take responsibility for it and know that us and only us have the power to change that. And all it takes really is awareness. We just have to become aware of what those programs are, what those belief systems are, what those habits and behaviors are. And once we become aware of them, we can start to consciously make new choices.

James Moffitt (12:57.176)
Very good. So how can parents effectively reconnect with their inner child?

Lisa Watson (13:05.151)
Well, the way you can effectively reconnect with your inner child is to introduce yourself to them, first of all, and realize that you even have one, that there is an inner child in there and start to get to know your inner child. Just start turning in towards yourself and asking yourself how you really feel about something. What are the thoughts that you're having about it? What do you really want?

What do you really need? And how does that really feel? like say triggers for instance are golden. We can gain the most information and go directly to our inner child through having awareness over our triggers. So say something bothers you like in a relationship. You're in a relationship with someone, could be friend, family, it doesn't matter. You're talking to someone and let's say that they're not listening to you.

They're paying attention to their phone. don't, they're not validating what you're saying and you're getting really frustrated. And now you're mad at them. Like you never listened to me because you don't pay attention to me. You frustrate me and that makes me feel upset. And the reality is it's your inner child that is triggered because of previous treatment to her when or him when she was little. Like if you're

Parents didn't give you enough connection, didn't give you enough attention. What happens is that becomes sort of like a void within you because the inner child has a totally different perspective on things than the adult mind does. The inner child, we have to remember that the subconscious mind was formed during these first seven years when we didn't have a fully formed prefrontal lobe. So we were only

This is going to sound kind of funny, but we were like 50 cards short of a deck. You know, when we were kids, we didn't have the full programming, the full understanding. didn't have logic. And we're also in a egocentric point of view under the age of eight, meaning we think everything is about us. And we need connection and we need our parents to actually survive. So when we're children and

Lisa Watson (15:24.521)
somebody says something to us or doesn't pay attention to us, we take it very personally. We don't understand all the reasons around it. We can't rationalize it. It just becomes our truth. So say for instance, that you're a kid and you have this beautiful white couch and you see this pretty red marker and you grab the red marker and you draw a beautiful picture all over this beautiful white couch.

Your mother comes in and she is not too happy about it And maybe she yells at you when she tells you you're a bad boy or a bad girl and that you get time out and maybe you don't even get a treat or get to do something fun because you did this terrible thing all that child sees under the age of eight, especially under the age of four these circumstances is that I'm bad I'm not lovable. I'm not deserving

And what actually happens is the child doesn't feel safe because if their main caregiver is upset at them, they don't feel loved, they don't feel worthy or deserving, they feel bad, then they may get disconnected from this caregiver, which they know they need to survive. So it really instills deep wounding into us as children that we don't realize as parents. And I want to say to all parents listening to this, like, don't beat yourself up.

We're all innocent to this programming and we've done it, but it's important that we do become aware of it, that we understand that the child is perfect. The child is just learning its reality. It doesn't need to be shamed in order to learn that reality. can simply be validated like, wow, that's a pretty, look at what you did. Like you drew a picture.

Because we don't want to take away the child's authenticity. We want them to express themselves. We want them to become artists if they want to become artists. But we also need them to know the difference of, you know, we draw on paper, we don't draw on the couch. But that doesn't mean they have to get in trouble. They don't have to be shamed for it. They're very intelligent beings. We can just say, look what you did there. Okay, that's a pretty picture, but...

Lisa Watson (17:35.679)
we don't draw on the couch, like we only draw on paper, like that's not okay to draw on the couch. And children can understand that through love and connection better than they will through fear and punishment. Because fear and punishment only makes it become an extrinsic motivation, meaning they're doing it actually out of fear, which brings up a whole nother topic, which I won't necessarily get into right now, but about emotional dysregulation.

and how when we use fear, all we're doing is we're dysregulating their nervous system. having to like, they can't be their authentic self. That wasn't safe to be their authentic self by just drawing. So they don't know what to do. And then this causes them to go into like a fight, flight or freeze. Cause all they really have is their amygdala. And so they become emotionally dysregulated, which as

Like if this type of parenting continues, as you can see in the world today, we have so many adults that have anxiety, depression, you know, all sorts of disorders that have to do with autoimmune disorders that have to do with directly with the nervous system. And what I have distilled it down to is that it's because we have been programmed really to be in fear of being our authentic self and it has caused us to be emotional.

