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Parenting After Divorce: How to Create Safety, Connection & Stability for Your Kids with Elisabeth Stitt · Bent Not Broken: Starting Over After Divorce | Post Divorce Life

• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: If you've been through a divorce and you have kids, I'm guessing at some point you've asked yourself, how is all this affecting them?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: I know I have.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: And as parents, we carry a lot of guilt.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: We wonder if we're doing enough, if our kids are really okay, and how we can create stability when so much around them has changed.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: But here's the thing: our kids don't need us to be perfect.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: They need to feel safe, connected, and loved.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: And they need to know that even when life gets hard, they can get through it.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I'm excited about today's conversation.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: My guest is Elizabeth Stitt, an award-winning parenting coach, author and founder of Joyful Parenting Coaching.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: And after spending 25 years as a teacher working with thousands of children, Elizabeth now helps parents create stronger, more connected families.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: She's also the author of Parenting as a Second Language.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Today we're talking about parenting through divorce, letting go of some of that parental guilt, and helping our kids become resilient even when family life looks very different than we thought it would.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Elizabeth, welcome to Bent Not Broken.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Deborah.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Looking forward to this.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: So you've spent 25 years as a teacher before becoming a parent and coach.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: What did you see happening in families that made you realize parents need more support?
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: I saw a big shift, first in my students, and I'll encapsulate that for you quickly.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: When I started teaching in 1990, if you asked a seventh grader, Deborah, what do you want to do when you grow up?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Deborah would say, I want to be an Olympic gold skater.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you'd go, that's fabulous.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Have you been skating for long?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Since last fall.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And in 1990, nobody thought you needed to tell a 12-year-old, sweetheart.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you've only been skating since last fall, you're not going to be an Olympic gold anything.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: We were just like, hey, that's awesome.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a competition nearby, I'd love to come see you.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Flash forward to 2014, which is when I stopped teaching.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And if you ask the same question, caveat, I was living in Silicon Valley at the time, but I have found that this idea extended beyond Silicon Valley.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Deborah, what do you want to do when you grow up?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I should major in computer science and minor in business, or if I should major in business and minor in computer science.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: But I do want to work for a big company like Google or Netflix.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think I want to do a startup.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody was telling these kids go dream, go play, go run around, don't worry about it.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you're going to be a football star.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: In 1990, we assumed that life would teach our children soon enough that they weren't going to be a football star.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then okay.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: In the meantime, it was okay for a 12-year-old to be dreaming.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so as my kids began to make this shift, I was getting mad at their parents.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like, who are these parents?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And why are they getting in the way of my kids' expansiveness and who they want to be?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: But as I began to connect with parents and speak with them a little bit more deeply, I got this overwhelming sense of guilt, anxiety, isolation, doubt.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I just thought, wow, parenting is always going to be complex because we've got so many moving parts and personalities, but it does not have to be soul-suckingly hard.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, that that was really that was, I just began to think about that more and more.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I looked into doing an MFT and I looked at how many hours it was, and I was like, oh no, it's not worth it.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to go back to school and be in somebody else's classroom for that long.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then I happened to learn about coaching, life coaching.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And somebody told me about their certification program.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, okay, now that's about the right amount of time to be making this shift.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I gave up my tenure teaching job.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting you mentioned the 1990s versus the 2014s.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: And in 1990, we really didn't have the internet.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Kids could still be kids and being able to go outside, have friends, like you said, be able to dream, use their imagination because they weren't in front of a computer screen.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe some of them were in front of the TV too much, but not the computer screen, not the video games.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: Some of that has transpired more as you got closer to 2000, so to speak.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's interesting that correlation.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now, your book is called Parenting as a Second Language.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: What does that title mean?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: And why do you believe parenting is something we actually have to learn?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Full disclosure, my editor wrote a book called Happiness as a Second Language and Creativity as a Second Language.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so she approached me, she's not a parent herself, she approached me about writing parenting as a second language.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And all of these things point out that if you grew up in an environment where you were not being modeled, happiness wasn't being modeled, creativity wasn't being modeled, parenting wasn't being modeled well, that they're all a skill.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: They're not innate things that you should just know how to do.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And just like learning a second language, nobody expects you to just be able to speak a second language if you didn't grow up speaking it.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: It can be taught systematically chapter by chapter.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: I have told people in the past that my kids, I have three children, none of them came with instruction booklets.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I know I didn't come with an instruction booklet because at the end of the day, we're all trying to figure it out, right?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: But you talk about parents becoming an architect of the family.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: What does that look like in everyday family life?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, I just want to put a little context for the architect of your family.