The Gentle Year

Finding Your Village in a Fragmented World | Angela Caldwell

• Knikki Hernandez • Season 3 • Episode 1

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Join the conversation beyond the episode inside The Gentle Year Facebook community — a thoughtful space for parents seeking clarity, encouragement, and real dialogue.

What if the reason families feel so fractured right now isn’t a lack of love—but too much pressure, too much information, and too little shared responsibility?

In this episode of The Gentle Year, I’m joined by Angela Caldwell, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with over two decades of experience working with families. Together, we unpack why family life feels harder than ever—and what might actually help.

Angela shares how the pandemic reshaped family systems in ways we’re only beginning to understand, from increased mistrust and tribalism to what she calls neural overload: the chronic overstimulation that leaves both children and adults emotionally fragile, reactive, and exhausted. We explore how behaviors often labeled as “defiance,” “laziness,” or even diagnoses may actually be signs of overwhelmed nervous systems.

The conversation moves beyond individual parenting strategies and into something deeper: family identity. Angela explains how families unconsciously form core values, how those values stabilize—or fracture—during crisis, and why so many households today function more like logistical units than connected systems.

We also spend significant time revisiting a powerful but often misunderstood idea: “it takes a village.” Angela challenges modern parenting norms around hyper-independence and rigid boundaries, offering a compelling case for shared responsibility, tolerance for difference, and rebuilding community in small but meaningful ways. From asking for help (even when it’s uncomfortable) to allowing other trusted adults to support and guide our children, this episode invites parents to rethink what support can look like.

This is an honest, nuanced conversation about:

  • Why families feel more divided and reactive
  • How neural overload affects both kids and adults
  • The hidden cost of doing parenting alone
  • Family roles, emotional regulation, and resilience
  • Reclaiming village-style support in a modern world

If you’re a parent feeling overwhelmed, isolated, or unsure how to protect your family’s emotional health in today’s culture, this episode offers clarity, compassion, and one very concrete takeaway: you don’t have to do this alone.

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[ 00:00:01,650 ]Hey guys, welcome to another amazing episode of The Gentle Year. I am here with Angela Caldwell. Is that how I pronounce your last name? Did I say that right? You got it right, Caldwell. Fantastic, awesome. I messed up on my last guest. She had to teach me a lesson. So that was fun. But Angela, I'm so glad to have you here with us today. And I would love to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself and talk a little bit more about what you do, where you're from, and how you do all the amazing things that you're contributing to the world right now. Oh, thank you so much. Let's hope they're amazing. We'll find out. Yeah. So I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist in Southern California.


[ 00:00:36,530 ]I am on, I was counting the other day. I'm on my 21st year of being a therapist. I work primarily with families and I'm on this mission to build dinner tables. I believe very, very strongly that if we're going to heal the world, we all have to sit and have dinner together. Um, and so, uh, I basically teach families how to get along family. Um, a lot of people, when they first contacted me, they say, like, you know, we need family therapy because we've got a real difficult family. And I kind of joke to myself like, 'Well, then you must be a family because all families are very difficult because it's a tall order to ask a bunch of humans to share a space and a fridge and a sink and all get along.


[ 00:01:14,740 ]Yeah. And so that's what I do. I help them get along. Wow, that's incredible. Not an easy thing to do, not an easy task in today's world where families are. It seems that they're more divided than ever. Is that the case for you? Is that what you're seeing right now where families are, you know, there's a lot of contentiousness, a lot of fighting, a lot of arguing, and a lot of separation? Yeah, yeah. It's hard for me to say. It really does feel like that, doesn't it? It feels like it. I haven't seen data. And the problem with asking a therapist is that I'm going to get all the phone calls of families that don't get along. So everyone who calls me is not getting along, right?


[ 00:01:49,410 ]If you're getting along, you're not going to call me. But I will say that the, should I say the intensity of the family problems is bigger. It's bigger than what I've seen in previous years. It's getting scary out there. Family members are taking it out on each other, making demands of each other, and they don't realize they're doing this, but it's to kind of ensure their own sense of personal safety. Um and uh, it's getting it feel like it's getting harder to be a family? Yeah, appreciate that a lot. Is the reason why we're seeing families divided, is it purely political and ideological? Why? Why are families so divided? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you have a couple hours. Yeah. We could be here all night, guys.


[ 00:02:33,630 ]As long as we get the answers we need, that's what we're here for. Thank you. Good, Angela's answers. And then I'm curious to hear what other people have to say, what their answers would be. But I think my answer is. Well, let me give you an experience. That way you can kind of piggyback off of this. So I know this is pretty controversial, but in my own life, I didn't actually experience this. Personally, but people in my family did. And it was over the vaccine and how there were some people who said you have to get vaccinated. Some people didn't want to get vaccinated, whatever. And what occurred was there was one side of the family that said, 'You cannot come over to our house for certain holidays because you are not vaccinated.' And when I say 'you,' I don't mean me.


[ 00:03:16,850 ]I'm just talking. I'm talking in general terms to the. the individuals who they were speaking to. And I thought, wow, that's interesting. And so me personally, I didn't care because I'm kind of a little wallflower. Blowing in the wind, I could care less what people think about me in any realm whatsoever. So, if you don't invite me to your cookout, like, could not possibly care less, like, I just could not care less. So I'm very interested to know. That was my own personal experience. Excuse me, take the scratch to that. It was not my personal experience, but it was the personal experience that someone in my family had shared with me that they experienced. And I thought, man, this is a slippery slope right here. Yeah. Well, I am really glad you brought it up.


[ 00:03:58,560 ]I was going to name that as I think one of the three. Things that are making it hard right now to be a family—uh, the pandemic has done a number on us, man. And I don't think we're going to really truly appreciate it until we're 50 years out and looking back in retrospect. When they took away our ability to connect and feel okay and feel like we're all going to wake up alive tomorrow. And I don't know how well everybody remembers, but those early days. you all, you heard was death and dying and dying and death and dead and dead and dying and death and die die death death. That's, I mean, imagine what that does to a human brain, no matter how well adapted you are. Right.


[ 00:04:41,530 ]So, we, we had, we had this like, what's it? It's like this explosive exposure to this terrible, terrible, terrible stuff that was going on around us, and if you remember, for months, we didn't have any answers, we didn't know what it was. The scientists were going crazy, losing sleep, trying to figure out how to help everybody. But, um, it was a scary time. We all went into, well, we didn't all, but a lot of us went into quarantine. So then we start closing the doors on each other and keeping social distance, and the grocery stores are closed, and you can't go to work anymore. And this wasn't like a gradual shift. It was ripped out from underneath us. and that I don't think enough time has passed by yet for us to appreciate what that did to us.


[ 00:05:30,030 ]When all of a sudden, most of the world had to interact in small rectangles digitally, it really robbed us of what we have counted on for centuries to be the authentic, meaningful connection with one another. um now that's this is me speaking to you and we're two adults and we we can we can at least have a little bit of self-awareness— not like wow that uh that kind of ripped my head apart a little bit, but the kids. the the Bleh. opportunities for growth that we have come to take for granted, that we rely on, gone. The social skills that we didn't know we had to teach because you just go learn them. You go to the playground, you learn them. Like we don't even think about it. Gone.


[ 00:06:12,680 ]The risk-taking and problem-solving, gone. The learning where to put your hands when you're talking to a person and how to make eye contact. Gone. And what all, everything that the kids got robbed of. Has created this generation. Highly anxious, fearful, awkward, socially. Some people like to say neurodivergent. Some people like to say autism's on the rise. Some people like to say socially awkward. It doesn't really matter what we call it. We see. In this rising generation, what that pandemic did to us, and here are parents now who grew up without any of that, trying to raise kids who grew up inside of it. But they're reading parenting books that were written before the pandemic. So they're trying to apply parenting strategies to kids that have never existed before, right?


[ 00:07:02,690 ]So that feels like one enormous factor. That, I keep saying, I don't think we're going to really feel the full impact of it until somebody writes it in the history books, you know, like until it's well behind us. That's going to, it's going to follow us around. It's going to shape, it already has impacted and shaped the way we come together as a family. It's created a laziness in family connection where we'll skip the gathering because we can just Zoom tomorrow or we can't, you know, and so there isn't, now that digital connection is such a... Easy? and frankly, kind of adaptive option we don't challenge ourselves anymore to be in, in proximity to other family members, which is Hard. Yes. I always quote this grad school professor that I had.


[ 00:07:48,040 ]He used to say, 'There is no house on this planet that is big enough for two humans.' Right. And it's kind of jokey way of saying. It is hard to share a space with another human. It's really hard. Try sharing it with 10 other humans or five other humans or— and like you have to deal with all their quirks and preferences and opinions and habits and weird stuff that they do and annoying stuff that they do. And you just can't stand each other. But you do kind of love each other. I mean, all the complexity of the emotion, the pandemic. I don't know. It's like it took an eraser to parts of that and then took.


