Latest / Thinking Out Loud | Kimberly / How Do We Raise Children Who Tell Us the Truth Instead of Hiding Their Mistakes? | Thinking Out Loud
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- Kimberly: How do we raise children who tell us the truth instead of hiding their mistakes? That's a question I've been ruminating over. Every time one of my kids makes mistakes, I find myself wondering, am I teaching responsibility or am I teaching fear? Fear of disappointing me, fear of being embarrassed, fear that making mistakes make them less lovable. I remember being an incredibly curious kid. Curiosity wasn't the problem. The problem was what happened after. Sometimes the punishment wasn't about correcting the mistake. It felt I had to carry the shame of it afterwards, not only privately, publicly too. Wearing this metaphorical cone of shame around the family so everyone could remember what I had done. Becoming a parent had made me question something I never thought I'd question before. Are consequences supposed to teach or have they become socially acceptable humiliations? AKA punishment. one. Welcome back to Thinking Out Loud. Hi, it's me Kimberly. Before we go any further, quick note: this podcast is for reflection and conversation, not professional advice. Take what resonates and leave the rest. Here we slow down and we explore life's gray areas, especially in relationships and behavior patterns we can observe and reflect on. I'm not here to tell you what to think. I'm here to offer framework that helps you understand your relationships, strengthen your thinking, and hold space for complexity. Let's get to thinking out loud. Growing up, I remember cutting my own hair. I remember getting into the paint and leaving artwork around the property as if I was Banksy. Except instead of making political statements, I was mostly creating extra work for my parents. I was creative, I was impulsive. Not much has changed. I was basically an iPad kid before iPad kids existed. Give me a TV and sure. It keep me entertained for a little while. Once the screen wasn't enough, Little Kimberly was off exploring. if there was paint nearby, a screwdriver within reach, well, one thing led to another. Or my bangs were bothering me. Well, my brain saw that immediately and started looking for solutions. Maybe I should trim them. Just a little. Okay. Okay, maybe a little more. I wasn't trying to be difficult. I was curious. I was experimenting I was trying to figure out how the world worked. Now, as an adult, I have more compassion for my parents than I did as a kid. Raising little humans is exhausting, especially in your thirties. Raising neurodivergent, spicy little humans can be even harder Because raising a little houdini isn't for the weak, Especially when your own nervous system is overwhelmed. You're trying to build structure, routine, safety, while still figuring out those things yourself. Sometimes parenting without structure feels like you're playing oregon trails. You're trying to make it to the next checkpoint. And then every time you think you got it figured out, someone got dysentery. I genuinely think my parents were doing what many parents of the time believed worked. Shame was often seen as a teacher. I'm disappointed. Embarrassment was supposed to build character. You gotta learn. The older I get, the more I wonder if shame teaches what we were hoping it taught. I don't think I stopped making mistakes because I was embarrassed. I stopped making mistakes when I understood the consequences. For example, I cut my cat Charlie's whiskers off. Okay, okay, okay. I know, I know. It's terrible. Hear me out, hear me out. And yes, it wasn't just once, it was twice. Not because I was cruel. Remember, I was a child. it wasn't because I didn't love him. I loved that cat. Charlie was my little buddy. I dolled him up, put makeup on, and he tolerated all kinds of nonsense from me. When I was four, I simply didn't know what whiskers were for. I didn't know the power I had over him. Either. I was four. I was told, Kimberly, you're essentially cutting off his fingers. That moment someone explained that whiskers help cats understand the space around them. Again, in a way I understood that clicked, that they aren't simply just extra hair to trim, I didn't do it again. it wasn't because someone shamed me, it was because someone tried to educate me, meet me at my level. once I understood the consequences, I made different choices. he still got makeup on. the lesson had stayed with me. Life is full of consequences, whether we understand them or not. You can spend years investing in your career and realize you never invested in your relationships with your kids. You can ignore your health for years until your body forces you to pay attention. You can also do everything right and still have something completely outside of your control happen because life is unexpected like that. Consequences aren't punishment. They're just a part of being alive. Which makes me wonder, if mistakes are inevitable, what are we teaching our children when they make them? Are we teaching them to understand the consequences of their actions? Or are we teaching them to fear coming to us when they've messed up because That's the question I keep finding myself asking about most these days. How do I create patterns where my children know they're safe enough to tell me the truth? I've been asking myself that question and another question as well. What does it mean to treat children like a person? Not necessarily like an equal in the sense of responsibility, not my best friend, a human being whose dignity matters because. If my friends accidentally peed her pants, would I lecture her? No. Would I make her sit in her wet clothes to teach her a lesson? No. Would I tell everybody what happened? No. Would I laugh about it for years every time we got together? No. I'd help her clean it up. I do damage control with her. I'd problem solve with her. I'd make sure she