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't used to have to work so deliberately in making choices about our family, because there were a lot more societal structures that were helping us to define what family was.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you take the idea of you work in a factory town and the whistle goes off at five o'clock to release all the parents home from the factory, well, that same whistle told all the kids who are out playing on the yard or on the streets that it was time to begin to hightail at home.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so a single parent wasn't arguing that, you know, no, you have to come home because we're having family dinner.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because Tom, Dick, Harry, Jane, Sue, Mary, they were also all going home.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was an example of a structure that just made it easier for parents to parent.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: There was a whole neighborhood expectation.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone's going to go home and it's dinner time.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And in my household, you did, if the phone rang between like six and eight o'clock, you didn't answer it because you assumed it was a telemarketer and that if it were an emergency or it were important, they would call back either immediately or later in the evening.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so as a society, we didn't expect to interrupt dinner time.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a structure, dinner time, that supports families that today is violated right, left, and center.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Every sport, every ballet class, every every extra math tuition is getting in the way of it.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that's interesting that you say about the structure.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the structure changed or it's loosened up.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have the structure like I did growing up, or even, you know, to some extent when my kids were small.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: What happened?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: Was that is that a cultural thing?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: Was there a shift?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: Is it the norms of what TV has put out there?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: Is it the internet?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: What happened?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's an author named Julie Gliscott Haymes who wrote a book called Raising an Adult, but she wrote this book and she did a lot of research.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: She was Dina Freshman at Stanford University, and she was seeing this shift in her students.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it was so funny because when I first read her book, I was like going, Have you been reading my blogs all year?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because I've been writing about this exact same stuff.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: But she actually did the research to say, how did we get here?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And mind you, this was 2014 that she's writing.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's already, you know, it's not even to date, that's already more than a decade ago.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: And what her research found, and social science researches were positing things.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: But what her research posits is that there were two main forces.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: One was there was the Sunday night movie that was about a child being an abducted off the street by a stranger.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this movie was after the Super Bowl, and so a ton of people were still watching television and they watched it.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And she marks that as the beginning of the play date.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: That there was so much fear around that idea that we couldn't just send our kids out into the neighborhood to run around, that we needed to protect them.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so we were going to have play dates.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: We were going to invite kids over.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: The secondary social event that happened was that a report came out from the government called A Nation at Risk.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is in 1986.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the nation at risk said all of the middle manufacturing jobs were going to go to Asia and that we were going to have a two-tiered society with very privileged at the top and a whole lot of people doing menial jobs, service jobs, whatever they could find jobs.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so now all of a sudden, in the middle band, there's this huge swath of parents who had been feeling pretty relaxed about their kids.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because if their kids wanted to go to college, okay, that's great.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: But if they didn't, they knew that they could get a good job at the factory, a good job at the company down the street, and they could work their way up and there would be benefits and retirement and that it would feel safe.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so pushing their children towards academic goals and towards whatever talent or developed area that might give them that extra edge to being in this top band at the top, to getting into those top schools.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now parents were thinking about that.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we have these two phenomena together: the play date, meaning that kids aren't just running around in the street, interacting with each other, learning from each other, finding their own sort of Lord of the Flies hierarchy and learning their social skills that way.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're at home and we're playing at home where it's safe.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: But you add into that mix the parents' fear and expectation that we need to be advancing our kids.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: We need to be using every teachable moment to teach them.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And this was 2014.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: I was on a local nextdoor.com in my area, and the mother was like, Help! I'm about to have a four-year-old over for a play date, and I want to do an under the water theme.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: What should I do?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I am just banging my head against the wall, thinking, Lord Almighty, a play date means you throw the kids in the backyard or in the basement and you say, I don't want to see you if there's no blood.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: The snack is in a while.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And here's this mother of a four-year-old.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine the pressure, Deborah?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it it's interesting because you mentioned the word safe, and that's what I was hearing when you were talking about both of those studies.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: You want to keep your kids safe from the boogeyman coming and getting them.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: And you want to keep your children safe, even as they grow into adults, to be in a career or a job that's safe and supposedly can't harm them.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right, exactly.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it so this began to affect a lot of different things.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that began to affect was the drive to enrolling children in activities.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: I call this the checklist child, right?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the soccer, the ballet, the music, the whole line yards.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And not just one day of ballet or two days of ballet, but we're gonna be on the dance team.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna be on the travel soccer team.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And while we're standing at soccer for our second graders, our third graders, all of a sudden there's a parent standing next to you who's like, Deborah, are you gonna put Joey in the chess club on Friday afternoons?
