The whimsical pushmi-pullyu's from Doctor Dolittle is a great metaphor for the internal struggles everyone faces in the human desire to be understood while also grappling with the fear of being truly known. We explore how this duality illustrates that while children yearn for connection and understanding, they may simultaneously resist it due to vulnerability concerns. We can -- and must -- embrace this complexity, advocating for intentional communication and efforts to deepen mutual understanding, even amid resistance.

Takeaways:

• The pushmi-pullyu illustrates the internal conflict between our desires to be understood and the fear of being truly known.
• Parents must engage intentionally with their children to help them feel deeply known, beyond just being caregivers.
• Children have a deep need to be understood, which can lead to emotional struggles if ignored.
• Understanding one’s child requires effort, time, and a willingness to ask meaningful questions about their inner lives.
• Even close relationships can lead to feelings of being misunderstood, as shown in Jesus' interactions with his disciples.
• Being a parent means navigating the complexities of emotional needs, including the push and pull of wanting to be known.

Empower yourself and your family to engage fully in God’s grand story. Subscribe to Hi(Impact) at Stephanie Presents for insights, encouragement, and practical resources!

Book Stephanie to speak to your women, parents, Christian educators, and students.

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#beingunderstood

Do you remember the story of the push me pullas from the story of Doctor Dolittle?

Well, if you do, you may be wondering why in the world are you talking about that on a podcast that is supposed to help parents raise kids ready for adulthood?

Oh, trust me, there is an excellent reason.

Stay tuned.

If your desire is to become spiritually stronger, emotionally healthier, and relationally smarter, you're at the right place.

Speaker and writer Stephanie Smith inspires and equips you to achieve these three key aims.

If you are a parent, you also learn how to raise empowered kids ready for adulthood.

Let's get started.

Welcome back.

I am delighted that you are here and if you are new around here, first of all, welcome.

Wonderful to have you.

And secondly, just to kind of get catch you up a little bit on Thursdays, the episodes are geared for parents and any other adults who care about the upcoming generations.

But to help parents raise kids who are ready for adulthood.

And our Tuesday episodes are focused more on individual, personal and spiritual growth, specifically in the areas of building spiritual strength, emotional health and relational smarts.

And really, that's what our kids need in order to be ready for adulthood.

So there's definitely overlap there.

Now, I began by asking about the story of Doctor Dolittle, and just in case you don't happen to be up on your childhood books, I will give you a bit of an introduction.

I'm going to read an excerpt from the book which just in case you don't know, is in the public domain.

So I'm not breaking any copyright laws by sharing this.

As a writer and a content creator, I'm pretty sensitive to keeping copyright laws.

But lets get back to our topic.

Push me pull yous are now extinct.

That means there arent any anymore.

But long ago when Doctor Dolittle was alive, there were some of them still left in the deepest jungles of Africa and even then they were very, very scarce.

They had no tail but a head at each end and sharp horns on each head.

They were very shy and terribly hard to catch.

The men get most of their animals by sneaking up behind them while they are not looking.

But you could not do this with Pushmi pullas because no matter which way you came towards him, he was always facing you.

And besides, only one half of him slept at a time.

The other head was always awake and watching.

This is why they were never caught and never seen in zoos.

Now of course this is a fanciful story and there are no real Bushmi Poly's in the world and no, there have not been any discoveries of those that have become extinct.

But, you know, a lot of times in life, we and our kids can feel like, push me.

Pull you.

There's one part of us that's pulling us this way, and there's another part of us pulling another way.

And I don't just mean this in the context of making a decision between right and wrong.

Rather, it is about our appetite, our healthy, God given appetite or desire to be understood.

Some psychologists believe that people have an even greater need to be understood than to be loved.

Now, that's debatable for certain, but, you know, it's possible to be deeply understood and unloved, but it's really not possible to be deeply loved and unknown.

Every person thirsts to be known, to be understood.

You know, being ignored stings.

It hurts.

We as humans, want to know that our presence matters.

And even if we adopt the Persona that, oh, it doesn't matter if I'm ignored, it's simply a Persona that we adopt to be protective.

It's not true.

You know, one of the common statements that you might hear from kids, and, I mean, it gets set in different ways, but it's, you know, you don't understand me or no one understands me.

And while that's probably not entirely true, the reality is we can never really fully understand another human being.

But that doesn't mean that we don't have the responsibility and the privilege to do the work to know them as best as we can.