wasn't carrying the embarrassment alone and we'd figure it out. If my friend cut her own bangs, would I force her to walk around feeling humiliated? No. or would I help her find a way to fix them? I feel I'd try to help. Why does someone's age suddenly determine whether they have a right for compassion? Children are entitled to dignity too. One thing I genuinely don't understand is why we normalize intentionally embarrassing children. The bad haircut day, the stories we proudly tell at family gatherings to embarrass them. Remember when you go show them the picture when you tell everyone what you did that one time. Maybe I'm the odd one out. I don't find those stories funny. I don't think I truly ever did. I think I was going along with it to belong. because the joke is almost always a child acting like a child exploring, being impulsive, trying something without fully understanding the consequences. Is there accountability? Absolutely. If my daughter cuts her own hair, we're gonna talk about it. If she colors the walls, we're gonna help her clean it up. If she hurts someone, we're going to repair the relationship. I'm not arguing against accountability. I'm questioning humiliation. Those aren't the same things I've heard people say we'll make them sit in their wet clothes so they'll never do it again. What exactly are we teaching? Are we teaching them responsibility? Or are we teaching them we'll abandon them when life gets hard? Are we teaching them that when something embarrassing happens, they're on their own? Children who are taught to ignore accidents or sit in discomfort can start learning that their bodies aren't important or that asking for help. When they're vulnerable isn't safe. That doesn't build responsibility. It builds shame, secrecy, or fear around normal human experiences. I hear people say my children are not my friends. I agree to a point. What I mean by it though is my job isn't to be a passive parent and just pretend kumbaya my children are equal in responsibility and my goodness, they're responsible for my feelings. No. My job also isn't to avoid hard conversations or not give out healthy consequences. Again, consequences aren't punishment. They're a way of life. I also don't want to become an authoritarian where obedience matters more than connection. My kids aren't my servants. They aren't extensions of me. They're people and I'm their leader, which means I have an incredible amount of influence on how their nervous systems learn to experience the world. That responsibility is something I take seriously because I'm not only raising children, I'm building a relationship, one that I hope exists when they're an adult. I want my daughters to know that when life gets messy. When they make mistakes, when they're embarrassed, mom and dad are a safe place to land because if they're spending all their energy trying to survive our shame or avoid our humiliation, they aren't learning responsibility. They're learning how to hide. The haircut situation has happened to me twice, unfortunately. One thing I've learned about raising neurospicy children is it's important to have radical acceptance while also asking myself, what kind of parent do I want to be? What kind of leader do I want to be? What kind of role model do I want my children to have? I don't want resentment to quietly become the thing that parents my child instead of me. I want to notice the big feelings when they show up. I want to name them because usually when I'm feeling resentment, I'm often being a passive parent. once we have a name for a negative emotion, we have a chance to change them. the first time my daughter cut her own hair, honestly, no big deal. We could give her a cute little A-line bob. Look at her, slay cutie pie, slay. Then it happened a second time and only this time. she also decided to cut her baby sister's hair too. No, not the top of the hair. It's always the hardest to grow. Internal screaming. That's when I noticed something. My panic wasn't about the haircut. It was about me. What are other people gonna say Everyone's gonna judge me. They're gonna think I'm a bad parent. instead of asking how do we solve this together, at first I did go to panic mode, which helped absolutely no one. In the end, the best thing we could do was style her hair like Draco Malfoy with some gel with a bow on top. Was it ideal? Absolutely not. Did we survive it? Of course we did. It's just hair. at the end of the day, she was safe. Hair grows back. looking back, I realized something that was incredibly humbling for myself. Those big feelings weren't about my daughter, they were about my fear of being judged. That isn't my child's responsibility. it isn't her job to explore the world in a way that makes me look like a perfect parent. My job is to help her. for her to explore it as safely as possible. That shift changed the way I think about mistakes. A friend once told me about a child who started to fire at recess. Did another child stop it? No. He made it safer. He remembered to contain it, get some rocks and make sure it stayed in one place. honestly, That's the kind of thinking I want for my own children. If you're gonna experiment, be safe about it. If you're going to use tools, learn how to use them safely. Respect them. Understanding consequences at the same time. Education does not remove curiosity. It gives curiosity guardrails. Which brings me back to something I've been thinking about a lot. Why do we celebrate stories where children are intentionally embarrassed? A bad haircut day, on picture day? Parents saying, Nope. You wanted to cut your own hair. You're going to school exactly like that. And everybody claps because they learned their lesson. Did they? What lesson are we celebrating? I mean think before you act or when you make a mistake, don't come to me because I'll make sure everyone sees it and knows whose fault it is. Those are very two different lessons. Children don't stop making mistakes because