Are we doomed to traumatize our kids? Host Emily Hessney Lynch sits down with Dr. Kenya Malcolm, PhD, a clinical psychologist and the Director of Infant and Early Childhood Initiatives at the University of Rochester Medical Center's Department of Psychiatry, for a conversation about exactly that. We explore how our trauma shows up as parents and how our anxieties can impact the environment our kids grow up in and their attachment to us, what your first stop should be when you're worried about your child's mental health (or your own!), and how to parse all the conflicting parenting advice you see online.

In the second half of the episode, we chat about a new title Kenya recently added: grandma! She shares her hopes for being a grandparent (hint: it involves spoiling them and having tons of fun), how she's taking care of her daughter postpartum, and how she built a relationship with her daughters that was flexible and allowed both her and her kids to grow and change as they got older.

Links:

• We both use a Brick to help reduce the time we spend on our phones; if you're interested in trying it, you can save 10% with my link!
• For more of Kenya, follow her PhD Instagram, her Bookstagram, and the Genre Snaps Book Club, or check out her consulting business.
• Emily's website & Instagram.

Books mentioned in the episode:

• Nonfiction: The Whole-Brain Child and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk
• Children's books: My Mouth is a Volcano!, I Just Don't Like the Sound of No!, and The Bakery Dragon
• Fiction: Theo of Golden, Nothing Tastes as Good, and Fabulous Bodies (out July 7, 2026)

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Common Thread

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Getting Real with Bossy: For Women Who Own Business

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If my husband and I both have childhood trauma and we both have been to therapy a lot, we're both like pretty self aware. We're trying our best. Are we still doomed to traumatize our kid?

Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. Doomed is a tough word.

Is it inevitable?

Is it inevitable? I don't think anything's inevitable. That's a very psychologist answer. There's nothing that is inevitable.

Hello and welcome to It's A Lot, a podcast about things that are a lot. On this show, we have honest conversations about the highs and lows of social media, parenthood and more.

When it comes to complex topics, online discourse can lack nuance and empathy. That's why we're leaning into deep conversations, making space for conflicting, messy feelings and keeping it real about how we feel.

We could all use a little more of that sometimes. I'm your host Emily Hessney Lynch, and today I'm excited to be chatting with Kenya Malcolm.

Kenya is a clinical psychologist specializing in child mental health, parenting support and relationship oriented leadership.

Dr. Malcolm is passionate about working with adults who work with and on behalf of children and families, supporting teachers, physicians and parents, especially new parents. I outside of work, they run a popular Bookstagram account called Reviews May Vary and lead an online book club called Genre Snaps.

She's also a mom and recently added grandma to her long list of titles. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Welcome to the show, Kenya.

Thanks so much for having me.

I want to dive in with some of your work as a clinical psychologist. So can you tell me more about your path to how you ended up specializing in child mental health and the work you do now?

I think I actually started being most interested in working with young people probably when I was a young people and I don't know that I actually knew what a psychologist was. And some people had ideas about that and don't do it. And it's a long road and it really is.

But as a teenager I was kind of with the group of friends who were often in trouble.

I was sort of like the goody two shoes of the group, but so I think I was really interested in people that seemed like no one was listening to them or who were always, you know, in trouble or those aren't really good friends, you know, that kind of advice from adults. But from the inside they were really good friends, you know what I mean?

And so when I started psychology training or grad school or whatever, and I was always a nerd, pretty academic, really enjoyed reading and writing and all of those Kinds of things I started in psychology. Often you get paired, you know, you have to work in a lab.

And so as a master's program, I did a lot of social research, like the influence of peers and the influence of adults and conformity research and how agreeableness as a personality trait really impacted whether kids were getting along with each other, whether they were bullied, those kinds of things. And I really wanted to do a clinical program and joined up with someone who was doing similar research but a little bit more applied.

When I went to the University of Arkansas for clinical, I worked with someone who was doing work around like the positive role of adult mentorship, but also the positive role of positive peers on being bullied or being neglected. So those same vibes, but a little bit different.

