High-achieving parenting often comes with the weight of expectations, not just from society but also from within ourselves. In this episode of the Where Parents Talk podcast, host Lianne Castelino delves into how these pressures can impact both our emotional health and our children's well-being with her guest, Kate Kripke.

A licensed clinical social, maternal and maternal wellness expert, Kripke shares strategies on how to foster emotional resilience in our kids while navigating the challenges of modern parenting, including the influence of social media and device usage.

The discussion explores the intricate connections between how we perceive our own self-worth and how it affects our children’s self-esteem, especially in the context of their mental health and social interactions.

Kripke, a speaker, author, podcaster and mother of two teens, unpacks the significance of communication, consent in relationships, and the importance of prioritizing both physical and emotional health for ourselves and our children.

Takeaways:

• High achieving parents often project their own insecurities onto their children, impacting their emotional health.
• Emotional awareness and self-compassion are essential for parents to model healthy communication to their children.
• Navigating parenting requires balancing discipline with emotional support, especially in today's competitive environment.
• Understanding how our feelings influence our parenting style can help break the cycle of anxiety and perfectionism.
• Parents must prioritize their own mental health to foster their children's emotional resilience and independence.
• Engaging in open conversations about feelings teaches children the importance of consent and healthy relationships.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Calm Connection System
• Kate Kripke

This podcast is for parents, guardians, teachers and caregivers to learn proven strategies and trusted tips on raising kids, teens and young adults based on science, evidenced and lived experience.

In this podcast, we explore the impact of hormonal changes, device usage, and social media on discipline, communication, and independence.

You’ll learn the latest on topics like managing bullying, consent, fostering healthy relationships, and the interconnectedness of mental, emotional and physical health.

Links referenced in this episode:

• whereparentstalk.com

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Lianne Castelino.

Are you a high achieving parent? Do expectations of yourself manifest in your children? Are your expectations of your children anxiety inducing? Welcome to Where Parents Talk.

My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is a licensed clinical social worker and a certified perinatal mental health counselor.

Kate Kripke helps support the emotional well being of mothers from conception onwards. She's also an author, a podcast host, a speaker, and the founder of the Calm Connection System.

Kate is also a mother of two teenagers and she joins us today from Boulder, Colorado. Thank you so much for taking the time, Leanne.

I'm really thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.

We are talking about a subject that many parents, especially today, can likely relate to and that is high achieving parenting. What, first of all, is a high achieving parent?

Great question. High achieving parents are those of us who set our sights on reaching our goals and meeting achievements above and beyond everything else.

So that's those of us who have sort of tend towards perfectionist thinking, all or nothing thinking, really high expectations of ourselves.

And often what really determines whether or not I consider someone a high achiever is are their achievements and their goals the basis from which they determine their sense of self? So sometimes these moms that are high achievers might also be career driven, sometimes not.

But definitely those of us who strive really high and will do whatever we can to meet our goals, even if that effort is actually getting in the way of how we want to feel.

So then the next question that follows from what you just said then is how can a high achieving parent impact their child be that both positively or negatively?

Yeah, great question. I want to preface this whole conversation by making sure that we are not creating a situation for shame and blame for any of your listeners.

Because it is really easy when we ask ourselves those hard questions as parents and mothers to go into a spiral of not being good enough or failing. And of course, the tricky part is that that tends to be the deep hidden thought process of many high achievers already. Right?

Good, bad, right, wrong, all, nothing. And so let's just set the tone of we're all in this together, none of us are going to be perfect.

However, I do think it's really important that we as parents understand that how we feel about ourselves, those deep hidden Underlying beliefs which are often fear based. What if I'm not good enough? What if I fail? What if something bad happens? What if I'm not okay? Right.

That those deep fear based beliefs and questions we have about ourselves will get projected onto our kids. Because our deepest beliefs, unconscious beliefs, lead to how we think on a conscious basis.

The kind of thoughts we have, the responses to life, those thoughts lead to how we feel emotionally. Our emotions motivate behavior and our behaviors, which are often habits, often very unconscious habits. Those habits lead to the results of our life.

So if we're parenting our kids from a place of feeling, like my success in parenting determines whether or not I feel good about myself. We're going to unintentionally get so hooked into the goal being the primary focus instead of the process of building relationships.

Does that make sense?

It does.

And what comes to me as you describe it is having the self awareness to know that one, you're a high achiever, two, that you might be projecting these emotions and sort of expectations on your kids. What do you suggest to parents to come to that self realization in the first place in order to then address it?