[ 00:08:25,400 ]took a inkwell and dumped that on part of it and then it just really like changed the way that we that we sort of interact as family members. Um, the second thing that I really that I think is making it harder and harder and harder is access to information. We didn't used to have this much access. I mean, I'm going to date myself, but growing up, there was the five o'clock news. If you missed that, you could stay up till 11. There were newspapers. kind of it. You might hear some stuff from a friend, but the friend doesn't remember the whole story. And besides, you want to play cards anyway, so you're not really like, you don't talk much about it. We have access to so much information.


[ 00:09:05,520 ]So we've got, and it's not just social media, it's the internet kind of in general. We can. We can be bombarded in our feeds with all kinds of information that we wouldn't have otherwise sought out ourselves. Right now, we have ideas about the right way to think and the right way to function, and the wrong ways to think and the wrong way to function. And we sort of play 'gotcha' with our family members, assuming that you're functioning the wrong way, based on what I read in my feed and the access that I have to these news stories. Well, no, that's all fake news. And you're not here. I have access to these other stories, and you're wrong in there. The need to prove my rightitude in a family, from my clinical perspective, skyrocketed.


[ 00:09:46,110 ]And it's created, I'm sure we'll get to this. It's created, sort of a tribalism, which I find to be real, real dangerous to our society. And then the third factor I have to say is AI. And we have to remember that when we talk about AI, we're talking about it right now, today, in 2026, as if it's a new thing. And sure, we're making some advances that are new, but AI has been around for a while. The algorithms are AI, right? And the way that we can. We've reached a stage now where we can't trust. Our news sources we can't trust. The computer I'm looking at I can't trust. And I I fear that that has generalized into not trusting the motives of our family members and not trusting that they have our best interest and not trusting that they're giving us correct information.


[ 00:10:33,650 ]And so the the mistrust that I'm seeing in um in my room has has gone up. I so those are I kind of have my eye on those three ingredients that are making a really difficult family soup. Thank you. Yeah, that's a lot to unpack. Yeah. Do you think that all of this is by design? And if so, who's the real enemy? Ooh. That's an interesting question. Uh, no. I think I don't believe that because I don't want to. I don't think it's by design. I don't want to believe that. Um, I believe that humans are in their essence I believe that humans are essentially good. Um, and I, I have to believe that if I don't believe that I can't be a therapist. So I have to believe that there is goodness inside of everybody.


[ 00:11:25,100 ]And. Um, the people that are easy to demonize and easy to villainize—um, I, I try to not do that. Catch myself. Right. And I, and I don't, I want to believe that the advances that we have. They happened from a good place. AI was somebody's good idea. They thought it would help society. They thought they were doing a good thing. The internet came from a good place. Let's make information available to all. I mean, who can argue with that? That's a lovely idea. That's a beautiful idea. I think it's... It's like, maybe like the atom bomb, you know, like, like, here's an interesting thing I can do with science. And then it kind of is, it turns out to be a terrible thing, but no, I don't know if I think there's a mastermind.


[ 00:12:09,130 ]I think we have to blame human weakness. Yeah, I think that's what I would do. I blame human weakness, which. We're never going to solve. Yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate that a lot. So is loyalty in question when it comes to families? I remember one, the reason why I asked the question is because Because I remember one time when I asked my dad, I said, Dad, what is loyalty and what is respect? And he told me, he said that respect for his generation and he's a boomer, but he's not totally a boomer— he's on the cusper. He's actually Jen Jones, if anybody knows what Jen Jones is. You know, I like that. Uh-huh, yeah. He's a Gen Joneser, but he said that respect for his generation was essentially doing what you were told, and you didn't backtalk anybody.


[ 00:12:53,120 ]Then loyalty was it— was your duty. It was your duty to be loyal to your family. So there was no questioning. That, eroded, and if so, why? Yeah, yeah, that's eroded. I think, in an effort to empower one another to do, now listen to my words because I'm going to use words that we all love to hear. Of these phrases that we want to like, knit on a pillow, and we want to make signs in our backyards, we are trying to empower each other to stand up for what you believe in. To have a voice, to show up, to be strong when it's scary, right? All of that sounds like, 'Wow, great.' Let's write poetry about those ideas. Those are great ideas. Um, because they're being delivered in sort of this really cheap, factory TikTok packaging.


[ 00:13:41,270 ]By um, by people who are not um appreciating the power of the pulpit and how careful you have to be with your messaging. Because they're being delivered by, ooh, is this an ugly thing to say? This might be an ugly thing to say, by amateurs. Um, I think people are taking those words. Fiddling with them. And then using them as an excuse to be a jackass. So when they want to say what they want to say. Um, they're like what I'm just I'm just I'm just using my space, I'm just speaking my truth, I'm just and and there isn't there aren't enough voices from your dad's generation going no you're being rude actually no that's not very graceful so we I do think I think we've lost the grace and elegance that existed in earlier generations in favor of this um kind of petulant, definitely immature desire to have a voice that's been put in clumsy hands with people who think that means you get to say whatever you want to say.


[ 00:14:38,290 ]And that's not what it means to have a voice. Yeah, I appreciate that a lot. That makes a lot of sense for sure. One of the other questions that I have is... When we, you mentioned COVID, and when we re-entered back into society and sort of went back into a sense of normalcy, going back to work and all those things. Do you think that our reentry into society requires as much effort as the shutdown, the process of shutting down did? 100%. And I wish you would put that on a billboard, Nikki. Yes. Yes, a hundred percent. We, we have missed it. I'm by the way, totally guilty of this. When the, when the curtain was lifted and we could all come out of hiding. I didn't try very hard.


[ 00:15:25,600 ]Did you? I was like, okay, back to normal. And I didn't do any deep reflection. I didn't put, I didn't like take a look at what habits I had developed and wondered if they might've been adaptive then, but they sort of suck now. I didn't, I didn't decide in my head with real conviction that, you know, I'm going to make an effort to say yes and go see my friend. and And I, I. We should have, I should have, we should, we should have, we, the therapist, we should have been leading that charge. We should have been the one saying, 'Hey guys, you don't just now put your shoes on and act as if everything is over now.' Now you have to do all that work.


[ 00:16:02,340 ]You have to reflect on, hold on, what routine did I get into that is no longer going to help me or empower other people? The pandemic made us very self-centered, but I don't mean that in a bad, like, because by definition, like you're like, well. I'm here in the house. I guess I'll learn how to crochet. Like, you know. Um, I'm going to read what I'm going to read. I'm going to watch what I'm going to watch. And, and that now, when we emerge, so like you said, we, here we, it's our re-entry. We come back into the world. We never fix that. So now we're in a self-centered, well, this is my truth and this is it. Well, I believe and nobody, I am unapologetic.


[ 00:16:38,650 ]Oh, Nikki, that word has become crowned as some good thing. No, be apologetic, guys. I am unapologetically this or that. Well, I don't know. That sounds like it could possibly venture into offensive and insulting and not gracious and welcoming of diverse opinions and tolerating other ideas. So, yeah, we should have done. Man, I want to give a spanking to my profession. We should have led that. We should have been the ones out there saying, 'Hey.' Not so fast. Let's do some real work here. Oh, can we? Can we? Dissect that. That's a really interesting postulate. Do you feel that therapists failed when it came to the pandemic? As I am speaking to you now, it's the first time I've ever had that thought and I do. I think we failed society.


[ 00:17:27,260 ]I think we had a calling and we missed it. I think that we were supposed to. Write articles and do podcasts and. Write books and. I think we should have been the ones advising the CDC and the Pediatric Association, we should have been the ones going, 'Hey, slow down.' We've all gotten into some real bad habits. Let's do this now. I think we should have been the ones advising. Doctors and hospitals. I think we should have been the ones leading the charge and we didn't. An end. I mean, we were all in our own reentry patterns. And I mean, this is, it's easy for me to say hindsight and all that. But yeah, I think, I think the therapist missed their cue. Oh, wow. Where do we go from here?


[ 00:18:16,540 ]Fire them all. Thank you. Uh, catch up, catch up. I, when you're a therapist, you can't ever believe in too little, too late. You can't ever, you know, I had a 72-year-old man come into my office recently like this week. Um and give me a speech about uh, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. You know, too, too late. For me, if I'm a therapist and I believe that, then how do I? Where do I go? I can't believe that. And so that, that for me. That's a concept that doesn't just apply to my clients, but it applies to society at large. It's never too late. It's not too late. And so the therapist, can you hear me, therapists out there? Let's do it now. We missed it.