However, while we have one part of us that wants deeply to be understood and accepted and loved, there's another part of us just like the push me, pull you that is afraid of being known and understood.

We all wrestle in some way and at different times in different intensities with the question, but what would they think if they really knew me?

And that they might be one particular individual and it might feel like it's the entire world, but one side of us pulls towards being known, and the other pushes us away from that.

So there's this internal conflict that we navigate and this tension that we navigate all through life.

And it's not really a conflict that.

That just disappears if we resolve it.

It's not that kind of conflict.

It's a tension that we have to learn to manage.

You know, the reality is that we can have a conflict with another person, and while that might be frustrating, it can at least be diminished in its frustration.

If we feel we're understood, the greater the conflict that's driven by when we feel like we're not understood, then the less likely we are to invest in solving that conflict and resolving that conflict because there's so much of a part of us that just wants to be understood.

And we want to be careful as christian parents that we don't confuse this God given desire to be understood with the sin driven demand for self promotion.

Those are not the same things.

Even though there's not always a really clear dividing line between those.

This is one of those differences that doesn't have a football field of space in between it.

It's more like it has 0.00 mm in between it and probably, maybe even some overlap.

So we'll leave it up to God to work out in a person's heart.

Okay, where are, where is a person moving for the desire for understanding because of self promotion?

And where are they walking out this God given desire?

It's interesting that when we look at the life of Jesus, he has this experience, and here he has spent three years with his disciples.

Now imagine spending three years living up close and personal with someone.

Maybe this is a spouse.

Maybe it's that you have a BFF and you are together all the time, or you are talking, you're texting, you're sharing.

Live together.

This is what Jesus does.

He's eating meals with these people.

He's going on long walks, he's going camping with them, he's having deep conversations.

Imagine if you were doing all the kinds of activities that would really draw you to someone and then after three years, you find out your friend still doesn't know you.

You know, Jesus disciples didn't just show up for like Sabbath dinners.

You know, the equivalent of maybe our Sunday dinner or meal or lunch after church.

I mean, they witnessed Jesus walking on water.

They watched him heal blind eyes.

They watched him cast out demons, restore hearing to the deaf.

And I don't know, something like raise people from the dead.

I mean, what more could they be looking for in order to have a conclusion and to understand who Jesus was?

And yet three and a half years of life together.

Extraordinary.

Never before, never since up close and personal life with the very God, the son of God.

And yet here they are.

They're at their final Passover meal together.

Now, they don't know what's their final Passover meal together on earth, but Jesus does.

And Jesus is here.

And what's he doing?

He is scrubbing their stinky, soiled feet.

He's telling them about the upcoming betrayal that he's going to experience.

And he is also comforting them with promises about their destiny.

In John 14, seven through nine we read where Jesus says if you had known me you would have known my father also.

From now on you do know him and have seen him.

And one of his disciples Philip responds to him and says Lord, show us the father and it will be enough for us.

And Jesus says to him have I been so long with you and you still don't know me?

Philip, whoever has seen me has seen the father.

And how can you say show us the Father?

I mean can you hear the frustration, the sadness?

It's like Jesus is going really guys, all this time and you're still not sure who I am.

And what's especially interesting about Philip being the one to make this statement is that earlier in the gospels, matter of fact in the very first chapter of John in verse 45, he goes and tells his buddy Nathanael hey we have found him, of whom Moses and the law and also the prophets write Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.

So it seems like at the very beginning of Jesus ministry and Philips relationship with Jesus he seems to recognize hey this is the christ, the messiah.

And yet three and a half years later this same guy is questioning who Jesus is.

Jesus didn't need his disciples to understand him, to secure his identity or affirm his role, but he knew how important it was for his companions to know who he was and it saddened him when they didn't.

And I wonder if a few hours later when every single one of those disciples abandoned Jesus in the garden and then later when he was put on trial in this crucifixion.

I wonder if during those times when they all love Jesus if part of that wasn't because they didn't really have clarity about who he was.

You know our children need two things from us.

They desperately need to know who we are and that's only going to happen with time and nearness and effort, that's the only way it happens.

It's not just enough to be near and it's not just enough to spend enough time with them.

There has to be intentionality about revealing yourself and to engaging with your children in ways so they actually get to know you.

Not just as mom, not just as dad, not just as a caregiver, they get to know you as a person.