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, thinking to yourself, what?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Chess club?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Friday?
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: I thought Friday was our day off.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the parent says, Oh, you know, all the kids who are in chess club, they're in the advanced math track when they get to middle school.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: And now you're thinking, oh, wow, if I don't put kid on Friday afternoon in chess club, am I shutting a door to cutting off an opportunity in middle school for being in the advanced math track?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if I if I'm not in the advanced math track in middle school, then how am I ever going to get to the advanced math class by senior year that's going to get me to the college that I want to go to with your second grader, right?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: So when we think about being the architect of your family, we want to really look at your values and be clear and make clear decisions.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in a divorced family, time is the most precious commodity that you have.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: You've already lost half of it.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: So every time you enroll your child in something and let them be under some other adult's influence, you are diluting your influence even more.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so, of course, we want our kids to do activities and we want them to have fun and we want them to find things that they like to do.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: But it becomes a delicate situation.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: I hear from both sides, right?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'll hear from a parent who says, like the other parent won't take Joey to his soccer game on Friday afternoons.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so now Joey's going to be kicked off the soccer team.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if I only had my kid every other weekend, I would not want to use soccer.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't want to waste my time on soccer.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe if you're a high school or and you're part of the school team and you're kind of doing it independently yourself, and it's building to something that you want.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: But if you've got an elementary school kid, even a middle school kid, you don't have a lot of time with them.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: Or even the money, money can change drastically in single parent households.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when you have a two-income family being able to maybe even then barely make ends meet, and now you're divorced, there's a single mom and a single dad trying to keep up with the Joneses with all of these activities, that puts even more pressure on the parent.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm sure it trickles down into the child.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so going back to the idea of being the architect of your family, part of being the architect is protecting family time.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: And there's so many different ways that we can do that.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I want parents to feel really grounded and really clear about this is what's important.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: At my house, we don't say yes to things on Saturday afternoons.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's our family time.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Deborah's been invited to a birthday party Saturday afternoon.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've made sure that she's had a present.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's in her backpack.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Please make sure she gets there by 3 p.m.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: You're the other parent, and you're saying, we will make sure that the present gets dropped off.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: But in our family, we we're we spend time with family on Saturday afternoons.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: And when a parent can be that clear and grounded in it, then they can just keep putting out that message in a very clear and grounded way.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not about undermining you, it's not about any of that.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's about in our family, we keep Saturday afternoon sacred for family time.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: I love that concept.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of touching on this, what happens when parents who have very different parenting styles after divorce, how can someone create that consist consistency and security in their own home?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm a middle school teacher.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: So in my world, kids change classrooms every 50 minutes, which means they get to learn five, six, seven different teachers.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And they know that in Ms.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Griffith's classroom, they can get away with something that they cannot get away with in Mrs.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Stitt's classroom.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: And they know that Mrs.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Stitt will give you a few extra points for having perfect spelling.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, Mrs.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: Griffiths isn't going to do that for you.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: I really believe that even younger kids can learn the difference between how do I act at mom's house and what are mom's expectations, and how do I act at dad's house and what are dad's expectations.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I still coach parents, I've been focusing more on divorce dads, but I still coach parents of mom and dad in one household.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: And last week I had a client whose mom and dad are super upset with each other because mom has one style and one priorities and wants the evening to feel one way, and dad has another set.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I finally asked them, and they were both kind of trying to make me say that the other person was wrong.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: They both really want to be aware of it.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: A power struggle.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I finally asked them and I looked at mom and I said, Mom, does your son behave with you when it's just the two of you?