[ 00:19:00,880 ]We're five years late. Well, I guess not. We came out 21, 22, whenever that was. We're a few years late. Now tell people. Now. Get on board of directors, get on, get on consulting committees. Like let's, let's get out there. Let's get on Nikki's podcast. Take a look at your habits, guys, because they worked for a couple of years and they don't. They're actually maladaptive. Now they're actually problematic. Yeah, man, there's a lot to that. And we, you know, I think what you're doing is you're being honest about what has occurred, but you're not. I know your intention is not to put anybody down. Or to say that therapists are not doing their job. It's just that sometimes, like you said, we're humans. We make mistakes.


[ 00:19:47,840 ]And we all, at the end of the day, were just human beings trying to survive what was called a pandemic. We were just trying to make it in this world. And even to some extent, we're still trying to just survive day by day. All of us are really dealing with things that we don't talk about. There are things that you've got going on— I'm sure that you've never said before. I've got things that I've got going on that I've never said before, and I think that applies to all of us. So it's there's a lot of room for grace here, I think. Now, in terms of family identity and core values, I know that's something you're really passionate about. What does it mean to you for a family to have an identity?


[ 00:20:32,490 ]Because I personally feel that a lot of families don't have an identity. They're just communicating with each other for logistical purposes. I think they're on my couch. Yeah. All right. So this is my favorite topic. So I'm going to talk for a minute. Apologies in advance. So. A family identity, if you compare it to a personal identity, that's uh, it's it's not necessarily something we put a lot of conscious thought into. When you are building an identity as an individual, the psychologist will say that's happening in adolescence and early twenties, like around that time. Yeah. And the psychologist will say, you know, you do this and that. You try on personalities, or you rebel against your parents, or, you know, like there's all these different tasks that are supposed to happen, but you're not doing it.


[ 00:21:20,393 ]It like with intention—right? You're not going like, 'I will now work on my identity by rebelling against my parents, like it's sort of happening unconsciously.' Which is it—what's supposed to be? That's the idea. Um, families do the same thing. Your identity develops sort of inadvertently, and it develops, um, as a result of necessity. So, um. If you think about how we come together as a family, and by the way, for this conversation, when I say family, in my world, in the therapy world. Family means kids. If you are a family that doesn't have kids, you're called a couple. And so you would have your couples therapist on to talk about couplehood. But when I say family, we're talking about kids.


[ 00:21:58,580 ]And what I'm going to do now is suck a lot of romance and poetry out of some ideas here. And I'm just going to get down to brass tacks. Families are formed with a job description. It's a singular job description. It is to raise a child, to raise the next generation. That is the job description. And yes, it's lovely. And there is romance and poetry to it. And oh my gosh. I really want to instill in him these things that I believe in. And I want to heal things in my past and give my child the things I never had in my past. And all that is lovely and beautiful, but essentially it comes down to. You come home from the hospital or you get your baby from adoption and you have a blob of human flesh that is pooping.


[ 00:22:35,990 ]and crying and the world says, 'Okay. Good luck. Build a citizen.' And you're like. Ugh. Yep, got it. And if you're like really diligent, then you read all the books and you go to all the classes and you listen to all the experts and you become a parent and a family and you kind of like. You try to apply these, but that one doesn't work on your kid because your kid has this kind of condition and you tried that, but that doesn't really fit your personality. So that's not working. And instead, that... and all of your parents who are listening. We'll appreciate that first year. Where you're kind of a fireman. You were putting out fires, right? You're like...


[ 00:23:14,650 ]You're like, I read a book that told me to do something that isn't going to happen right now. It's not going to happen because I've got one hour of sleep and there's no groceries in the fridge. So that's not going to work. And so what happens is if you kind of. Take the 30,000-foot view. You are building a family identity in that early year. Based on what you are capable of doing and what needs are the loudest, what wheels are the squeakiest, right? On top of that, whether we realize it or not, we all parents all have an idea— and for most of us it's unconscious— but we have an idea of what a kid needs to succeed.


[ 00:23:55,450 ]And that idea is based on how we define 'succeed.' And if you look at how you do, so some people might think of success in the monetary sense. I want to be, I want to be, I want to have a kid who is financially stable and doesn't have to worry about money. That would be success. Other families define it as, well, I want a kid who's happy. Most parents say that. My kid is successful if they're happy doing it. I don't care what they're doing, just happy. Other people say, 'No, no, no.' A successful child is a child who has a deep relationship with God and who is driven by faith. That's a successful child, or it's another person is going to be about achievement, another person is going to be about play and recreation.


[ 00:24:31,163 ]Right. Everyone's going to have an idea in their mind, and again, they're usually not conscious of it about. What kind of launching pad do I build to send this kid rocket where I think they need to go to have the best chance of success? So we read all the books and go to all classes. And if we don't, if you're the spouse that doesn't, or you're the kid, you know, you hear from other people how to do it. And what you do is you inadvertently, you usually unconsciously instill these values in your kid. And they're the values that you talk about or don't. They're the activities you choose to attend, compared to the ones you choose not to attend. They're the victories that you celebrate, compared to the victories that don't get a lot of your attention.


[ 00:25:20,720 ]There right and say that's human. That's what we're supposed to do. That's that's human. That is by design. We're supposed to be doing that. But we're doing it with an unconscious idea of what my kid needs to succeed, however we define that success. So what happens is you, again, kind of take it, zooming out the lens, kind of taking that 30,000-foot view. If you look at it, you can watch a family. Let's say that I have a single parent family. Let's take a single parent family that'll be an easy example. So say I have a single parent. And it's a dad. And let's say that I have a dad who believes that the best chance for his kids to succeed would be for them to have a good job.


[ 00:25:56,320 ]That is success. My kid needs a good job. Jobs are hard to come by these days. So, if that's a diligent, good dad, he's probably going to be patting his ear to the ground and reading, you know, what his algorithm is going to be kind of like, who's hiring? Where's the world going? What do I need to put my kid into? So you can see how. How, as what becomes part of daily life when the kid brings home um a pile of homework on Monday, right? The dad's going to probably think, 'Okay, how are we going to break this down into small tasks to get it done?' The dad probably isn't going to think. Man, that's a lot of homework. It's not a lot of room for play.


[ 00:26:32,780 ]Where am I going to build in a play day, right? So that's, and that would make sense because what the dad has on his eye is what's going to be the best path to success. So in that house, what's going to get played up is, say, academic achievement or academic success— as in in sacrifice and what will be sacrificed in that house might. be recreation and small talk and the things that are not valued in that family. Well, can we sit here and say that he's doing it wrong? No. What we can do is we can say, 'Oh, yeah, that's what that parent, those are the values that that parent naturally, of course, instilled in their kids.


[ 00:27:07,660 ]Because they had this idea for success, and it becomes the family identity.' And before you know it, this is the family, this dad and his kids, this is a family that's on the honor roll and they're. President of student council and they're, they can do a lot of things with their hands because he's looked at the trades and the trades are the ones that are hiring right now. And so they might maybe become really handy and they know how to fix their own toilet because that's what the dad is kind of. And so, and so they're next door neighbors. would identify them as like, 'Oh yeah, that's the smart handy family.' And that becomes their identity. Their identity is the smart, handy family.


[ 00:27:40,400 ]And so if you ask them to put it in words, which is clumsy, and we don't really do it like this in life. But they would say, 'We are the family who is smart and handy. We are a family who knows how to solve problems. We are a family who. who and where the dad's probably unconsciously coming from is these kids are going to be okay. They're going to get a job. They're going to be stable. They're going to be okay. Each family kind of develops an identity. based on those core values that they didn't really necessarily go and choose. They did it because of what they think is needed at the time. The exercise that I love to do with families is I have them.


[ 00:28:19,920 ]actually identify.' The three or four core values that formulate their identity, that inform their identity. And it's a really, Nikki, you should try it. I mean, it's a tough exercise because— No, let's do it. I'm game. Oh my God, it's so fun. Put it on me. You gotta, you, you Google like core values and different websites will come up with like a list of like 20 or 30 values. And it's like, creativity, intelligence, wealth, beauty, charity, faith, kindness, love, that right, ambition, that and they're all good. And so if I were to tell you, Nikki, what are your four Top ones. You probably, if you're a good person, you're probably going to struggle because you want all 20. You want to be like, well. All of maybe not those two, but all the other.