Do you know there's something very good about your kids learning that you're actually a human being.

It's kind of like once you become mom or dad for your kids it's kind of like you're not really a person.

I mean, if you're a mom, you're not.

You're not really a woman.

I mean, you're a mom.

And then as they get older, it's in their adult.

It's kind of like then they begin to realize, oh, you're.

You're actually like a person.

And you actually were a person before you became a mom.

And the same is, you know, is true for dad.

So there's.

There's value, even when your children are young and they're still in your home and growing up and being intentional to let them know you as a person, not just as a parent.

The second thing that our kids desperately need in order to be this person of emotional health, relational smarts, and spiritual strength is they need to be known.

First of all, they need to be known by you.

Now, you might be thinking, oh, well, of course.

I mean, that's just a given.

They're my kids.

Let me say this.

Just because they are your kids doesn't mean you know them.

The reality is that we can never fully know what someone else is experiencing and thinking in their hearts and in their minds all the time.

Earlier this week, on the Tuesday episode, I shared, it's a true story, and I'm not exaggerating this in the least.

It was a true story of how as a kid, I sat in church, and over a period of time, I calculated I would just have to become a drug addict.

It wasn't that I had this great desire to do this or to do drugs or anything like that.

It was because I had concluded that the way that you could impact the world for Jesus was you had to have this extraordinary testimony.

And because of what I was exposed to as extraordinary testimonies, I concluded that meant I had to have enough of a life of sin, had to be bad enough in terms of quantity, and it had to be long enough in terms of time that it was a credible testimony.

And then I would come back to Jesus, and then, and that would give me the power to impact people's lives, because I would have this amazing testimony.

I can guarantee you no one.

My parents had no clue that I am sitting in church, second view, piano side, and I am plotting about how I must become a drug addict now.

Okay, just to be clear, I did grow up.

My brain matured, and I didn't actually follow through on that plan.

But it was, it wasn't just a one time passing thought.

I mean, this was a serious mental and emotional struggle for me for a long period of time.

No one knew what was going on in my heart and mind.

And I can guarantee you, if you're a parent, there are things going on in your kid's heart and mind that you don't have a clue in the world about.

One of the stories that I share in my talk on boys is how, with my oldest son, he was an avid reader, and then he hit a certain age, and he just really lost interest in.

In reading the type of books and things that he had before.

And it wasn't because he was sitting on video games.

And I did not investigate what was really going on in his heart and his mind.

I did the terrible thing.

If I just made an assumption.

After all, I'm his mom.

Not only am I his mom, I'm a stay at home mom.

Not only am I a stay at home mom, I am a home educating mom.

I mean, I couldn't have been around this kid anymore, and we had conversations, and I'm overseeing his education and all this kind of stuff.

Well, I allowed my proximity to be confused with intimacy.

I allowed the fact that I was around him so much, with so much time that that was all I needed.

I needed time and I needed nearness.

Well, that was not the case.

You have to have this third component, and that is effort.

You have to have intentionality.

And what I did with my son was I just made a conclusion about why he.

He quit reading.

Well, years go by, and we just happened to be in this conversation one day, and this subject came up, and I asked him about it, and he said, you know, I just.

I read all of these great stories and these adventure books and.

And these things that.

That people had accomplished.

And he liked to read history and a lot of biographies.

So he wasn't just reading, like, fantasy.

He was reading about real people and accomplishments that they had had.

And he said, you know, I read about all of this, and I could never see myself being capable of the types of things I was reading about.

And it hurt so much.

I just quit reading.

Okay.

Did you just hear that thud?

Because that is still my heart hitting the floor like loser mom.

I mean, I missed it.

I missed an incredible opportunity at a pivotal time in his life where if I had put forth the effort to really investigate what was going on with him, to understand him and why there was this change in his reading, oh, what a difference that might have have made.

It doesn't mean that all of a sudden that he would have had a great love for reading restored, but, oh, there were definitely things that I could have done to encourage him to, and to become aware of what was going on in his heart.

So, moms and dads, even if you are heavily invested in your, in your children, don't make my mistake.

Don't repeat my mistake.

Don't think that just because you are with them, don't think that just because you have enough time with them that that means that you really know and understand them.

One of the questions that I began asking my sons when they were older, when I think I actually didn't start this until they were adults and some of them maybe in their very, very late adolescent years.

So I wish I had thought about this earlier.