James Moffitt (19:08.482)
Yeah. As I'm sitting here listening to you say that I'm reflecting back to what my parents did with me and my sister back in the, you know, seventies sixties and seventies. And, gosh, I wish they would have been able to listen to all that way back when, because there was, there was a lot of.

Lisa Watson (19:27.061)
You know what, James?

I'm sorry, we have a delay.

James Moffitt (19:33.206)
I was just going to say there was, there was a lot of fear based parenting going on.

Lisa Watson (19:38.931)
It's very common, but here's the beauty of it, okay? You can release your parents of all that responsibility because you literally, through the reparenting process, you get to go back and you get to be everything for that little boy. It doesn't matter what age you are now that you didn't get from your parents. You get to be the new voice. You get to be the one that tells him how perfect he is and how much you love him.

One of the most important pieces of inner child healing and of parenting an actual child outside of us is validating their feelings. All the child needs is to be validated that what they felt was, is heard, is seen. But I'm sorry that you went through that. That was really hard when mom and dad didn't listen to us or, you know, that was really scary when this happened or that happened, but we're not there anymore.

and you wrap your arms in your imagination around your inner child. And what you have to do is you have to bring them to the timeline that we're on now. Because there is really no time. A lot of what I teach, this sort of parenting, it's very, there's a lot of quantum physics involved in it understanding that we're energetic beings and how this reality really is structured. When you understand that and you understand there is no time.

that inner child doesn't know that it's not back in 1970. Okay? And the triggers that I was talking about before are like the inner child's attempt to get from this current reality what it didn't get back then. It needs to be listened to. It needs to be listened to. Can't you listen to me? It's trying to resolve the conflict from back on that prior timeline. So what you do is you say, we're not there anymore.

I'm 50 something years old or whatever it is. I'm here. It's 2025 and I'm here to listen to you now. That's all that matters. All we have is the now moment. Mom and dad didn't know any better, but we don't have to take it personally. It meant nothing about our worth. It only meant that they weren't, you know, they didn't know how to be great parents because they didn't have parents that were able to teach them that. Everyone is innocent. All that matters is the now moment. We don't need anybody to

Lisa Watson (22:06.685)
apologize to us. We don't need our mother to, you know, validate for us now in her body. We get to validate for ourselves. It's just the inner child that matters. And it doesn't matter who says it to them. Being you, because you're your own savior. And this is the thing about like Disney that I can't stand is that we're always taught that there's this external savior. There's some prince that's going to save us or Jesus is going to come save us. Some

Something outside of us is going to save us. No, you have the power to save yourself right now. And that's what we all need to do. We need to turn inward and we need to reparent ourselves and tell ourselves all the things that we wished our parents told us. Give yourself all the things your parents never gave you. Give you the safety. Give the words of affirmation. Give the validation.

That's how we do it.

James Moffitt (23:10.158)
What role does authenticity play in healing family dynamics?

Lisa Watson (23:16.703)
What a great question. Authenticity, I was saying, it's the most... Authenticity, first of all, is the highest vibration that we can hold. If you know anything about David Hawkins and the scale of his book, Power Versus Force, he talks about the frequency and the vibration of emotions. He doesn't mention authenticity, missed this part, but authenticity is actually the highest vibrational frequency we can hold.

higher than joy, higher than love. It's the complete safety to be and express our authentic selves. Even if it's not pretty, know, drawing on the couch is not pretty, but we are authentically being artists at that moment. And we need to be able to accept that. So for whether it, like I know this podcast focuses on adult children.

We want to accept our children and everyone else around us for their authentic selves without placing shame or blame on them for not being something that they're not, even in the moment. Because when we shame someone for being their authentic self, like say they like make even make a mistake, you know, they they were late.

for work a bunch of times and they got fired or whatever. Okay, if we can learn to just accept it where it is and understand that life is just a workshop, it's just a series of experiences that really don't matter at the end of the day. It's about having the experience and learning from it and moving forward. Life is about the journey, not necessarily the end result.

So when we're able to accept our children for their authentic selves, when we're allowed to let them make mistakes, let them make bad choices, this is how we learn without shaming them. You should have done this, you should have done that. Why didn't you do this? You could have done that. Well, if you'd have only been done this, then this wouldn't have happened. And what we're saying is you're just not good enough. You're not good enough. You're not good enough. You shouldn't be who you are.

