Tag Archives: family

Podcast Episode: Raising Kids, Raising Ourselves: Something To Chew On For Trusting Adult Role Models And The Teens In Their Lives

Posted on by under Consciousness, Spirituality, Uncategorized
Father and child sitting on the floor playing with toys near a window
A father tenderly plays with his child by the window surrounded by toys.

Pip: Classroom Mothership Earth — where the curriculum includes teenagers, trauma, and the quiet radical act of taking care of yourself.

Mara: Today we’re drawing on Ari Joshua Bouse’s writing on the relationship between adult role models and the teens in their lives — the neuroscience, the self-care, the community scaffolding that holds it all together.

Pip: Let’s start with what it actually takes to show up for a teenager.

Raising Kids, Raising Ourselves

Mara: This piece opens with a question that sits underneath the whole thing: what does it mean to be a trustworthy adult in a teenager’s life, and what do adults need to do for themselves before they can be that?

Pip: The post anchors that question in something personal — a grandmother raising five teenagers through the turbulent sixties, holding the household together through poverty and trauma, without a roadmap. And from that comes a line that reframes the whole adult role: “it is incumbent on we parents, caregivers, teachers, coaches and mentors to be good role models of those coping skills and strategies.”

Mara: So the upshot is that modeling isn’t a bonus feature of good parenting — it’s the mechanism. If adults want teens to build resilience, regulate their emotions, practice mindfulness, the adults have to be doing that work visibly, in front of them.

Pip: Which is where self-care stops sounding like a spa weekend and starts sounding like a professional obligation.

Mara: Exactly — and the post is direct about the stakes. A teen acting out doesn’t just affect the teen. It stresses the whole family system, which means the adults’ mental health is part of the equation too. The recommendation is concrete: talk to your primary care doctor, consider a family therapist, treat your own maintenance the way you’d treat a car’s oil change.

Pip: That analogy does a lot of heavy lifting for something you’d find on a bumper sticker.

Mara: It lands, though. The post also describes the school-side infrastructure that supports this — a multidisciplinary team including principals, counselors, a school resource officer, a social worker, and a nurse, working from a trauma-informed and restorative justice lens. The point being that the village is real and already partly built.

Pip: And the post is clear that the village doesn’t replace parental authority — it supports it. Youth empowerment means teens having a voice, not teens running the household.

Mara: Right. The post closes on neuroscience: teens are actually at a uniquely receptive stage for mindfulness practice because of where their brains are developmentally. The “upstairs brain” versus “downstairs brain” framing — prefrontal cortex versus amygdala — is the practical model for why co-regulation between adults and teens matters so much right now.

Pip: So the whole thing is really one argument: you can’t hand a teenager a coping skill you haven’t practiced yourself.

Mara: The thread running through all of this is that the adults and the kids are in the same developmental moment — just at different stages of it.

Pip: More to come from Classroom Mothership Earth. We’ll be back.

Raising Kids, Raising Ourselves: Something To Chew On For Trusting Adult Role Models and The Teens In Their Lives

A Positive Thing A Family Member Has Done For Me

Posted on by under Uncategorized
Elderly man handing grocery bags to a woman and child at the door

I remember when Grandfather would sometimes stop by for a surprise visit with some bags of groceries during my Elementary School days.

There was plenty more good that he did while our lifetimes intersected, but this experience still lights up my soul to this day.

Grandfather was a gifted storyteller, witty and could be charming. But more often than not, he was stoic, humble, the strong silent time, and didn’t do drama.

But he had a big presence, and when he showed up, he would smile and say something like, “well, I was just in the neighborhood and I thought maybe you guys could use some groceries.” At that time in my life, my Grandparents didn’t live more than a 5 minute drive away.

Of course like we’ve all heard; growing up being raised by a single parent wasn’t easy for me, nor is it on anyone else.

But extended family played a significant role in my life, and this example of how Grandfather looked out for us has always stuck with me.

During this time period in their life cycle, my maternal grandparents were in a more comfortable position in their lives financially. By this time, they were empty nesters, expanded their social network, and had the opportunity to travel the planet and experience different cultures. I always appreciated how they would often bring me back a new t-shirt that I would proudly sport at school. Fashion has never been my bug, but I always felt like those t-shirts externally reinforced my intrinsic uniqueness.

Grandfather had been orphaned by the untimely death of both of his parents by the time he was 19. He would always say that “we were poor but didn’t know we were poor. We had food to eat, and we played and had fun as kids.” And then he would always say that Grandmother grew up a different kind of poor, as in, Appalachia like abject poverty. She never saw a dentist till she was 18, when she walked in a clinic off the street with bleeding gums and no money to pay for dental care.

These days, many people, like my own daughter, still tend to call themselves adults by 18 or so. But the truth is that we are still adolescents till our mid-20s from a developmental and psychological perspective.

College wasn’t an option for either of my grandparents or their peers from their old St. Louis neighborhoods back then. Later in life, they would tell stories about their newer peer network who went to college, how they had dreamed about their own children going to college someday, and then me by the time I came along.

Parenting back then; especially for folks that grew up like my grandparents, involved a lot of financial stress and winging it. Of course there’s still plenty of all that in parenthood today.

As I got older, I remember asking Grandfather about consciously envisioning a life plan or planned parenthood back when they were starting out as a couple. And Grandfather would chuckle and say, “naw…but sometimes we’d look around and say, what the hell are we doing with all these kids?”

These days, many folks are familiar with the term Food Insecurity to describe the anxiety that connects to the insecurity about when or where your next meal might come from, if at all.

In my case, I had the good fortune to grow up around all kinds of people from diverse racial, ethnic, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Some of my peers at school arrived from other lands with English not being their first language. At that time, the land we all lived in was called the MidWest.

And it wasn’t lost on me that I was only a fragile step away from what some of my peers were going through, who were part of the Cycle of Poverty, on the fringe or falling through the cracks.

But the difference in my case was that I was privileged to have someone like Grandfather looking out for my mom and me.

Finally, it is with a deep sense of appreciation and gratitude that I feel for the way that Grandfather chose to look after us, even though he wasn’t obligated to.