This episode dives into the well-known adage "It takes a village to raise a child", exploring its relevance and application in contemporary Western society. I shared personal experiences of initially resisting assistance in parenting, reflecting a common societal mindset that equates accepting help with inadequacy. Through recounting moments of realisation and change, the discussion highlights the importance of allowing others to contribute to child-rearing, not only for the parent's benefit but also for the child's development of secure attachments with multiple caregivers and family members.

In this episode, emphasis is placed on the need for a collective approach to parenting, encouraging listeners to open their parenting "village" to include partners, family members, and wider community connections. The episode aims to shift the perception that parenting should be a solitary journey, instead advocating for a more inclusive, supportive, and interconnected approach to raising children.

Check out this resources to learn more about Window of Tolerance.

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For more information on this topic, head to the show notes: Episode 12 Show Notes

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What does it mean for you when I say the term, it takes a village to raise a child? Have you done and cracked jokes like I have where you'll say, Oh, that's awesome. When are they going to come knocking at the door? Or maybe you've said that's great for people in different cultures or different countries.

And that's it. That's what they're used to, but in our Western society, that just doesn't happen. Or maybe you've had a moment that I've had in raising my children, where I actually had people that were wanting to help, including my partner, including my mom, close relatives. But I shut them down and I didn't let them in to become my village.

Maybe you can relate to that too. so this episode is going into that term in more depth of why we do need a village to raise our kids and how can we let them into our village and my experience of when I didn't let them in and what I notice in my kids as well.

So

in my early parenting years, I looked at that sentence. It takes a village to raise a child. And I looked at it in the perspective that, well, that's good for other people, but I don't need a village. I am more than capable to raise my kids. How dare they say I need a village. I am capable and I made it so much about myself that if someone tried to step in, or maybe my mum would say something like, Hey, Let me hold the baby or let me settle.

I would be like, why do you think this is internal, by the way, I would be like, why do you think I'm not capable? Clearly you think I'm failing. If you're needing to step in and settle my baby, do you not think I can soothe my child? And I think it began. I wear, I was super triggered in hospital. When I gave birth to my son, I remember him crying.

This was 12 years ago. I remember him crying and my husband and I just looking at each other, trying to support each other, trying to learn, how do we navigate this? This is new to us. I think he was like two days old. And I remember a nurse walking straight into our room, literally taking him off me without saying a word.

And walking out with him. And I just remember got like freezing going, what the hell? And I think internally, I really saw that she doesn't think I'm capable. She hasn't even talked to me. She hasn't even asked me, am I doing okay? Do you need a hand or anything? She just took him. And that created a really false belief for myself that when anyone stepped in, it was because they didn't think I was a capable mother.

And actually saying that out loud now is kind of crazy that I can really reflect that back and go, that was a pivotal moment. I was 26 years old and I felt like I was just judged. And you know, she clearly just looked at my age and status and went, yep, nope, she can't do this. and God, I want to give my little young motherhood self a big, big, Cuddle right now to say that wasn't your fault. That was so bad that she just did that without any communication towards you and took over like that. And I hope today this doesn't ever happen to you or hasn't happened to you. This was 12 years ago.

As I mentioned, I hope that the people that you experience within the hospital system, have a lot more self-compassion for you.

But if you had something similar like me, definitely know it's not that you're not capable.

So I had that experience. I also had emotional learning from my childhood where my mum was super capable. She was a working mum. She did all the housework, the dinner, she cared for our kids. My dad, I saw more of a Guy that walks in. Yes, I had positive interactions with my dad and I still have a wonderful relationship with him, but it was very much that he stepped in from the work, even though my mom was working as well, he would sometimes do dinner, but really nothing to do with bath time, bedtime, any of that, we would often say goodnight to him in downstairs and then my mom would actually take us up to bed.

So a combination of my emotional learning, my experience as a first time mom, what I saw, it created this big protection bubble and our brains are still very primitive at times. And sometimes our primitive brain just takes over, which is that fight or flight. It constantly wants to keep us safe and keep us out of danger.

And this has stood the test of time, right?

But what can happen is this primitive of our brain comes into our modern day life and we get false positives.

It still fires off if we're running away from a lion, that it's a life or death situation.

So in my early parenting, every time someone would say, Would you like me to soothe them? Would you like me to hold them for a little while? Would you like me to put them down for a sleep? My brain would fire off these false positives that this means danger. You have to do it. It's so fascinating how our brain works.