we embarrass them. Mistakes are a part of learning. What often changes is whether they'll tell us about those mistakes The goal quietly shifts from I want to do the right thing to I don't want mom and dad to find out. that for me is scary and a huge difference because one leads growth and the other leads to hiding. when I tell this story about my daughter's haircut, I don't want it to become a story that embarrasses her. She did a normal part of. Growing up. She was safe about it. Instead, I want it to be a story about how I grew as a parent, how I learned to put down my own panic, how I learned how to problem solve instead of perform, and how I learn that my daughter's dignity matters more than protecting my image as a parent. I hope years from now, the lesson from this story she remembers is. About how her mom can problem solve hard things and so can she. Where is the balance though? I don't think the answer is never having consequences. I think we protect our kids way too much from consequences when they're a natural part of life. I also don't think the answer is making every mistake into a lifelong source of embarrassment content either. Because what are we trying to build with our children when we embarrass them? I don't want my kids to avoid mistakes. That's impossible. Mistakes are just a part of learning. They're a part of curiosity. They're a part of becoming your own person. What I want is something different. I want my daughters to know that they can survive their mistakes. I want them to come to me when they're scared, when they break something, when they lie and they realize they lied. I want my daughters to know that they can come to me when they hurt someone, when they're ashamed, that I'll be there to support them and help problem solve. If they learn that my love disappears every time I'm disappointed, they won't stop making mistakes. They'll stop telling me about them. I think that's a much bigger problem. And maybe the goal isn't preventing mistakes. Maybe it's creating a family culture where mistakes become opportunities to learn instead of opportunities to shame. Opportunities to problem solve instead. I also don't want to swing to the opposite extreme either. I don't want to raise children who believe they can do no wrong or that every problem is someone else's fault. Doesn't prepare them for healthy relationships either. Yes, life is full of consequences, and sometimes the consequences are natural. Sometimes there's social consequences. Sometimes we create them as parents too. To help our children learn. The question I keep coming back to. Is this does this consequence teach the lesson I'm hoping it teaches, or does it teach something else entirely? Does it build responsibility or does it build secrecy? Does it encourage repair or does it encourage hiding? those aren't the same things, and I want my children to understand they matter. Their thoughts matter, their feelings matter, their bodies matter. Their dignity matters and at the same time other people matter too. Other people's fears matter, other people's boundaries matter, other people's safeties matters. Healthy accountability isn't choosing one person over the other. It's teaching our children how to hold both. to understand actions affect other people without believing their mistakes make them a bad person. When a problem comes up, we solve it. Sometimes solving it means cleaning up a mess. Sometimes it means an apology, replacing what was broken. Sitting with a disappointment, helping a little girl with uneven bangs figure out what hairstyle she'll be rocking for the next few weeks until they grow back long enough to trim. because problem solving isn't just about fixing what happened. Sometimes that's not possible. It's about helping a child process what happened, how we build responsibility, how we build resilience, and maybe most importantly, it's how we build a relationship where children know they can come back to us when they're carrying the weight of a mistake. I don't only want to raise responsible adults. I want to raise adults who know accountability and love can exist in the same room. One. Back to the question: How do we raise children who tell us the truth instead of hiding their mistakes? Maybe the answer isn't teaching our children to fear consequences. Maybe it isn't removing consequences altogether. Maybe a better question is: what am I teaching my children about coming back to me after they've made a mistake? Or maybe an even harder question is: when my child messes up, whose feelings am I responding to first? Theirs or my own? Sometimes our biggest reactions have very little to do with our children. Sometimes they're about feelings. Fear of being judged, fear of getting it wrong, or fear that our mistakes somehow say something about our worth as a parent. Our children aren't responsible for protecting our image. They never were. They're learning how to become people. They're learning and we're learning right alongside them on what it means to be a leader to a small little human. Maybe accountability should have never been about humiliation. Maybe it was always meant to be about repair, repairing the relationship. Repairing mistakes when we can, repairing trust, reminding each other that making mistakes does not mean we are carrying it alone. I'd love to hear your thoughts. what helped you feel safe enough to tell the truth when you were growing up? Or if it never felt safe, what kind of relationship are you hoping to build instead? Whether you leave a comment, send me a message, or simply sit with the question yourself. I hope this conversation stays with you. Thank you for slowing down and thinking out loud with me. Remember, children won't remember whether we raise them perfectly. they'll remember what they learned about themselves when they made mistakes. I hope mine learned this. Mistakes don't end relationships. They were relationships have a chance to grow. I'll see you in the next episode.