Yeah, I am a big advocate of listening to our bodies.

I will say that most of high achieving folks, and again, not everyone, but many of us who are high achievers have learned to be high achievers because slowing down invites feeling and emotions. And we probably are also folks who have not been taught that emotions are not the problem.

So we do whatever we can to not feel those unpleasant feelings, including jump in our head to find the right answers or analyze things or look at our to do list. To do more, to achieve more. And so one of the things that I think happens, especially in parenthood is that we cannot avoid the unpleasant feelings.

We cannot avoid them. And to begin to notice, well, first of all, asking ourselves the questions, what was I taught about uncomfortable emotions when I was a child?

And what have I learned to do?

To jump out of uncomfortable situations, Whether that's uncertainty or unpredictability or worry or sadness or disappointment, and to begin to notice that when we feel discomfort in our body, what happens next for us? What do we quote, unquote do next?

Because if you notice that you jump into analytical thinking or problem solving or getting up out of your seat to do something on your to do list or find some other big achievement to focus on, that's probably a sign that you're missing. From my perspective, one of the important, most important parts of being human, which is the wisdom of our emotions and our Kids feel so much.

So if we don't know how to sit with our own emotions, it's going to be real hard to sit with our kiddos emotions.

There's so much in that, right there is how you were raised, how you were taught to manage your own emotions.

Now dealing with a different generation, there's the idea that we live in a world that is ultra, some would argue, competitive, you know, toxic achievement is just a built in facet of the world we live in. So what you're describing in many ways is turning all of that off. And that is not a small item.

So what can a small first step in your estimation look like?

Yeah, although I want to just suggest that I'm not sure turning it all off is either a fair expectation or a realistic one. And that's certainly not what I am inviting people to do. That's certainly not what I have done.

I mean I am a born high achiever and have really hard to had to work with what motherhood has looked like for me because when my kids were little and I was trying to keep up and do everything I was quote unquote supposed to do and raise these perfect little humans who were also very successful. I mean, I, I, I, I, there's, we can't turn it off.

We just need to get curious about the impact that that is having in us and how it's influencing the choices that we're making. So for instance, a introductory, introductory question that I ask myself all the time, I invite everyone to ask themselves is what part?

First of all, what's not working for me in my life? Sometimes we're not even pausing enough to ask that question, right? How am I feeling and how do I want to feel?

Which is a very different question than many high achievers ask. What many high achievers ask is what do I want my life to look like? What do I want to do? And that is a very intellectual analytical question.

It involves doing and achieving. Just in the question there's, you know, flavors of high achievement, right? But when we ask how do I want to feel and how am I feeling?

Now that's a brave question because I think it requires us to slow down and sit with vulnerability, which again, many of us were not taught was okay to do. The question that follows that is what part might I be playing in the things that aren't working for me?

And this is not where am I to blame and how is this my fault? I do not want anyone to ask those questions. But what part might I be playing?

I think a lot of us do not recognize that we are fueling unintentionally, of course, a lot of the anxiety, guilt and burnout that we feel in motherhood. And that's where we get to ask ourselves, what am I telling myself it means to be a good mom? What's my definition of good mothering? Quote unquote.

Right. But again, I want us to consider the possibility of looking at this from a feeling based perspective versus a doing and achieving based perspective.

And we can't turn off the society and culture's external pressures. They are there.

I mean, Lord knows we are in a generation of parents who believes that if we're not participating in everything in our children's lives, we're letting them down somehow. Right. And yet feelings are never the problem.

So if we can sit back and consider the possibility that our emotional discomfort is not a problem and our children's emotional discomfort is not a problem, then we can open up more room to ask ourselves, what choices am I making that it's leading me to feeling so stressed and tense and tight and burnt out?

Certainly a very important distinction when you talk about doing versus feeling. That's a great way to think about it. Your work with maternal wellness, Kate, has spanned several decades.

At this point, I'm curious as to what you are seeing with respect to current trends as it relates to high achieving women who become moms and what they're. They're telling you.

Yeah, I mean, the trend is a fast paced one in which high achievers will think to themselves, what do I need to give my child and provide my child with so that they are, quote, unquote, okay.

And I think the definition of okay often is, is, you know, feeling good all the time, being at the top of the class, having all the opportunities that maybe they didn't have. Right. A lot of it is about, again, it's sort of about this image of well being, but the image is from looking from the outside in. Right.

What does it look like to have a successful child Now?