Lisa Watson (25:39.765)
when we're all just really in the now moment doing the best that we can. It may not be our best that we're capable of doing, but it's the best that we can do in that moment with the belief systems that we have about ourselves. And maybe we're self-sabotaging ourselves because we don't believe we're worthy or deserving. And that needs to be healed before we can even move forward and do better. So as a parent,

The best thing that you can do for your adult children is to back off and just be a container for them of love and support. Validate what they're doing, get them back connected with their authentic selves and with their intuition, like asking them, well, what do you think you should do? Because innately, we know what we need to do.

Our desires, our joy, our authenticity is truly our North Star. It's what guides us. So we want to guide our children back to their own intuition. What do you think you should do? Or how did that work out for you? Or what did you learn from that? Or what do you think you'll do next instead of telling them what they should do? Because we weren't parented that way. We were scolded. We were told we didn't do right.

back to conscious parenting. Be a conscious parent. Don't be the parent that just is an autopilot repeating all the same generational patterns that your parents did to you. It's time to step out of that. It's time to become the parent that you wanted to have. And we have to be conscious of what it is that we're doing and saying before we can realize what we want to let go of.

James Moffitt (27:34.594)
Good stuff. Can spirituality enhance a parent's ability to foster emotional intelligence in their children?

Lisa Watson (27:45.213)
Absolutely. I start my practice with my clients. The number one thing that we start on is talking about who you are, who you really are, and remembering that you're a spiritual being having a human experience. And this is the most critical piece in what I do, and I actually think it's one of the things that gives people the most shifts immediately, my clients.

is when we cannot take things so personally. What I teach is that we're basically avatars. We're avatars that are, we've come into these bodies, we're spiritual beings, and we're not this body. We're a spiritual being who's housing this body. And the programs of this body, the hard drive of this avatar is our subconscious mind that is formed in that for seven years, as I spoke of.

The problems that we have in our life, why things are working or not working, are because of the belief systems of this avatar. They can be changed through the reparenting process. They're not who we are. They're just the programs and beliefs that we're running. And when you can understand that and you can get a non-judgmental, like,

You can get some space between you and this avatar that you are and understand that you at your core are not bad. We're all actually perfectly innocent. I like to say that, you know, when we were born, would you agree, James, that when a child is born, no matter what family it's born into, that this infant, when it comes out of its mother, is perfectly innocent?

Lisa Watson (29:41.769)
The only thing that changes that innocence becomes the programming. It becomes the behaviors that are modeled for the child, the way that they grow up. If they grow up in a loving home that is emotionally regulated, they're validated, there's connection, they have good beliefs and they're emotionally regulated, the child's gonna grow up to create a reality that is just like

If the child is put into a family, born into a family where there's abuse, maybe drug addiction, where there's violence and things like that, the child's gonna pick up those behaviors and those belief systems and unworthiness beliefs about themselves, and they're gonna create a reality based on that. Each child perfectly innocent, still perfectly innocent at our core, we are only love.

The only thing that's in the way are these disempowering belief systems that we've been taught about ourselves. And we're capable of changing those. They're just behaviors, things that we did in the past. Like you could literally choose in this very second to be a different person going forward. You know, if you're, you know, an alcohol, someone who drinks, someone who's abusive, someone who self-sabotages, whatever it is that you do in this moment,

You can choose not to do that in the next moment moving forward. And so we can literally step into becoming new people, but we tend to hold people to their past. We tend to repeat the past. We tend to judge people based off their past over and over and over again of their behaviors, like not releasing them. Well, we need to stop doing that to ourselves. We need to be kind and loving to our inner child and only speak.

words of affirmation of you you're innocent and you're beautiful and it's okay that you did that we don't have to choose that going forward like just give yourself nothing but love and the words that you speak to yourself will begin to change your beliefs about yourself and ultimately will change your reality.

James Moffitt (32:07.0)
Good stuff. So Lisa, we're talking to parents of adult children here, you know, between the ages of 18 and 30, probably. What would you, what would you, if I were to give you three or four minutes for an elevator speech, what would you tell them?

Lisa Watson (32:27.175)
I would tell you kind what I mentioned before, which is to back off of your children and start to love and accept them exactly where they are and turn down the shame, turn down the lecturing and turn down the judgment. Allow the hardest part is us as parents, we want the best for our children.