[ 00:29:03,900 ]I want all of them. I want all of them to be my core values. But what you would notice is that. No, because if you lived that way, you'd be like a... schizophrenic crazy person running around trying to accomplish everything. No, actually, take a look at how you live. Take a look at when, if you value kindness and honesty. Take a look at moments in your life where those two have been in conflict and ask yourself, which one won? Cause that's the one you, that's the one you value. That's your core value. We do this exercise here in my house as a family and I'll do this little. A little personal, but I'll tell you. Here I am, a therapist, preaching to the world about mental health and being a well-adapted human.


[ 00:29:41,320 ]And I like to think that one of our core values is balance. Let me tell you something. We are an overscheduled family, which we highly value sports and athleticism. So everyone in my family is an athlete. And I really don't think my girls got to choose that. I think we push that on them, which again, we're supposed to do as parents. Both my husband and I are smart and academic. So that is highly valued in our house. But what it means is without me. Ever verbalizing it or him ever saying it, we expect you to get good grades, be on a couple of teams, your weekends have to be full of games and matches, and you have to get good grades. And you have to, like, you have to, you know, volunteer for things at your school.


[ 00:30:24,350 ]You have to be active, right? So I can sit here and say, 'Oh, no,' I really value balance. But Nikki, I don't. We don't in our family. We don't value balance because when I have to choose, I'd rather them be busy working on all this other stuff. So it's a cool exercise to kind of sit and say, and say these things that I claim to value in my family, our family claims to value. Do we really live that? What do we eat? Actually, live. And those are your core values that are forming your identity. Now our conversation can go up in about 17 directions right now. So I'm going to stop talking and let you. A hundred and ten percent. This is a lot to unpack.


[ 00:31:02,410 ]And I appreciate all of what you said. I mean, you really broke it down from the very beginning, you know, when the family begins, how these ideas. Are inculcated into their children right from the beginning, they don't have a choice in that it's just it is what it is you know from zero to seven years old, and then you know, as the child gets a little bit older, they hit 12, they hit 13, then they start, you know, cultivating their own lens to look through the world. And it's interesting. It's very interesting. But one thing that I'm trying to put all the pieces together here. One thing that I took away from what you said is that it seems that, when families... have these identities.


[ 00:31:45,220 ]And when these families are in survivor or in survival mode, like with COVID and all that stuff, when there's a crisis. Thank you. We really see what we truly value because these values, they're either going to stabilize us or they're going to completely come apart. Yeah. Yeah. And when we're scared on top of that, like with COVID, when we're scared. Not only do our values reveal themselves, but we become hostile to other people who don't share our values, who don't have the same ones. We forget that everybody gets to choose their values and we have an obligation to respect everybody else's values. When we're scared, we go, 'That's wrong.' This is the way to do it. My way is to do it. The way you're doing it is wrong and bad and you're going to hurt me.


[ 00:32:37,830 ]You're going to hurt this world and you're going to hurt me. And that's how we behave when we're scared. So we have these. I think what you were describing in your house, these values conflicts. That we experience as existentially threatening. When before COVID, when we're not scared. They're not existentially threatening. They're different ways to look at the world. They're different. They chose. The different four on the Google list than you chose, right? That our family members get to choose how they want to construct their life based on their core values. Yeah, I've got a lot of thoughts going on in my head right now as you say that. Because there's a lot going on on social media, I had to, just even before this podcast, I didn't block them.


[ 00:33:19,430 ]But I put a notification or a little click the tab, and I basically said 'not interested' in this person's post. And it was probably about three or four different people that I had to undo. You know, my follow ship on on their Facebook accounts and stuff because I didn't want to see what they were posting. One of the reasons why I didn't want to see what they were posting is because some of these people are colleagues, some of these people are teachers, some of these people are are people who I've looked up to for a long time. And I see them, what I see, and I don't come from a place of judgment when I say this, but it feels like. A lot of people are getting swept away in the sea of emotion and what they claim to value.


[ 00:34:06,240 ]I can see what you're saying. It's, it's. It's deconstructing right before my eyes, and I don't want to see those things. So in terms of families' advice time, how do families protect their children? How do they protect the family unit during these social and cultural upheavals that we're experiencing today? Yeah, I'm doing my best with that question because I'm feeling it too. How do I protect my kids? We got to censor the internet. So since that'll never happen. We got to protect from information. Can I go off on kind of a scientific idea? Absolutely. It's a little geeky. Sorry, listeners. I might lose it. We got lots of people who geek out on this stuff, 100%. Awesome. Okay. So in neuroscience, there is a concept called neural overload.


[ 00:34:56,550 ]And it's the idea that your brain, the way that your brain is, kind of, kind of. The architecture of your brain is such that. Um, the input that comes in via the five senses—right, so that's this that's all input. The way that it comes into the brain, there's an organ in your brain that's kind of like the hotel concierge. Right? That's like, 'Oh, you need to go this way and you'll go that.' Oh, you're visual information, you go to the occipital lobe. Oh, you're auditory information, you know, and so that organ isn't very big. And so it can only take so much stimulus, so much input at the same time. um, the, the. As we grow, as the brain develops, that organ gets a little bit bigger, but more importantly, there's more connections in there.


[ 00:35:37,420 ]So it becomes more sophisticated. And so we are able to take in more and more units of information and process them quickly because we are intelligent life forms and that's how the brain develops. The route that your five senses take. So you get this input from your five senses, right? It goes up through this little organ in your brain, and then it's sort of distributed according to the processing center. Then it goes to that processing center, and the processing center kind of types up a report and sends it to your forehead, and your forehead makes a decision about that, right? That is what the intelligence community calls intelligence, right? The ability to take in input, process it appropriately, send it to the decision-making part of your brain, and then make some kind of judgment call or decision, right?


[ 00:36:26,060 ]So this is kind of neuroeconomics. Okay. Your brain is only so big, and that organ that takes in the information is only so big. And when we're kids, there are not a lot of neural connections in there. If you overstimulate that organ, the brain will do what any of your organ will do— what your liver will do, what your stomach will do. It will shut down. And I don't mean, I don't mean die. Like, like, like when we say, like, organ failure. But it will shut down. It'll say, 'closed for business.' And you'll get, and we see this because it sort of happens even before our time, like, you know, all generations have seen this throughout the ages. You'll see what happens when there's neural overload because the kid goes.


[ 00:37:06,750 ]Right? And that's what happened: the organ, the thalamus, kind of shut down, right? Like, nope. Everybody out. We're done. There's not enough connections. I don't have enough synapses for this. When neural overload happens, it triggers the anxiety juice. So then you go all the way down this axis. We have this vein that goes from the brain all the way down to our stomach, right? And so, and it triggers the... scared breathing and the heart rate and the hair raising. And it triggers a fear, what we now, what people are calling a fear response. It's okay. That's right. If you have neural overload once a month or so, and you have the fear response and the cortisol flood and all that, you're good. You're fine. You'll recover from that.


[ 00:37:49,280 ]But when we have it every day. You're going to break the brain. And what we mean in therapy, a broken brain is a disorder. You're going to see anxiety disorders. You're going to see neurological problems. You're going to see a kid who's failing in school. You're going to see a kid who is emotionally dysregulated. That's what we mean by the brain is broken. There was too much stimulus, too much information. The brain went into overload. Every day, not once a month. Every day and now it's not; now it's kind of chaotically functioning in there and I don't want to get into the weeds about what that looks like. But now, if you were to look at scans of the nearly overloaded brain, there is all kinds of chaotic firing going on.


[ 00:38:33,900 ]We have names for it. We can call it generalized anxiety. We can call it ADHD. We have names for that. The names are only so helpful because your insurance will cover it and you can get a medication for it, right? But what's really happening there is if we're going to protect our kids' brains. I know this is an unpopular point of view. Guys, we have to turn off the information faucet. We have to turn it off. So I am in favor of what we do with our kids. We don't let them online until a certain age. Once they were online, we had, oh my God, they probably want to kill us. We had four nights of conversation. about about how we're going to do the internet.


[ 00:39:11,620 ]We are so light as Fort Knox in this house. We locked down the internet. They're not allowed to take computers. Getting a computer was like a big deal in our house. That computer is not allowed to leave the living room. So one of the rules we have is: 'I and your father. We are allowed to walk behind you and see what you're doing at any time. Privacy? Nope. Absolutely not. Nope. Yes to all the obvious stuff. To the screen limits. And, you know, like, let's get outside and touch grass, all of that, too. But that is very much for us to protect the information. The amount of information is killing our kids, breaking our kids' brains. And so that's how we're going to do it. That's how we're going to protect it, guys.


[ 00:39:49,370 ]We are going to cut off, we're going to turn off the faucet. We are going to severely limit. How many units of information get into that thalamus. Yeah, that's really good. That's really good stuff. I see everything of what you just said. I see happening and playing out in real life. It's a lot. Seems to me the takeaway that I get from what you said is that overstimulation and overwhelm can sometimes get misread as ADHD or some kind of disorder. Or whatever. Sometimes it might not be misread as a disorder. It might just be misread as an attitude problem or just defiance or a behavior issue, laziness, things like that. Concretely, what are some of the early signs that a child may be neurologically overwhelmed? Okay.