So even though I was so tired from doing the work of an entire village, I still was incapable of letting anyone into my village, letting anyone step in and help me and support me in those moments.

 Can you relate to this? Has this played out for you where you feel like you have to do it all or no one does it as good as you or if your child was to get this support from someone else, they would be worse off for it. I've said all of this to myself so many times. And the crazy thing is when we have a belief like this, that no one can step in and do it better, or our child's going to be worse off for it.

Yeah. Our brain will go about validating that feeling for us, that belief,

because our brains can't , tell the difference from made up or reality. So we will be sending signals that we need to get this validated and our brain needs to keep us safe. Right? So if someone steps in like your like your partner, and they can't settle your baby. We then go, yep, that's the proof we needed that it needs to be me all the time.

I have to be the only person in my village because they can't do that. But then if we really take an honest step back, have we set them up for success to begin with?

Have they had no experience in settling their baby because we've done it for them? Maybe we've done it for months and months where we've been experimenting, finding what works and then we've literally just said, okay, I'm so burnt out. I need you to step in and help go on, do it and get it right first time.

Have we literally set them up for a failure and began to validate that belief that we have to do it all basically because we've given them no chance of succeeding at all, or we've given them no chance to make any mistakes or take on any of the learning that we've spent months doing prior to this?

do they lack confidence with parenting because they're working all day and coming home and they're not getting time to practice?

Are we stepping in and taking over and not letting your husband or partner and your baby work it out together? Work out what works for them. Have we not shared some information on what we found to be helpful and maybe they can get a similar response. Have we given them some tools because we have been the main sole caregiver.

that , we can give them our backup tools as well. Okay. Worst case scenario, do this or worst case scenario. If you can't settle, step out the room and, calm yourself and them down. And we will revisit this another time.

Holding our babies or partners to a level of perfection when something has changed with the caregiver role

is detrimental not only to us and being able to have breaks and guilt free moments where we're not needed, but also detrimental to the learnings that our husband or partner needs to do to, to develop confidence in parenting, to learn how they can create an attachment together. And for your baby to see other perspectives, other ways, and still learn to feel safe.

So an example of this was with my third child. Now this can happen with your first just as easily, but for my third child. What generally happened in our family dynamic is that my husband would take on the caregiving roles of the other two children when he was home.

For example, getting them ready for bed, or doing the bedtime routine, or setting them up, getting them dressed, teeth, all of the things. He would take the two , older ones, and I would look after the youngest.

And on paper, this makes a lot of sense, right? It's like mum will do the youngest, the dad will do the oldest. Happy days.

But what we started to notice is that as a child. My youngest grew as I started to explore more evenings out with girlfriends that I hadn't been doing before, or I've been catching up with them during the day and wasn't craving or wanting to go out in the evenings. We hit a huge brick wall with this because husband

Was really rejected as that caregiver at that point, because he had had no experience doing any part of her bedtime routine. It was all me.

This then fed on to trying to develop coping for this. I would wait until she was in bed before I went out or I would step in and overtake my husband in a situation or I would cancel plans or I would I would maybe go, but have the biggest mom guilt in the world because she would look like someone was chopping her leg off when I was leaving because I was leaving her with her dad.

Oh my gosh, God forbid. But she just felt really insecure with that.

Now, different temperaments will play out differently. She is quite a sensitive soul. So change for her is And there's a lot of processing that needs to happen with a change process for her and a lot of reassurance within that.

But then it started to play out during the day as well. And it would be sometimes just. Not being able to leave a room or her needing to be on top of me, even when dad was around or not wanting to interact. And at the same time as well, I think my husband was feeling some level of rejection from her and kind of really.

not knowing how to handle it either. So it kind of kept reinforcing that dependency. And because I wasn't allowing her to feel any discomfort with this, I would just do it. I would just be the person, you know, if dad was holding her and she saw me and just like pulled at me, I would be like, Oh, give her here.

Instead of giving her some positive reinforcement around, Oh, what are you and dad doing? Mommy's just going to do this. being around, but allowing my husband to really step up and, and be in the spotlight and be a great person for her to spend time with. I was reinforcing that that wasn't cool because I kept trying to.