But what we have to understand is that we're so entangled in them, and there's so much ego involved in it. you know, what will people think if our children are this way or that way? And when you really sit and look at it, it's really more about you than it is about them. When I got a divorce in 2015, my kids were in their mid-20s. And I had...

My ex-husband was a narcissist and very controlling. I was a great mom in a lot of ways, but in a lot of ways, I had completely abandoned my own self and my own needs and had been modeling those behaviors for my child. And when I got a divorce, I decided that I was just gonna live life on my terms, that I wasn't going to ask anybody permission to do anything anymore and I was going to take control of my life.

And I wanted my children to learn this lesson. wanted them all the ways I had modeled behaviors before. wanted to say like, don't, don't do that. Don't let people do this to you, do this instead. But what I decided to do is not tell them a thing and just model the behaviors for them. And my kids had just graduated college. One of them was still in college, just had graduated like a year after I got a divorce. They were both out of college. They moved to another state, the two of them by themselves.

And I decided that I wasn't going to give them any life advice. And I was simply going to watch and observe and be there for them should they need me. And that's exactly what I did. And I never told them they made a mistake. I never said anything negative if something came back and blew them up in the face, whether they lost money or couldn't make their rent. I just said, you know, how, what are you going to do or

Lisa Watson (34:47.783)
that sounds exciting. And I just kept things very positive. And then I lived my life with reckless abandonment. I just did what I wanted to do. I actually met a man in 2017 and we eloped four months after getting meeting. And I didn't tell my kids until like the day before we were going to get married. And my older son wasn't very happy with me for about a year. He couldn't even express it to me. And after a year, he said like, it really hurt his feelings because I didn't.

You know, I didn't ask him and include him. And I told him that's because I needed to not ask anybody anymore what I was going to do with my life. It was an important part of my healing journey. I had to let my inner child know that we were in charge and that we didn't have to ask anybody permission anymore, that we were a sovereign being. I didn't have to ask a man what I was going to do with my life anymore.

And when I deeply explained that to my son, he understood it. And I gave him the same permission. Like you don't have to ask anybody for anything. And you don't have to get my permission to live your life the way that you think it should be lived. As parents, our job is simply to get our children to a point where they are safe and where they can make good decisions. And...

in making bad decisions, they'll learn how to make better ones. If we keep trying to save them from everything, they don't actually learn. So if you can just let your kids know that you're always here to support them, you can have natural consequences. It doesn't mean that you're going to allow them to, you know, if they keep needing money, needing money, needing money, you can say, I'm not giving you money anymore. Like you need to figure out how to do this on your own. And we...

With love, we can create really strong boundaries. And this is the same thing that happens when our children are toddlers. We teach them through very strong boundaries, but through love and connection and natural consequences, how to be adults. The toddler years are the most important of child rearing. What you do in the toddler years will come back to you when your children are in their teens.

Lisa Watson (37:11.125)
That was much longer than an elevator speech, but there's a lot to unpack.

James Moffitt (37:11.704)
Good stuff.

James Moffitt (37:17.752)
No, that was excellent. I appreciate it. So I want to read this takeaway for listeners. Cause I think it's very good. says listeners may gain practical strategies to heal past traumas and foster healthier, more authentic family relationships, enhancing their support for adult children, individual journeys.

I like that. And, Lisa, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. had a wonderful time talking to you and listening to what you had to say. And I know that the listening audience is probably going to get a lot out of it.

Lisa Watson (37:53.483)
That's great.

James Moffitt (37:54.188)
So to the listening audience, huh?

Lisa Watson (37:57.247)
Thank you, it's been great.

James Moffitt (38:00.14)
Yeah. So the listening to the listening audience, I want to say thank you for the privilege of your time. you can listen to the audio version of the podcast on captivate FM, Amazon music, I heart radio, Apple podcast, and public radio. You can watch the video episode on rumble.com R U B L E.com. And I'll also upload, the video version to my YouTube channel. Our website is parenting adult children.org.

common spelling parenting, adult, children.org. You can get my contact information, upcoming show schedule, a place to leave a review for the podcast episodes you listen to, which you, by the way, can do on your, if you're listening to Apple podcast on your smart device, you can actually leave a review online right there while you're listening. New episodes are released every Friday morning at 8 a.m. And Lisa, thank you for being here.

to the listening audience. I hope you have a wonderful day and we'll talk to you later.

Lisa Watson (39:02.891)
Awesome, thank you so much.

James Moffitt (39:04.526)
Bye bye!