[ 00:40:40,340 ]So, um, so what you're going to look for in your kids is emotional fragility. So now that's, that's hard because that's subjective. So I'm going to ask parents out there, kind of use your best judgment, use your, use your. Use your dow as a human right kind of and um. And if they seem fragile, like they're flipping out over something they shouldn't be flipping out at, or they're getting an unreasonably angry about something. If you are seeing emotional fragility. It's too much information. We have overload. That's overload. If you are seeing, now this is kind of a weird one that I'm seeing a lot. If you're seeing sleep trouble, that's an early sign. Sleeping, this is controversial, but I want you to hear me out on this. Sleeping is easy when they're kids.


[ 00:41:24,790 ]It should be easy. If it's not easy. Check the faucet, see how much and not just internet. Like, check if there's too many friends and too much of a schedule, see how many units of information are having to be processed. Um, Sleep is an easy thing for a kid to pull off and they're supposed to be able to get into a rhythm. Of course, medical conditions aside and the family members that are struggling with that, they know what to do there. Um, But your kids should be pretty easily on a rhythm by the time they are sleeping through the night. They should be getting tired at a predictable time. They should be getting up at a predictable time. It's one of the things we hate as parents is they get up at 6:30 even on Saturday.


[ 00:42:03,980 ]So if there's a sleep problem, take a look. Take a look at how much stimulation is getting into that brain. And the third thing that I'm thinking about. You're going to have your nutrition experts on here talk about how important good nutrition and good food is. But I will say, if there's a change in eating preferences and opinions. And again, kind of back to the emotional fragility, those are kind of basic. If there's [they] want this and they want it this way and they're getting really upset and they don't like that anymore. And they're like, 'That's, that's, that's that is that is a sign that there is some misfiring chaos happening in the brain.' And that I know that's a weird thing to say, because also kids are allowed to change their tastes.


[ 00:42:42,140 ]But I think parents will have an instinct about it. So take a look. At the information overload if you're seeing those signs. I appreciate that. I know our listeners do, that's for sure. In terms of kids and adults, is there a difference between what neurological overwhelm looks like? Like maybe a kid suffers differently versus an adult. Are there differences and similarities? How do they overlap? Thank you. Uh, no, they're exactly the same. They come in a larger size in an adult. So we don't say temper tantrum. We say anger problem. Um, we say meltdown. We have different words to describe what's going on when an adult. So think of the adults in your life that you know, where they've had moments of emotional fragility. They overreacted to something.


[ 00:43:32,970 ]They broke down way too easily over spilled milk, you know, whatever it is. And we might say we have a tendency because we expect more of each other as an adult. We tend to be a little bit more. uh judgy about we tend to put we tend to attach a lot more meaning to it like wow This person is off the rails. No. It's a temper tantrum. They're emotionally fragile. It's information overload. This guy had like a just crazy outburst. No. A temper tantrum, it's emotional overload, that's that. That's neural overload. There. Um. And that's—I'm not talking about the people. It's patternistic and they probably should be in therapy or prison. I'm not sure, but I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about those.


[ 00:44:15,040 ]I'm talking about what we see in our family members, kind of like what we're calling meltdown. Are you sure? Is that a person who is shut down? The other thing we see is that other presentation I described, that kind of... Blank. Check the checkout. The hello. Are you? It seems like we lost you. Right. That that that's probably a sign. Like exactly what you would see in kids. I guess this is my long way of saying: Now, if you really look at it closely, it's exactly the same. Yeah. My grandma used to say that adults are just bigger versions of children. I agree. Yeah. They're children, but just in bigger bodies. That's what she said. That was funny. So you touched on something really important there about how individuals can be patternistic.


[ 00:45:02,480 ]I think was the word that you used in some of these behaviors. So how do you tell the difference between someone who's maybe suffering from burnout and overwhelmed information overload versus, you know, having a serious character flaw? That's hard. I don't know if you can sometimes. Sometimes we can't tell the difference. A clinician, we're the ones that are trained in it, so we can tell the difference. So, if you can get somebody into couples therapy or family therapy, we can help you out with that. But aside, I mean, not everybody has access or time or money for that. So, how do you do it on your own, right? How can you tell if this is like a personality issue or like something else seriously going on? Or is this neural information overload?


[ 00:45:40,850 ]Um, I would say you can, you got to remove the variable. So, are they like that on vacation? When there's not a lot of information overload. Are they, if they were to take a digital break, if they were to put their phone down for a day, are they still like that? So, if you're seeing that it's a constant, even when there isn't a lot of information, a lot of input headed into that thalamus, then yes, now you're probably moving into the area of a more serious condition. Wow. You know, I have to ask a question that I wasn't going to ask, but... I'm trying to think of how to word this. So, you know what? Yeah, just go ahead. Just go. Let it fly, man. Let it fly like the Hunger Games.


[ 00:46:24,340 ]Let it fly. Anyway, so. Um, one of the okay, so the question is this, and I might have to say this in kind of a roundabout way because I'm still processing the question as I ask it. But the challenge that that I see is that in and even in my own family, I see people popping off all the time. All the time, and any little irritability that they have shows up externally, and it's not— it's not a good feeling; it's not a good feeling at all. I see it in so many people. But when I was growing up, when I was a kid, people used to tell me that I was like a duck. Water would just roll right off my back. And it was a metaphor for how I never let things really bother me.


[ 00:47:15,070 ]Now, it's not to say that things don't bother me because they do. But I've always kind of had that mellow. Laid back way about me when it comes to certain things, to a lot of things. I don't get worked up about the same things that people get worked up over. I mean, sometimes it's even so wild to other people. They're like, 'How is it possible that that didn't bother you? How is it possible that you didn't get mad at that? How do we get you in Washington? Will you run for something? Yes. We need you in there. I'm telling you, man, it's crazy out here. So, you know, is there, I'm trying to think of the right question, but, um, Do you believe that there are just certain people in families that come along, generationally speaking, maybe ancestrally, that are meant to be the peacemakers, the healers?


[ 00:48:07,180 ]I don't know. I don't think of myself as that way, but I'm just, I'm really curious to know because I know that there are people in families that are like me. They don't suffer from the same things that other people are suffering from, and maybe it's just because we've seen too much and we just say, 'I don't want to be a' 'I don't want to play a part in that.' I don't know. I don't know what's going on there. I have a theory for you. So what you are describing has been named as far back as the 80s. So there is a very well-known, beloved family therapist, Virginia Satir, that we all study. We all have to read her books and learn her theories. Um, she was this—uh— she's the grandmother of family therapy.


[ 00:48:46,410 ]She's, I mean, if you see videos of her, you really you want to like have cookies and sit on her lap and have her tell you a story, like she's the most wonderful, wonderful human. You can see why she was such an effective family therapist. She proposed, what she contributed to our field is this idea that every family has certain roles in them. And this person that you're describing has a name. And she would have called that person the 'super reasonable.' And she would have made an argument. This might make you fall over. She would postulate to you that every family has a super reasonable because they have to. And that the chi and it's usually a child in the i mean they grow up to be an adult, whatever but um it's it's it's in the requirement of the super reasonable is to be The voice of reason in heated passionate drama, theatric families.


[ 00:49:33,800 ]Right. And so, and she, she had names, all these other roles that exist in families, but you sound like you're describing yourself as what she would call a super reasonable. And that you are. Probably when you speak, people listen because you don't speak very much. That would be my guess. That's how she would have described you. Probably people turn to you. People experience you as kind of aloof. That's how my mom describes me. It's literally an adjective she has used. Literally, you're so aloof. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. People like you are experienced by other family members kind of standoffish and guarded. But at the same time, when there's real like— when the shit really hits the fan— you're the one that they that they want to talk to. They trust your rationale.


[ 00:50:13,950 ]They trust your level-headedness. Right. So. So you have this role. Now, now let's get, let's get, let's get dirty. Yeah. Let's get granular on this. Okay. I'm ready. Let's go. So that would be you. It sounds like, so you got cast in that role and it's an extremely valuable role. Every family has to have one because it's the compass. You become the compass of the family. Yeah. But there's a downside to it. And I'm curious if you experience it. Yeah, I don't know how to put it into words, but there's definitely tremendous downsides. The one obvious one is that, you know, you kind of are stuck in this weird place of watching. Everybody decombust or combust right in front of you. And you're like, 'What the heck is going on?' That's the obvious downside.