And so I really was interested in working with teenagers and that led me to be doing more parent based work, primarily because Tim Cavell, who I was working with, was very family oriented work.

And one of the interesting things about working with teens is that, or working with families is that families are often much more open to interventions that they can do when kids are younger.

So that sort of led me to doing more early childhood stuff because a lot of parenting related interventions and programming are for parents of younger children.

While you can still update it or modify it to work with older kids, it tends to be more around communication and helping the young person regulate and all those things. More parenting interventions that are focused primarily on caregivers are for younger kids. So it sort of evolved over time.

I didn't know when I started I wanted to work with young children in particular.

But the systemic lens, you know, working with kids from the context of their family or their relationships or school made a lot of sense to me in the way that I understand people. I guess it really connected some things for me. So that was a very long answer to. I stumbled upon it primarily.

But I sort of remember even as an adolescent being like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be the voice of the. I'm gonna be the voice of these teens who people think are bad kids.

What made you wanna like, stick with psychology? I know so many people who did undergrad psych degrees and then went in completely different directions.

So is there something about it that got its hooks in you in undergrad?

So psychology is one of the most popular undergraduate degrees. Right.

And I think part of that is because it's fun to learn about and because people are often looking for ways to help them understand themselves and the people that they care about. Right. But I don't think that most people want to become a psychologist, which is what you would do to keep going. Right.

And then also some people don't realize that you can't become a psychologist with just an undergraduate degree. And so then they get the undergraduate degree and they go, oh, I have at least four more years, if not more. Right.

I was trying to become a psychologist, so it wasn't like I was trying to take psychology classes, you know, so it didn't occur to me until probably a couple years before I would have graduated with a doctorate that I could have done something else, you know, because PhDs in clinical psychology programs are hard to get into, and they're also hard to get out of. So I guess I'm just gonna finish it. Like, I've got two years left or. And I had kids, so it wouldn't have made sense to quit as a doctoral candidate.

But you also have to do an internship that's unrelated to your program that's hard to get into, and then fellowship, and then you have to do a license.

So you really have to stick with it.

Yeah, you have to.

Such a long time.

And they really don't tell you that. I mean, you really. No one really talks to you about that when it starts.

The agreeableness research you mentioned sounds so interesting. Can you talk a little bit about that and what the takeaways kind of are?

I can talk a very little about that. So that was work I was doing at the University of Texas in Arlington. So that's where I did my undergraduate and master's degree.

So that was not an applied program. So there's no clinical component there. It was just a research program.

And so the researcher that I was working with, Lori Jensen Campbell, she really described our work at the intersection between social psychology and developmental psychology and personality psychology.

So we would give, usually kids elementary school or middle school, depending on which project we're working on, personality inventories, and then we would also give them social science, social peer connection measures.

So part of the goal of some of that work was to look at how particularly the big five personality traits mapped onto positive peer interactions versus, like, being bullied or being targeted or being a bully yourself.

And so some of that work, like some of the takeaways that I remember from 20 something years ago, from a very long time ago, some of those things are like things like when we think about agreeable people, they do tend to have a bit more tolerance for people maybe being mean to them or not being nice to them as other people up to a certain point. And Then they stop being agreeable as agreeable. Right. So like, so that's one thing.

The other thing is that one of the things that I think is really important about personality or what we think of as personality is that it's not always about a specific behavior. So like I can't. Because I know you're agreeable, conscientious, open, whatever.

I can't necessarily predict the specific behavior that you're going to do if in a given situation. And then the other thing that I think is so important and so I think kind of core to the work that I do is that environment matters. Right.

So we come in with all of this stuff. Temperament that leads to lots of personality traits and things like that. But behavior is often very contingent upon the situation. Right.

So like the way that I talk about it most often it's. I don't act the same way at a board meeting on Monday morning as I might act at the Anomaly Film Festival on Saturday. Right.