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Do you feel like the evening routine has pretty good flow?
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: She's like, Yes.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I looked at dad.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: Dad, when you're alone with your son, do you feel like the evening is pretty good flow and it goes pretty smoothly and bedtime isn't that big of an issue?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, 100%.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: I said, so what that tells you is that your son is comfortable with both of your parenting styles.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: The only thing he's not comfortable with is you guys fighting about it and the lack of clarity with each other and the little pot shots that you're hitting at each other.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so if two divorced families are doing a really good job of being super relaxed about, you know, well, mom makes us do such and such, or mom lets us do such and such, that's wonderful.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Mom's a smart lady, and I am sure that she has good reasons for what she's the way she's doing it.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you're gonna learn some valuable things in doing it that way.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Here in this house, we do something else.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: And as long as you are clear and consistent and calm and explain why and what we're doing, then it doesn't have to clash between the two houses.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because your kids actually can they can handle it.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: They can handle things being one way in one house and one way in the other house.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: And when I hear a parent say, I can't do it in this house because they're not doing it in that house, I am very like, I hear what you're saying.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And while it might be easier if both families and households were doing it the same way, we can absolutely teach you a way that works for you, no matter what it looks like in the other house.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: And at the end of the day, that's what the kids need is to see that structure.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: wherever whatever house they're at that helps build them the that sense of security that they need grow to grow up healthy and happy and ideally they're getting clear explanations and kind firm directions and consistency in both houses even if the expectations and directions look very different got it one of the things you do is emphasize connection rather than simply relying on consequences when a child is angry acting out or pushing a parent away how can we look beyond the behavior and understand what the child may really be communicating it's such an important question especially with our kids who are going through divorce right because if we look through the lens of you are misbehaving, you are trying to make my life hard, you're trying to stick it to me, first of all, we go on the defense and true secondly it doesn't support our children in feeling their feelings and in having a lot of extra emotions that are coming up because of the divorce because of the stress on a child even if it's two very happy households it is stressful to go back and forth between two houses all you have to do is think about going away for the weekend and having to pack to go away for the weekend and going away for the weekend might be wonderful.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: You might have something fabulous planned but boy you come back and there's everything that you have to pick up again.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: And we're asking our kids to do that every week sometimes multiple times a week can you imagine yeah so if we start with wondering what's the feeling behind it.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: One of my mantras is the relationship is always more important than the issue obviously safety is a caveat on that right if it's safe you yell you grab you pull them out of the way you pull them away and you apologize later.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: But with everything else even if we slow down for a full minute one full minute of slowing down isn't gonna make the difference to getting into the car and getting to school and if you don't slow down and if you don't take some of that calm then you're gonna waste that minute with something else anyway.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: So part of being the architect of your family is also teaching your kids deliberate social emotional skills talking about and practicing when you're calm practicing calm down techniques and then practicing being upset and mad and I'm crying and I'm gonna I'm gonna choose a calm down technique I'm gonna do my Daniel tiger breathing.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Four three two one and I see the parents like you're gonna look ridiculous doing this stuff and you know if you've got like a fourth or fifth grader they're gonna be rolling their eyes to high heaven don't worry about it their need for something that is they can reach for that's a little bit bigger than they are is so great that just you know be playful with it but just insist that they do it.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: It can be little things too you can twiddle your fingers and teach them to twiddle your fingers and then if your kid is upset in front of you you just start matching one two three four you twiddle your fingers to it in front of them and because they've done it with you because you've sat at the table and they practice it before you know it they're going to be doing their fingers and as they do their fingers twiddling matching your thumb to your forefinger andor to your other fingers requires both sides of your hemispheres to work in conjunction with each other when two sides of our hemispheres are working together.