I think there are many mothers, whether they're stay at home moms or working moms, who have been led to believe, not from a malicious place, but because of the data coming out around child mental health, that children need to be seen, heard and understood. Right. We all are hearing that across platforms. Right.

There's gentle parenting, there's attachment parenting, there's, you know, this idea that we need to be having these really important conversations with our kids all the time. It is, when we look at that from a perspective of doing it is unachievable because we're trying to, quote, unquote, do it all.

I invite people to step back and ask that question again, how do I want my child to move through this world? Most of us are going to say brave, resilient, emotionally intelligent.

And we forget that that kind of child development and success in children requires emotional challenge.

So what I'm hearing, to circle back to your question, is moms coming to me who are almost saying I don't have time to have this support because there's too much to do.

This idea that my job is to take care of everything outside of me first and foremost, because taking care of myself, a I have no time or it's selfish or there's too much to do. And then we miss the point, which is that it is literally impossible to show up for our children the way we want to if we're burnt out.

So it is sort of this inside out perspective versus outside in perspective about thinking about, again, how do I want to feel as a mother and a woman and a human and a participant in this larger society? And what are the choices that I'm making or the thoughts I'm engaging in that are getting me farther away from that or closer to that?

So again, I think it's just this increased pressure to do, do, do, do without realizing that the feeling in there, it's the emotional part of mothering parenting that is the most helpful for our children. We need to slow down and be present with them in those moments or we're not teaching them how to be emotionally resilient.

I kind of feel like I went all over the place with that question. But does that answer the question?

It does. It does. And it does provide context generally.

And it also begs the question when it comes to anxiety, because you talked about how we feel about ourselves is often how our kids will see themselves as well. Yes.

Many parents believe when it comes to anxiety that by hiding their own stress, they are protecting their kids and hiding it from their children. Kate, can you give us a sense of how do children absorb and internalize their parents anxiety?

This is my favorite question and I am so glad you're asking. And again, it's a perfect question for that high achieving parent who's trying to quote, unquote, do everything right.

Maternal and child mental health, parental and child mental health. But I mostly work with moms, or I work all with moms. I should say maternal and child mental health are intimately connected. Why?

Because we communicate safety to the world, to our children through our emotional energy. And I don't mean this necessarily. Woo. Although of course you can think about that if you want to.

But minuscule facial expressions, body odor, muscle tension, tone of voice, breath patterns. How we're feeling on the inside is exhibited in many ways to our children.

We want to be teaching our children that having a vast experience of emotions is healthy. In fact, the definition of mental health is that our internal landscape, what we're feeling inside, matches what's happening outside. Right?

So we want to make sure our children know that it is okay to feel worried, scared, uncertain, disappointed, sad, angry. Many of us think that's bad. To show our parents that we feel that way because ironically, we don't want to contribute to their emotional discomfort.

However, when we say we're feeling one thing but exhibiting something else, this is incredibly confusing to children because they feel what we feel. Mirror neurons, exchange of body energy.

You know, little children who sit in our lap, they feel all the things that we don't even realize we're putting off again, the temperature of our skin, our body tension, our body odor, our tone of voice. And quite frankly, the biggest mistake we might make when a child says, mommy, are you sad? Or mommy, what's wrong? Is to say, nothing, I'm fine.

Because we're inadvertently teaching our children two things. Number one, it's not okay to feel sad or disappointed or whatever it is that we're actually feeling.

And two, we're teaching them not to trust their intuition. Best thing we can do is with total authenticity, say, yes, I'm feeling, fill in the blank.

And then, and here's what I'm going to do to be taking care of myself so that we're offering that both and I can feel hard things and still be okay.

So along those same lines, Kate, what are some practical science based strategies that parents can look to to regulate their own emotions in moments of stress and overwhelm?

Beautiful. First thing I want to remind everybody about is that our bodies don't know the difference between real and perceived threat.

Our physiology does not know the difference between real and perceived threat. And 99% of the time what we're telling ourselves is a problem is not a cris. It might be a situation that needs some figuring out.

And it might be really uncomfortable or really inconvenient, but not necessarily a quote unquote problem.

So I say that to folks to really remind people how important it is to pay attention to what you are thinking during the time that you're noticing your body feel tense and tight. And that's the other important practice that I Think many doers and shakers and high achievers are not used to which is coming into our body.

How am I feeling in my body? Because our body tense, tight, hot, you know, achy or you know, relaxed, open. Sometimes there's a bit of effervescence.

If we're feeling something that's not, you know, a fear based feeling, those feelings are going to tell us what we can do next. To access parasympathetic nervous system response. Sympathetic fight, flight or freeze Parasympathetic rest and digest.