[ 00:50:52,430 ]But there are some other downsides. Downsides to it that I have now: I'm not saying that this is exactly related to your theory; it may just be my own personal experience. But one of the other downsides is that I can take a lot. I can endure a lot. I've had people, even my mom, has said, 'You endure way too much. You have... You have too much patience with things that she doesn't have any patience with at all. And the reason why she has said... that that's a downfall. And I don't know if it's a downfall or not or a character flaw or whatever. But one of the reasons why it's a downfall for me personally... Is that when I've hit my limit and I cannot take anymore?


[ 00:51:41,290 ]There was another guy who came on my podcast a little bit ago. He was a psychologist and he described a kid that, when he got really really really really angry, the kid described his emotions as 'volcano mad And that's me. It is full on nuclear. It is scorched earth when that happens. Doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, oh yeah, it's, yeah, total devastation for everybody in the blast radius. You and my brother are kindred spirits. He's the super reasonable. Oh, God. He doesn't say much. When he speaks, we all listen because he never speaks. And he's always, like, he's the trusted. Like, he can guide us out of, like, the crazy drama that I get myself into. I'm not the super reasonable. Really funny because his explosiveness comes out.


[ 00:52:34,840 ]You'll lose a limb. Like that, those are some, those are some laser is like, like venom comes out and we're like, like when he leaves there, there is pain in that room after an explosion. So yeah, he's, I, yes, I see it. I know it. I know exactly what you mean. But I think why that is, and again, this is Satir's theory, it's such a beautiful theory too. In order to be super reasonable, let's back up one step. Your family environment, all family environments create you. They create the role that is required, right? If you think about, like, we call it a family system, meaning like any system, like a solar system or an education system or a cardiovascular system, the parts of the system are required. There's no, there's no like.


[ 00:53:20,740 ]They they're all needed for the thing to work, like a car engine that all the pieces are needed right. So you're not like a spare part— we need you, we need you— because the family around, because it's too hard to share a space with other humans. And so we all get heated with each other. And so we need the thermostat. And so the super reasonable is the thermostat, right? Turn up the heat, turn down the heat, turn on the air, right? So for sure. But in order for you to do that, Nikki, you have to become a little bit more detached from your emotions than the rest of us. So you don't get, so you get robbed. You don't get to feel your— you have to have some distance between yourself and your own emotions.


[ 00:53:55,840 ]Okay. All right. So that's the cost. All of us pay some kind of cost for our role. So what does that mean though? If you can't be in touch with your emotions the way I can be, I mean, my emotions are sitting on my lap. Like I know exactly what I'm feeling the moment I'm feeling it. But that means I get to act on them. If you have to, by definition, separate yourself. A little bit have a little distance from your emotion, then you don't get to know they're happening for a while, right? Because you have to, because you're the super reasonable. They have to get volcanically big for you to even know they're there. Right and so that's kind of the that's sort of the heartbreaking price that the super reasonable plays that pays in order to occupy that role.


[ 00:54:36,770 ]Oof. Okay. Wow. Now I understand everything. The keys, the secrets of the universe have just been unlocked. So appreciate that. Don't change. Because your family needs you. Your family needs you in that spot. So don't change. I won't. I won't. You know, that's funny. And so, a question for you, what are these other roles? So they got the super reasonable. What's your role? What, you know, what, what other roles exist? So I have, I have a, I have an embarrassing one. So another role is the blamer. So that's me. I'm the blamer. Um, they have, what are her roles? Her roles are the super reasonable, the blamer, the past, uh, pacified peacemaker. Um, which is different than the super reasonable, but they can in smaller families that might be the same person.


[ 00:55:15,440 ]The Lost Child is a role. And what's her last one? Oh, her last one is healthy. And so this is the boring part. Her theory is that you start off in these kind of unhealthy residences and we're working to get you into a healthy identity. Super reasonable. The good news is they're the healthiest of all the four roles. So you're the healthiest. I'm not very, my role, I mean, I like to think I'm a little bit healed now, but in my family of origin growing up, I was in a family of blamers. It was a big family and probably three of us were blamers. And the blamers are usually the leaders of the family. They have the upside of being a blamer. Is that you?


[ 00:55:54,650 ]You are very skilled at identifying a problem, knowing what to do, executing a solution. Um, you can you take a stand on things, and you and people follow you happily, kind of like they believe in you. Downside is you can be kind of an asshole. So I had to go to therapy for that one. I'd like to think that's eradicated a little bit. Yeah, but those are the other ones. Amazing. Wow. Well, thank you for breaking that down for us. We really appreciate that. And we'll have to do some more research on that topic just to kind of see if we can all figure out. Yeah. Our roles are in these family dynamics. One thing that we haven't touched on yet, but this was one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the podcast, is you explain this village concept so well.


[ 00:56:46,820 ]So do you have a little bit of extra time where we can kind of break this down? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think it's so important because as soon as I heard it, I was like, you know what? That's so, so true. So let's, let's just, let's just get into it. So what, what does it mean? It takes a village. What does that truly mean? Yeah, I believe it's an African proverb, but we've adopted it kind of globally. We all love that expression. It takes a village because it does. And all your parents know. I think it's asinine. That we have this idea that the entirety of child rearing falls on the shoulders of one or two people. I think that's just dumb. Um, and I think the rest of the world also agrees that it's dumb.


[ 00:57:26,630 ]And if you're a parent, you— you're with me, I can feel you like that's dumb. Like how, how is this entire job? The hardest job in the world falls on me. And it shouldn't. And a lot of the tribal cultures that existed before us and then some of the cultures that exist today, they don't do it that way. They're villagers and they're damn good at it. And so I'm trying to get us to take a page out of their book. Um, Bye. Raising a child. Is I went to school for make fun of me here. I went to film school. I was going to make movies. Um, it didn't work out. I don't have the talent for it, but, um, It was really hard.


[ 00:58:02,540 ]I was working 18-hour days on sets and I was doing some real ugly grunt work. I was an athlete growing up, so I taught tennis. Being a tennis pro to snotty kids and their snotty families, that was really tough, learning how to be professional. I'm a family therapist, which is a highly difficult and technical job that's very difficult. And none of those jobs, none of them, have the level of difficulty that I experienced being a parent. being a parent. people you try to explain it to other people maybe who aren't parents or who are thinking about becoming parents and it's um You don't want to tell them that because you don't want to scare them out of it. But it's so hard building a person.


[ 00:58:41,020 ]It is so hard because I'm not even sure I know what a good person looks like and what I think a good person should be doing and saying and feeling. all that, it's so incredibly hard. So that idea, it takes a village. We shouldn't have. I have to do that on my own. I should be able to rely on my family and my neighbors and my aunts and my grandparents and my teachers and my police. officers like i was like i should be able to rely on everybody else to help me out here help me build A voting citizen. Can you help me turn this person into a great future leader of this world that'll save our planet? Help me out here, right? So that's what it means.


[ 00:59:17,700 ]Um, I know you probably have follow-up questions because I'm going to answer like 40 that you haven't asked. So now I'm going to hit. No, no, I think this is really great because you're going into what it what it means. The phrase actually. Means because the way that I'm interpreting what you're saying is that we've we've sort of bastardized the quote— it takes a village to mean something that it doesn't mean, but I haven't quite put my finger on what we're actually saying and what we're actually communicating when we, as Americans, are actually saying when we use this phrase. What does it actually mean versus what we use it to mean now? Yeah, when I hear people say it out in the world, they're saying it usually in response to someone helping them out with something with their kid.


[ 01:00:03,980 ]Like someone will say, 'Oh, he dropped his backpack.' And I'll hear someone go, 'Ah, thank you.' 'Takes a village.' And, and. Yeah, sort of. That's not really what that means, but okay, you're taking the first step toward it. What it actually means... is I don't know. Tolerance for difference. Now that sounds weird because it sounds like that's a separate idea, not related to this, but it is absolutely central to it. It means tolerance for different ideas. It means... giving up a little bit of control. And it means, and this one's super controversial, loosening rigid boundaries. Okay, now that's where we're going here. That's the framework, okay. If you're going to raise a child by yourself. I'll give you seven years before you jump off a cliff.


[ 01:00:59,000 ]It's ridiculous. That's too hard. So you're not going to do it. You're going to rely on other people. And we do. And in American society, we rely on the people that we've been told we're allowed to rely on. We're allowed to rely on teachers. We are allowed to rely on babysitters, but only like once every couple of weeks or once a week or something. We're only allowed to do that. We're allowed to rely on family members, kind of, sort of. We're not really allowed to rely on anyone else. Does this depend on income level? Because very wealthy people would rely on nannies and things like that. You're allowed to rely on a nanny. Yeah, you're allowed to do that. Um, but yeah, yeah, absolutely.