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: We can get to our thinking brain and away from our reaction brain more effectively I love that because what you're doing is teaching children early on coping skills for the rest of their life because we all end up in situations where maybe we lose a job or we break up with somebody or this that or the other and to teach them how to handle stressful situations early on is only going to be of a great benefit to them as they get older and on and on in life.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: And again I this is something I say to all parents not just parents of divorce that because they are in led by adult activities where they're not getting to interact and practice skills because they're in groups of the same ages they're not getting a lot of multi-age interactions because they are on their screens more for all these reasons kids are not learning their social emotional skills organically within the family at the same rate that they used to schools have never really been about teaching social emotional skills but they used to allow more time for it right we used to have a place on the report card for citizenship.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yes you were you were unsatisfactory satisfactory or excellent at citizenship and because it was on the report card and it got reported at home teachers were teaching it they were having conversations about what does it mean to be a good citizen which is just you know social emotional education right what does it mean to be kind thoughtful a good friend helpful and that's something else we don't have anymore.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: Why is that because of these same strains okay right we have to push all the kids up to get into college because there's no middle jobs for them anymore which means that the colleges want it to be performing at a higher level which means now the high schools are going to give more homework so that their kids are performing at a higher level and now the ninth grade teachers are complaining that we can't make the progress we need to make because these kids are coming in so unprepared.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: So now the middle school teachers are giving more homework and boom boom boom boom boom in the state of California the kindergarten curriculum is about two thirds of the former first grade curriculum wow so now we have now there's no time for citizenship.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: No I can't imagine what that's going to do for these future generations.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: And now you throw in COVID and we're still sorting COVID out right because kids lost so many skills during COVID there was so much time when they weren't gaining the skills they should have gained or would have gained let's say that now schools are working even harder to try to make this up so even more of the kinds of activities at a school that helps us to be a well-rounded person and a good citizen are being left by the wayside.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think the pendulum swinging back a little bit especially with fear of AI and AI buddies, AI friends, right?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: That people are scared of that and they should be they really should be that they're saying like okay we need to have school be a place where kids are gathering and it's not just drill drill drill drill like we're also allowing for what does it mean?
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: Interaction.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah how can we solve conflicts peacefully right right single parents can feel exhausted because every decision seems to fall on them what are some practical ways they can reduce the pressure to be the perfect parent and bring more joy back into the home repeat the mantra perfection is neither required nor desired okay that absolutely we don't want perfect parents kids don't need perfect parents they just need parents who are present and so when we really get back to thinking about we have a more limited amount of time so we have to just be a little bit more deliberate and a little bit more present.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say alongside that I'm in favor of systems and routines and one of the reasons I'm in favor of systems and routines is because when you have a system or a routine for something you've already made the decision.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: And now the system or the routine is bringing things forward let's go back to my Saturday afternoon example right like but mom Deborah's birthday is on Saturday afternoon.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: I have to go to Deborah's birthday she's my best friend and of course that's ling clang clang clang clang all kinds of guilt all kinds of everything else and if you have clarity clarity in your heart clarity at a cellular level Saturday afternoon is our family time it's so much easier the decision of whether or not she's going that's already made and the kid actually already knows it too and because the kid has felt the security and safety and pleasure of being a family together Saturday afternoon for the last however many months she's not really thinking that she's gonna get her mom to say yes to going to Deborah's birthday party.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: And when mom says no it's family time that helps her feel even more grounded as a kid.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: Of course you offer something else you can say like sweetheart I know Deborah is your best friend in the whole wide world and we want to do something special for her.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: Shall we check and see if we can pick her up on Friday afternoon and take her to ice cream because there are other ways to celebrate Deborah's birthday.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have to be at her party on Saturday afternoon.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: And yes your kids may complain about it a little bit but the amount of complaining is going to be a lot less so the amount of oh I have to make this decision this is so hard.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Chess club on Friday afternoons no Friday afternoon is our go-to-the-park day right so there's a lot that's lifted from you as a parent if you have some key rules we hate the word rules guidelines.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah but I kind of like the word rules because it tells me as a parent if I'm you know immediately getting my flow chart is it yes or no?