So one thing is just to get curious, what is happening in my body? We know that from a parenting perspective, it doesn't matter what we say and it doesn't matter what we do.

What matters is the, the nervous system response from which those words are coming from. And so before we parent our children, we literally want to be, this is a big term.

So I don't want your listeners to overthink it, but parent our, ourselves. What can I do in this moment to tend to my own nervous system? I do have a bit of a three step practice for this. Can I share it with your listeners?

Yes.

Okay.

And this is all based on the evidence and the science about nervous system management and parenting, but it is three steps and I call it the three Cs. And the three Cs are a process to move from unpleasant emotion back to more pleasant emotion.

Another way to say this is to move from sympathetic nervous system response. Right? Fight, flight, freeze to rest and digest. Calm, steady, grounded.

Again, to remind folks, which your listeners may already know, when we're in a state of fight, flight or freeze nervous system response, our limbic brain is on, is the one that's making, you know, it's reactive frontal cortex, rational thought, logical thinking, creatively, problem solving. We can't access that if we're in a state of fight, flight or freeze.

So whatever comes next, if we want it to be intentional and grounded and useful, we've got to quiet that part of our brain that thinks there's a big problem here. So the three C's first question.

And this is for, for all of us when we're in these moments of like, you know, noticing our, our, our, our nervous system begin to escalate, right? We're getting, beginning to get irritated. We're beginning to feel anxious about something.

We're beginning to feel the, the sort of heat of disappointment or anger. First question, first C. Curiosity. What am I feeling in my body?

Sometimes I ask this question, Leanne and my clients will say I'm feeling like my Child never listens. Which of course is not a feeling. That's a thought. So the first question is literally, what am I feeling? Ah, my.

My chest feels tight, my jaw is clenched, I'm having a hard time breathing. What emotion is that? I'm really frustrated. I'm feeling anxious or worried. That first C is so important.

And again, many of us who are taught that it's not safe or not okay to feel unpleasant emotion will not take the time to ask that question because we're really wanting to lean into the feeling. From the assumption, which is science backed, that the feelings are never the problem.

They can be really uncomfortable, really inconvenient, but not a problem. And not a problem for adults with fully functioning brains. Right?

We know that children actually don't have the brain capacity to process big emotion on their own, which is part of why we're doing this. Because if our children struggle, if our child is struggling, we want to be able to sit steady with them through their struggle.

What am I feeling in my body? What emotion is that? Second c. Compassion. So much research on the value of self compassion in nervous system management.

Self compassion means meeting ourselves where we are. It's not cheerleading. Come on, you can do this. You're doing fine, right? It's gonna get better.

It's truly allowing ourselves to feel exactly as we feel. We won't have time to get into something I'm gonna mention here on this call.

But many of us have these beliefs I keep mentioning about emotions being bad and not being okay. And it's really important to be able to challenge those beliefs that you may have learned when you were a child.

Because the second part, compassion, means we're going to give ourselves permission to feel exactly what we're feeling. Of course I'm feeling this way.

I've asked my child three times to do their homework or put their shoes on, or come to the dinner table or stop throwing food or whatever it is. Of course I'm feeling frustrated. My feeling makes sense. I'm in a moment. I do not know what to do.

My child is crying and I can't figure out how to settle my child. Of course I'm feeling anxious. Our brains are wired to feel anxious in times of uncertainty and unpredictability.

So that second C is truly about just meeting ourselves where we are. Once we've done those two things, we can move on to choice.

Many of us, the reason we will high achievers, especially the reason we'll get sort of quote unquote scared of giving ourselves permission to feel what we're feeling is because we're afraid we're going to get all consumed by it and there's no time. Right. How often I hear that from my clients. I don't have time to feel the feeling. I've got too much to do. Right.

There's data around the passing of feelings, too. 90 seconds. If we let ourselves feel those feelings, it doesn't take a whole lot of time.

But that third c, we finally get to say, okay, how do I want to feel? This is where agency comes in.

And there's a lot of data that talks about how when we feel like we do not have choice and control, our nervous system escalates. This is for us, and this is for our children. So this third c choice gets us back into agency. How do I want to feel in this moment?

I don't want to feel overwhelmed. I don't want to feel ragey. I don't want to feel terrified. I want to feel grounded. I want to feel calm. I want to feel connected to my child. Great.

What are the thoughts we can engage in that will get us closer to that feeling? I can remind myself that feelings are not the problem.