[ 01:01:32,360 ]But if you were raised and are living in a traditional American society, you have been told. To even, even instructed to have a hands-off approach to other people's kids, because that's respectful. And in many ways it is right to say, 'Hey, not my kid, not my place.' We even use that phrase. 'Hey, it's not my place.' Right. So we have this kind of hands-off approach. We also, as parents become, ridiculously territorial about my child. Some other time I'll go off on this concept of owning up a child. They're not— you don't— it's not your— I mean, careful, careful there with my child. Um, A child? Benefits profoundly. From exposure to different adults with differing ideas that are different from their parents. A child benefits profoundly. Their mental health calms down.


[ 01:02:30,760 ]Their thalamus stays nice and intact when they have... experience with their own five senses, with other ways that people think and move about the world. When they go over to someone else's house and they're told to do something differently than how they're told to do it in their own house. If we live the way villagers live, so let's go to like, you know, Charles Dickensville, you know, like if we live the way villagers live, if you go back to your imagination, what you imagine to be kind of the old style villages. You had to kind of find a way to get along with everybody. You may not like the butcher, but you had to get along with them because that's where you get your meat, right?


[ 01:03:12,660 ]And your next door neighbor, I mean, they're annoying, but they watch your kids every afternoon while you're doing something that you need to do. So you kind of tolerate everyone around you because you have to, because the village doesn't work— your kid doesn't get cared for if you don't have a tolerance for all the different ways of living and different ways of moving about the world and different ways of perceiving things. You kind of had to do that. And I don't know if I will argue that those kids were healthier. I mean, God knows. But I will say that our science and our field show that when kids are raised village style, meaning the parents are not so territorial and the villagers are not so hands off.


[ 01:03:54,770 ]And it's more like a roll up my sleeve and let's all raise this awesome kid together. That kid. Good God, ends up being awesome. That kid ends up getting excited about going to school. That kid gets a job at a reasonable, that kid, people want to marry and hire and hang out with that kid. Like that kid ends up having. The right amount of stimulation go into the brain, the difference and tolerance for difference. That kid doesn't get flustered. That kid is emotionally regulated because, from an early age, their parents... were not so territorial and their other villagers were not so hands-off. And everybody kind of said, 'I think you should do it that way.' What? No, I think you should do it this way.


[ 01:04:37,170 ]Hey, in our house, we do it this way. And so they had to learn how to be. Nimble and adaptive, and they develop skills because they have to know how to behave in lots of different circumstances, as opposed to tribalism. Where you learn how to behave exactly in this way. And your parents insist on this way. And the neighbors in the villages are hands off. And they say, 'Hey, that's how they do it in their house. That's their belief and what they believe. And that kid then goes and applies this one way of thinking and this one way of being to situations where it's not going to work. And so that kid now is distressed. And is not nimble and is not adapted and doesn't have sort of a lubricant socially and know how to kind of move around different people.


[ 01:05:24,430 ]That kid is distressed now, the parents are angry now, now that the the tribes are fighting each other because you did this to my kid and and and and and we and we have an anxiety disorder all of a sudden.' Tribalism. Killing it, sneaky. There's this author, he's so wonderful. Do you guys know? Father Greg Boyle. He's a homeboy, industries out in East LA. Go look him up. He's the greatest thing that ever happened to us. We need more Father Greg Boyle's, but he wrote this book. And in this book, it's called 'Cherished Belonging.' And he has, I can't remember exact quote, but he says: 'We have gotten too there's there's too much tribalism and not enough villagehood. We need to tolerate the annoying neighbor.


[ 01:06:06,860 ]We need to tolerate the disagreement in child rearing that we have with our family member. That needs to be okay, so that our kids... Can become smoother in their social interactions and have healthy outlooks on life and be more open to diverse opinions. Oh, OK. Yeah. There's so many things going through my head. That's that's an amazing share. It's it's brilliant. Now, how do you. you think? Because we don't we don't have that here in the good old US of a we just don't how do you think that families maybe even therapists can contribute to this in some possible way but how do you think families can build a village when one doesn't currently exist. Yeah, that's great because it's roundup on actually, we don't say, we don't say, we don't say it with our words, but you have to ask for help.


[ 01:06:59,660 ]And we don't do that in America. We don't ask for help. So I want you guys to do what I do. I want you to get over it. I had to. Oh my god, it was hard. Get over it. Ask someone for something regarding your kid. With no qualification, with no promises to pay back. See what it feels like. Start building your own tolerance for the discomfort of that. Say to your neighbor, 'Hey, I'm in a bind. Can I leave my kids with you for a couple hours? And yes, you'll experience the American horror and mortification that you would dare to burden another human with your child who they didn't choose to have, you choose to have the kid, right? Yes. Feel what that feels like. That's the first thing that we need to do.


[ 01:07:44,500 ]We need to start asking for help and then risk someone being resentful about it. I'm telling you guys, I won't. I started doing it. I started doing it when I had kids and I have been blissfully shocked. at how quickly my village started showing up for me. at how easy it became for me to ask for help. And I'm an American. I don't ask for help. We don't ask for help. I'm just like you. We didn't do that. I started doing it. So ask for help. The second piece. is show up and violate boundaries. Whoa, I said it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We roll there, lady. No, I'm just kidding. Go for it. I love that. Okay. So you see a parent in need.


[ 01:08:23,890 ]So I'm sitting in church the other day and I, um, there's a woman over there. She's sitting over there. She's by herself. She has four kids. Of her kids, all are snotty, sick, probably shouldn't have come to church. All right, whatever. We make mistakes. It's fine. Two of her kids are little. One of her kids is running up and down the pew and being disruptive. And there's a church, church, by the way, where we love each other and care for each other, right? There's a church full of people not helping. Now. I don't think they're being jerks. I think they're doing what Americans do or like. You know what? It's not my place. I don't want to offend her. I don't want to upset her.


[ 01:08:58,410 ]So I did this thing and I decided to risk offending her and upsetting her. And I walked— I don't know this woman. I walked over to her. And I reached down and I picked up her baby. And I kind of smiled at her. I looked at her. I picked up her baby and I held her, the one that was crying. I started kind of soothing the baby in church. And she looked at me and started crying. It freed her up to go get the one that was walking down the aisle. So she went and got the aisle. She, the kid in the aisle, she brings him over. Can I tell you, Nikki, that a woman in the front row saw me do that, turned around, and came and got the other kid.


[ 01:09:33,399 ]And this village—tiny, little micro village built around her because we violated her boundaries. We went ahead and did it. We said, 'Hey, I know I'm not supposed to pick up other people's kids. Thank you. I'll be though.' Aren't we supposed to pick up other people's kids? This woman couldn't do it. She can't. She only has two arms. She's got four little kids. She's by herself. God bless her for even dragging him to church. Like, good for her. Why can't we? Why can't we go ahead and violate that boundary? Or should maybe I say, violate the social norm of, hey, you know, I'll wait. If she asked for help, I'm happy to help. Instead of saying, 'What can I do?' Just do it. Just find something to do and do it.


[ 01:10:13,500 ]If your neighbor, if your kid's classmate seems like they're not doing well, if they're misbehaving, say, 'Hey, uh-uh,' we don't talk like that. Be the parent. Because the parent... If you're worried about them getting mad at you, that doesn't hurt that bad, guys. Let them get mad at you. It's okay. More likely, they're too busy with their other tasks or their other kids that they missed that the kid was rude and they need another adult to go, 'uh-uh,' that was rude. Watch your tone or whatever we do. It's okay to parent each other's kids. There's another book that I love and it's called 'Please Yell at My Kids.' And it was written by a journalist.


[ 01:10:50,810 ]I can't think of her name off the top of my head, but she and her friend decided to do that with each other. They decided to go ahead and raise each other's kid to do a village-style child rearing. They Love it. They are insisting that the whole world do it. And the book is called 'Please Yell at My Kids.' And it comes from this place of like. No, I get it. I get that you're being respectful of me. I get that you're letting me be the parent, but honestly, I can't do it all the time. Sometimes I'm tired. Sometimes I'm scared and I don't want the confrontation with my kid. Sometimes I actually don't. Don't know what to do in that moment. Sometimes I'm going to do it and it's going to be ugly.


[ 01:11:20,960 ]So it's better that you do it. Right. And so please help me build an awesome citizen right now. So is that violating boundaries? I don't really I don't know. Is it violating a social norm? Yes. Let's violate that social norm. Let's stop being so hands off. That's the second piece, I guess. Ooh. Can't wait to see how this all plays out when somebody tries to violate a boundary of someone who maybe considers themselves to be a gentle parent and their kid's acting like a maniac. Yeah, it could be causing a war here. Who knows? Oh, my God. This is so funny. Oh, my. But it's amazing. It really is. From a historical perspective, and I know you've done a lot of research on this topic of villages and stuff, what social norms have helped villages raise children together that contrast with what we've experienced here?