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: And why what's the principle behind it?
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: And because it's connected to an ideal a value a principle that is going to help my family be bigger and better and more expansive and more loving and more connected in the long run it's easy for me to stick with that.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: Got it for the parent listening today who feels like their family has been broken by divorce what is one thing that they can begin doing right now to rebuild connection and create a new sense of family I feel like we're creating three families.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you had a Venn diagram, you've got the kids and who they are at mom's house and the way mom's house runs and what those main priorities and values are.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have who are we at dad's house and the main priorities and expectations and how are things run and what does it feel like and who am I at dad's house.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: And social scientists talk about code switching your kids have to code switch between your two households that's true but I would like to make the argument that they're code switching between mom and dad anyway and that they actually know how to do it and that that's something that they can learn if it's not combined with a lot of tension and bad mouthing the other parent.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then you do have in the middle of the diagram you do have this space where mom and dad and the kids all live together.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: So if you really want to make a difference for your children and you're divorced find something for that space.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't have to be a lot doesn't have to be really often but find something that represents that space maybe it's all sitting together maybe not every soccer game but at the championship games right not at all rehearsals but at the concert so that as your child looks out and scans they only have to scan one area to find their whole family.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's how you do birthday parties and how you collaborate on birthday parties not just one parent throwing a birthday party and letting the other parent know you can come if you want or parents feeling like they have to do separate birthday parties.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: So find something that is in that common space.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you're thinking about your own space ritual matters a lot ritual really helps and this is another way in which we have to be the architect of a family because we are less likely to be engaging in religious ritual we're less likely to be going as a family to a religious service that is going to have its own rituals.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're less likely to be saying grace at dinner and prayers at bedtime or lighting candles for Shabbat on Friday night.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're not connected to a religion I say try to identify some things that have that kind of consistency and maybe just a little bit of specialness or awe.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it could be lighting candles at dinner time.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: I had a family who they had a candle for each member of the family and each member would light their candle and as they lit their candle they would say one thing that they were grateful for today.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: What a small little moment I had another family that had a little Buddha statue attached to their door and they all rubbed Buddha and as they would go out of the house they'd say bless the house what a sweet thing right what a nice sense of security like as we leave this house we're asking Buddha bless this house take care of this house as we come in maybe you know hi Buddha as you come right like everybody else is gone everyone's gone to work and to school but Buddha has stayed right and this wasn't a family for whom Buddha had a particular religious connotation but they made it into a ritual right something very simple but yet a ritual and a tradition yeah and that helps to provide safety and stability and grounding final question can children actually come through a divorce more resilient when parents intentionally create safety connection and consistency?
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well I don't know if my daughter's more resilient than she would have been coming through the divorce but I absolutely would she's 30 now I would 100% say that she thrived with divorce and in eighth grade she had to do an art project that was supposed to be representative of her life and she had the shadow side and the bright side and on the bright side she had a picture of a tree and in the tree was hanging a little heart and the little heart said M and D, mom and dad and there it was jagged it was cut.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I walk into the room and she's explaining the piece of art I remarried second family to my mother in law to the grandma in the house and she looks at me she's like mom I know the divorce was harder on you but it would have been so boring to just live with you and daddy.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like boring she's like yeah I have an Indian grandma and I've been to India and I have a Slovenian grandma and I've been to Slovenia and I have a half sister and I have stepbrothers so she had her resilience had said this is my story and this is my truth and this is how I'm telling it and that was we had been living with my husband since she was in second grade this is in eighth grade and it was definitely rocky at the start but by middle school she's kind of going like yeah this is my life and isn't my life cool because I have all these different things I love it.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: Elizabeth how can the listeners get your book do you have a website I'll put everything in the show notes.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah the book is there through Amazon my website is my name elizabethstitt.com Elizabeth with an S.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: I however am in the middle of transferring it over to joyfulparentingcoaching dot com but really if you get Elizabeth with an S and you just say you know to chat Elizabeth Stitt Parenting Coach you should find me.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: Okay sounds good thank you so much for this riveting conversation I really enjoyed it and thank you for the work that you're doing my pleasure