I can, you know, remind myself that my child is a child and all of their behaviors are reflections of how they feel. And kids feel big feelings all the time. I can remind myself that I'm literally doing the best I can in this moment.

These are thoughts that might help us feel more grounded. And then the action steps, the choices. This is so important because we can't have all this just live in our brain. We need to pull this into action.

What baby step actions can I take that will move me from overwhelmed and ragey and exhausted to calm and connected and maybe a little more confident? Well, I can put my hand on my heart and take a deep breath. I can pick up my child and go stand outside in the sunshine and, you know, move, move.

You know, move the. The environment that we're in. I can get down at my child's level and look them in the eye and reflect back to them. Wow.

We are both having a really hard time right now, aren't we? I can drink a glass of water. I can put on some music.

I mean, there's all kinds of things that we can do that will help us shift from that more unpleasant emotion to that more pleasant emotion. What gets in the way for many high achievers is this idea of time. Not having time. This is a big thing for many high achievers.

There's not enough time.

The irony is that when we Take the quote, unquote, time to slow down, allow for the feeling, meet ourselves where we are and take a step, small baby step action. Everything after that moves more easily. So it's not about not feeling the first feeling.

It's about giving ourselves permission to access other feelings at the same time. That makes sense.

It does. And you've done such an incredible job of laying it out in terms of providing the context and sort of approaches for parents.

Kate, if you were to leave high achieving parents with one thing that they need to be aware of.

Yeah.

In raising a child in today's high achieving culture, what would that be?

This is a painful realization and a deeply empowering one.

How I feel about myself, really underneath all the layers that I've put on myself throughout my years of becoming successful in this world, how I feel about myself is how I will feel about my child. And how I feel about my child is how they will feel about themselves. Let me give you an example.

If I believe I'm not good enough, which by the way, is a deeply buried, subconscious, learned belief for many high achievers. It is one of those deep beliefs that motivates all the hard work that has led to deep success in our lives. Right.

Let me prove to the world that this thing I'm most afraid of is not true. Right. If I believe that about myself. Confirmation bias.

All kinds of brain functions that we neuro, neuroscientists have been studied forever, that will get projected onto my child. If I don't believe I'm good enough, I will see evidence in the world of not good enough, including in my child. If I. And by the way, this is so.

One of the reasons this is so painful is because we are not aware, we are not actively choosing this. It's just that the lens, right. How we feel inside is what is projected out into the world around us. It's what we see.

If I see that in my child, and this can manifest is as my child isn't sleeping well enough, my child isn't eating well enough, my child isn't behaving well enough, my child isn't doing well enough in school, my child doesn't look the way I want and need them to look. Right. All these things that we are not intending to cause harm, it's just what our brain is doing.

And as we parent from that place, we're sending an unintentional message to our child that they're not enough. This realization, Leanne, changed my mothering of my two daughters. I was raised in a family of major Perfectionists with a lot of anxiety.

And from the outside, no one would have thought that there was emotional challenge inside the four walls of our house. But I was raised by two lawyers who were very anxious parents who led to being these high achievers.

And I was a little girl who was raised with that same sense of necessity to prove to the world that I also was good enough.

And as soon as I had my little girls and I started to watch with what I want to call neutral curiosity, not judgmental curiosity, but true like reflection, reflective curiosity, where I'm just wondering, I began to watch them and began to notice that they were doing things to make sure that I felt okay.

Which on the one hand is kind of awesome because it means I have really well behaved children, right, because they're sort of behaving in a way that they know will help me feel good. But I was determined to make sure I wasn't raising two daughters to have the same anxiety I had growing up.

So I do think it can be really hard to slow down and ask ourselves these questions.

But once we begin to notice that this again, what part might I be playing in the things that aren't working for me to begin to back up and say, hang a second with true self compassion and curiosity, Can I ask myself the really hard questions?

And can I do my own work around learning how to truly believe that I am enough, that I am good enough, that I am okay, even when I feel hard things that I can that.

That I can feel trusting of myself and confident regardless of whether or not I get that promotion or get the, you know, admiration from others or have the perfect house or whatever it is, can I still feel okay about myself on the inside? Once I've done that work, the messages I send to my child are going to be very different.

We've just scratched the surface, Kate, and certainly it is such an incredibly important topic when we think about where we find ourselves in the world today. But we have run out of time. I want to thank you, Kate Kripke, a licensed clinical social worker, maternal wellness expert, author and podcaster.

Really appreciated your time and your perspective today.

Thanks for your questions. Yeah. Loved being here.

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