Now, you know, this isn't probably a question for a three year old, but you can think of different questions that would be appropriate at the seasons of your child's life, and you can come up with your own question.

But the question that I came up that I began to ask, and I still ask this sometimes, and that is, how are you doing in your soul?

That's a very different question than how are you doing?

Because when it gets to how are you doing in your soul, that is, opens the door if somebody wants to, to make themselves known and to, to learn about someone else and to really enter into a depth of understanding with them.

Now, those are not the kind of questions that you just toss out over a plate of pancakes as you are rushing to get kids, you know, ready for school or out the door for soccer practice or whatever.

And that's definitely not a question that you ever ask in any kind of accusatory or angry way because you will have then totally lost the potential to ask that question in a positive way forever.

It has to be in the right setting, and it absolutely has to be with the right heart.

But your kids need to be known, deeply known, and that starts with you.

But they also need to have experiences of being deeply known by others.

And that is not going to happen by default.

And I encourage you to be intentional about putting people in your kids lives and whether that's friends, whether that's extended family, whether that's mentors.

And this isn't just like throwing them out there, you know, into the wild, but it's paying attention.

Who are the people that can be present in your child, in your children's life, who really want to get to know them and who are going to handle that knowledge in an appropriate, loving, caring way?

Now, you don't want to hand that off as a parenthood.

Certainly when our kids get to be adolescents, the, the primacy of friendships begins to rise to the surface, and there is an appropriateness to that.

But you, even during that time, what you don't want to do is just to acquiesce your role in knowing them and in letting them to know you entirely to their peers.

You still want to be the parent, even though how you show up as a parenthood might look a little different.

And as you seek to invest the time, the proximity, the nearness and the effort in getting to know your kids, just remember, you're going to get a push me pull you response.

Sometimes.

They are going to pull you in, they're going to open up, and when they do, you need to handle that with care, even if internally you are like quaking on the inside.

Trust me, with five sons, there were things that I walked through with them.

There were decisions that they made.

And I'm not just.

I'm not talking here about immoral decisions, I mean just decisions about things that I didn't.

It wasn't how I grew up, it wasn't what I thought I would be dealing with.

And they would tell me things, or they might tell me things about beliefs that they would have for a period of time.

And internally I am thinking, are you kidding me?

What idiocy is that?

Or, you know, things along those lines, but you learn as a parent to keep those things inside and on the outside.

You say, really?

Okay, explain that to me.

Tell me more.

You engage in a conversation with them and then you leave and you go to your room and you shut the door and you fall on your knees and you desperately cry out to God in prayer to please straighten them out.

And I say that with some jazz, but I also say that with a lot of sincerity as well.

And there are other times that you are going to make the efforts to get to know your child and you are going to experience them pushing you away.

You're going to get the push me pull.

It's going to come.

You cannot make your decisions about this need that they have based on their responses.

You just can't do it.

You just need to keep showing up day in and day out when you have those times.

And it might be a conversation, it might be a season of life where they are pulling you in, and it might be a conversation, or it might be a season of life where you feel like it's nothing but pushing you out.

Just know the push me pull you effect is going to be there.

And it.

It should not have an impact on your decision to continue to meet this need because it's a need that they have and all of us have.

We want to be known.

And at the same time, it can be pretty terrifying to be known.

But knowing others and being known is part of how God does his work of redemption and restoration within us.

And that is part of how we love God with our whole being, with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind, and with all of our strength.

Okay, my friend, that's going to wrap us up.

Hey, if you haven't already, you need to make sure that you go to the website.

You need to just do that today.

If you've been listening to this podcast for a while and you're like, oh, yeah, I keep meaning to do that.

I have to.

Okay, you know what?

Just.

Just stop what you're doing.

Okay, well, okay.

If you're driving down the highway, don't stop in the middle of the highway and pull out your phone.

All right?

I will trust that you will pick a more suitable time, but as soon as you can and it's safe and it's wise, stop what you're doing.

Go to the website Stephanie presents.com and sign up for my weekly newsletter, high impact.

Why?

Because I want to help you maximize your immeasurable, eternal, and irreplaceable impact.

I'll see you next time.

Thank you for listening.

Visit the website stephaniepresents.com and sign up for high impact to join the mission of building spiritually strong, emotionally healthy, and relationally smart women and families.

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Together, we can invite and equip generations to engage fully in God's grand story.