Stop any discomfort experienced by her and myself because it was making me uncomfortable seeing her uncomfortable. And my brain was just like, Jen, just do what you normally do. Like pick her up, do this for her and validating that my husband was not capable in that moment or that he couldn't be a safe caregiver for her in that moment or provide that amazing love that he had for her.

And this leads on to my biggest point is when we say it takes a village to raise a child, it's for our children too. It's not just about that. We need support as a parent to raise kids because it's a really heavy load, right? Of doing and being caregivers. It's really heavy on what needs are needed from us.

in that time. What needs are needed from us, but it's for our kids to develop healthy, secure attachments with more than one person.

It's for our kids to see other adults, other caregivers as safe, that they can get their needs met by them. It may look different, but they can learn and grow with what works for them. And what they like to get from each other.

But in order to do this, in order to expose our kids to accepting and feeling safe and loved and secure with other caregivers, they need practice. They need to work through maybe some, um, Hard emotions at first with another caregiver stepping in because their perspective up until this point is that it's just you, you are the only one that can solve this problem for them.

You're the only one that can do everything. So they need us to push down our discomfort or release it in another way. That's actually not going to impact them.

So they need us to grab a hold of our discomfort, not make the situation about us, In what we're needing to feel safe right now, which is often to take over and stop whatever's going on, we need to give them the encouragement and we can do that when we're around through healthy body language, we might be thinking inside, like, I don't know how dad's going to do this, but we can only set them up as best as we can and keep repeating it.

If it doesn't work the first time, it might work the third, fourth. Fifth time they step in and do something and step in to soothe your baby. And this doesn't even matter if you only breastfeed your baby to sleep. What we want to do is give our husbands options, right?

And something I do in my practice is work through co regulation in a variety of ways, so that our children can feel safe and confident and secure and loved with different levels of co regulation provided by caregivers. Husband or partners can step in or grandparents can step in because they can also provide those exact same responses depending on what level our children or baby needs at the time.

And it still doesn't take away your attachment and connection.

If you still want to continue to feed to sleep or have that as another co regulation option for you, we want to keep as many options as we can in parenting, right? But it's about evolving a bigger toolbox. a bigger village for our children to flourish and thrive with, because this is what raises a healthy, securely attached child, not having dependency on one person, which is likely the mother at this point.

And as your child gets older, these attachments will go into the school space or into daycare, your child will often daycares give you one set caregiver for your child. And this is the caregiver that's going to be placing them down for a sleep every time. So your child has a chance to grow an attachment with them and feel safe that their needs are met when you're not around.

So this happens. In our children's lifetime, we develop these attachments, healthy attachments with so many people and how much safer can you picture your child feeling so if you are out of action, maybe you've had to. Go away for a few days or maybe, God forbid, you've had to spend some days in hospital and you're not around to support them.

We have given and provided more opportunities for attachment. We've created that village for our children and this village could maybe only be their dad. Maybe that's the only village person they have right now is you and your partner.

But you've created options and you've created safety, trust, connection, love, without you being there, which is the bigger picture, mums. It's the bigger picture for our kids. It's the bigger picture that we have to think about when we're going about things in our parenting that we just want to control or feel like we should do.

It's coming back to the bigger picture of what's best for our kids to really thrive as a human. So how do you feel about that quote now? It takes a village to raise a child. How do you feel? Is there someone else you can let into your village? Are you shutting down opportunity or keeping your village so tightly closed, making it all about what you have to do and not allowing someone to step in?

Are you dealing with a partner or a husband that is shaped in that old school way that believes that you should be the only one for your child? Are you able to talk to them about that today and say, actually, this is so important that you step in for our children or our child to develop a healthy, secure attachment with more than just me?

Are we trying to do it all and keeping ourselves in the home, not going out, meeting people, other mothers in mothers groups, because guess what? You can get support and other people can step into your village that are other mothers too.

With my older kids, I see this especially, I love connecting with my friend's kids and hearing about their life and their days at school. What are they up to? I really enjoy being a alternative adult in their life and creating a safe space for them.

Is your mum and dad around to step in and help and support? Is there grandparent figures around that we can let down our guard or whatever we feel about them and take the bigger boots and say this is good for my child? As long as you trust them and they are safe in their environment, of course.

There are so many ways of creating a village for you to not only support yourself, but to support your child's development too.

So my quote for you today, it takes a village to raise a child. This is true, but it also takes a village to be a human, to feel connected, to thrive. Thank you. Until next time, Thrivers.