[ 01:12:21,090 ]So there's one that I'm really obsessed with. So it seems to me we've lost humility. So it looks to me. Than in historical village contexts. that the adults didn't assume that they knew everything. Or didn't they? There was a humility and an acknowledgment. That I don't have all the answers and I don't always know what to do. And please. Actually, yes, I do want to hear your advice. I might not take it, but I want to hear it. And an openness to hearing other ideas or allowing other people to help. That's what I keep seeing over and over and over again. I had the fortune, actually, of visiting Africa years ago. Um, and we got to visit a village in Africa. And I. Um, was struck, we got to spend a whole day with these villagers.


[ 01:13:15,660 ]And I was struck at this—because it's village-minded, but this sort of— everyone had eyes on the children, and I was struck by all the different instructions. Not like a bombardment, but from time to time, a different adult instructed the kids. Um, and then now, this adult is telling the kid how to, and now this adult, and no other adult, minded at all. And I, and I felt— I can't really describe it. I felt a humility there. I felt it like, well. I don't know everything. Maybe that, you know, like maybe I don't know the right answer here. And I don't, maybe that's exactly how I would have done it. Or maybe it's not how I would have done it, but I don't think a ton of hard.


[ 01:13:59,440 ]Oh, I think we lost you there. Oh, there we are. Uh-oh, we've, uh, I think we've lost your sound. Oh, no, we're good now. It went out for like two seconds, but we're good now. Could you finish that last thought? I think we lost maybe like the last three or four seconds. There was... There wasn't. Um, there wasn't an arrogance to any of the, of the adults. There, there was a. In fact, it was almost, it was almost boring. Nikki, it was almost like, it was like, nobody really seemed to take any issue with all of the different adults offering instructions. And I don't know what they were saying in their language, but offering instructions to the child or telling the child what to do or not do.


[ 01:14:43,540 ]Everyone else just was like, 'Yeah, okay.' And they mind their own business. And there was a humility in that. And it was elegant. Wow. That's, that's a beautiful thing. So kind of just wrapping things up now, how can we combine the village mentality and raising children? And being a little less territorial over our kids, which I know is going to be a huge issue, a huge issue. Even my mom, if she was listening to this podcast right now, when you said the phrase, 'My child,' this is my child. She literally says that all the time. And I'm her only child and I'm 38. And when I was a kid, you know, there were some situations that had happened at the school. Where I was going to as a kid.


[ 01:15:29,730 ]And she was like, 'No, you don't make the decisions for my child.' She is my child. I take responsibility for my child. So if she succeeds, that's on me. If she fails, that's on me. And she really did see me as sort of a reflection of her parenting. Any thoughts on that? I don't blame her for a millisecond because that's how we're socialized here. That's that. I mean, your, your mom didn't come up with that. Those ideas are, or like water around, like it's in the air in America, right? So I don't blame her for thinking that. God. In that thinking, do you hear how, do you hear the Herculean task? She thinks belongs to her and only her. And so there's no way. Yet she was calm.


[ 01:16:21,000 ]There's no way that she was. Um, thank you. Without fear and anxiety, you know, like, like she, she, if you take on the enormity of this child, it's all of my parenting. It's got to be spirit-breaking sometimes. I mean, I feel for your mom. And by the way, she is representative of our culture, of our generations of parenting. And I see it that's why I can— I see it in my like, people take on ridiculous, unreasonable sized task. And they crack under it. And so you have abuse and neglect, and you have sharp tones when sharp tones aren't necessary. And you have parents in bad moods, and you have irritability that gets taken out on the kid, and you have projected expectations. And so all of these things go wrong because of the ignore the weight of that task.


[ 01:17:20,600 ]How much healthier would not just our kids be, would we be if we shared that responsibility? Yeah, I wish we did. It would be interesting to see what something like that would look like here. And I think that there are, maybe you know, some, it seems to be that there are some micro communities out there that are doing these things. Does that exist? You know, where can we find these things? I'm telling you, there's a movement out there. I'm seeing it online a little bit here and there. Marina Lopez. That's right. Marina Lopez is the one who wrote Please Yell at My Kids. She tried it. I saw one good thing that came out of COVID was people, you know, when we were creating, what did we call them? Pods.


[ 01:18:05,090 ]When we created our pods. That was sort of a natural extension of that was that parents started sharing parenting responsibilities and started instructing kids who were not their kids. You're seeing it, you're seeing more of a movement toward it. I say we stop. I say I say one sort of. It doesn't seem like a big step, but one big step we could take. Um, is uh not not getting so defensive when somebody else instructs or scolds or advises our kid like, what what happens if you if you if you take a beat. What happens if you don't sort of react? And instead you kind of take it in and ask yourself, like, wait. Is that all that damaging? I don't know. Does that mean my kid's not going to college?


[ 01:18:51,390 ]Probably not. Does that mean my kid's going to like wet the bed tonight? Probably not. Like, it's, it's not actually all that damaging if someone instructs or scolds your kid in the moment. And I don't know. Open your mind, guys. It might actually be a good thing. Yeah, yeah, this is deep stuff. There's a lot here. So two more questions for you. One question: this question is just kind of one to wrap up the... the whole podcast and to give people something that they can take away from this conversation. Cause we discussed a lot. So, in your, from your perspective, if parents just did one thing differently after listening to this conversation, what do you hope that would be? And why, why does it matter so much?


[ 01:19:32,990 ]Yeah, so um, so what's fresh on my mind is the village part of our conversation and and I feel like um Ask for help. Let's do that. Let's do that one thing. So even if, so this is my client did this and I thought it was so cool and it worked for her. Um, maybe even manufacture a fake help, right? A fake request just to practice, right? Maybe you don't actually need that. Maybe you don't need someone to give your kid a ride home, but you're going to practice because you heard this podcast and you're like, okay, what does it feel like to burden another human being? Can I sit in the discomfort of that? Yes, you can. You can sit in the discomfort of that.


[ 01:20:08,900 ]And not only that, you might actually get rewarded afterwards, right? So sometime this week. Ask someone for help with your kids. Appreciate that. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And then this is a question that I always ask all the guests at the very end, and you can interpret it however you want to. The question is, what do you think is the most important education that a child could ever receive? Ugh. Failure. Failure. Failure is the best teacher. Any of us have ever had. Don't be afraid to let your kids fail. Failure is profoundly impactful to our character and our dignity and our self-esteem. Failure is how we become good people. It's let them fail. Appreciate that. Yeah. As teachers, we talk about that a lot, too. So I appreciate that very much.


[ 01:21:01,230 ]Well, Miss Angela, where can we find you? Because this conversation has been incredibly enlightening. And I know somebody is going to want to reach out to you and ask you more questions that we know we couldn't fit into this hour and hour and change podcast today. Where can we find you? Love that. So I'm pretty easy to find. So I run the Caldwell Family Institute. My last name is Caldwell, C-A-L-D-W-E-L-L. And all my stuff is there. All my, all my socials are there on my email, my phone, all of all my stuff is there. I'm pretty easy. And then be on the lookout. I hopefully have a book coming out this spring. You know, hopefully some of the questions that you might have. I hope I answer them. You'll see.


[ 01:21:40,180 ]Let me know. Read my book. Let me know if I answer. Yeah, you've done an amazing job. And we've had to, for the audience, we've had to move heaven and earth to get our schedules and our lives to come here today. So we are very grateful that you're listening to us today and just, you know, being here for this. One also, this is a random thing I'm just going to kind of throw out there, Angela. I have not mentioned this to anybody ever. It was a thought that just kind of actually came to me today. So the question is this, and I'm thinking about doing this for the podcast and the... The idea is to create a group or community called The Gentle Year where you and all the other guests can be a part of that community.


[ 01:22:21,120 ]Parents can be a part of that community. And everybody can sort of connect with one another. And let's say, if somebody has a question about the village concept, they can post that question and you and others can chime in on this idea to support these parents. Because if we're actually going to create a village, we could start there. What do you think? I think you just gave me goosebumps. Oh, cool. Like a forum or something. Oh my God. I love that. Do it. All right. Well, guys, be on the lookout for that in the show notes of this podcast episode. I'll go ahead and create it once we get off the show. Well, Angela, thank you again so much for being here today. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you. And we're just really, really, really grateful. Thank you again. Thank you. This is, this has been a really wonderful conversation. Really awesome. Thank you guys.



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Knikki Hernandez

Host
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Angela Caldwell

Guest