Because there are contingencies within the environment and there may be some response set that is similar because of the kind of personality or temperament that I have. But the. It's never going to be nature or nurture. It's always going to be nature and nurture.

That's really interesting to hear. I thought I was going to be a psych major for a hot second in college and my brothers adopted. So I was like very interested in nature or nurture.

And I think we have some similar things which is very different temperaments. So it makes sense that nature and nurture go hand in hand to shape the person.

Right. I mean also like, so there's lots of the biology that's different between the two of you.

But then also, as even for kids who are born very close together, the kind of parenting they receive isn't the same. Right. And their experience of their parenting and their environment isn't the same.

I mean, and you can talk with adults who talk to their adult siblings and have completely different memories of the kind of childhood that they had. It's just not that. As simple as we would like it to be.

Yeah.

Or as our brain tells us to sort of help us make meaning of things. You know, we need it to be a little bit simpler than it is.

And there's so much social content now about mental health that I feel like a lot of things get flattened through like a little infographic.

Yes. The sound bite graphic sort of grab you hook thing is definitely, definitely a thing. In mental health talk. Mental health world.

Is there any like social content in the mental health space that like drives you totally crazy, that people are really getting wrong.

Anything related to self diagnosis sort of, sort of makes my eyeball twitch. Not just self diagnosis, but also the tendency to call every man who has pissed you off narcissist. That really makes my eyeball twitch.

So there's some of that. And again, it's because we want an explanation for things. We're trying to make meaning of our lives.

And somebody online says, this thing happens to me and I thought it was fine, but turns out it's part of my adhd. And you're like, I do that. I have that too. Because we're looking for community.

We're looking for ways to make sense of things that we don't like about ourselves. And sometimes we just don't like something about ourselves. And that's just, you know, we can either let that go or we can do something about that.

I think the social content and algorithms know you so well after a period of time that they feed you all these things that are relatable. And then I'm sitting here like, do I have autism?

But like, nothing else would make me think that other than these videos that are like designed to seem relatable.

Right? Well, I mean, in the algorithm tracks how long you watch something, right?

Or if you watch it again, or if you click okay, or if you send it to anyone, or if you.

Really, like have empathy for someone and you're like, wow, this trans person story is moving me so much. Then you get all this trans content. You're like, am I trans? No. Wait, what?

Not to say Algorithms are brainwashing people, like some people might think.

I mean, I don't know that it's brainwashing necessarily, but we do have a bias towards things we see a lot of.

So, and if we think about just odds psychology, right, we're more likely to over predict something if we've recently seen an example of it or if we see that pretty often. So you buy a red car and then you think everybody's got a red car because you're noticing red cars, right? So once we start seeing a couple of things.

I'm in the middle of heated rivalry threads right now, and I know that other people are not in it, but it looks like that's all anybody's talking about, right? And that can be scary, depending on what the thing is that you're looking at for sure.

Stepping back from like grown ups on social media, can we talk a little bit about like the term infant mental health? Like, what does that mean and what kind of mental health things come up for infants and young kids.

So the definition of infant mental health is really the capacity of a young child to be able to express and experience a full range of emotions, have meaningful relationships with others and learn, or something like that. That's actually a pretty good definition of mental health in general. Do we have the capacity to experience a full range of emotions?

Can we make meaningful connections with people? And can we benefit from the environments that we're in in the best way that we can?

When you think about infant mental health and early childhood mental health, and that term sort of varies by audience, it could be to 3, it could be to 5, it could be to 8, just to make it especially difficult.

Infant mental health, broadly speaking, is more of a framework that's got a number of tenants associated with it that says things like relationship is the context for learning. New babies present opportunities to families to grow and change.

Someone who has infant mental health as a lens helps families or helps to mediate potential trauma that has, that a grownup has experienced that are often triggered by the birth of a new baby.

So infant mental health as a framework which is multidisciplinary, it's not just a mental health field, it's a way of looking at things, is really focused on this idea that relationships matter, that the kind of relationships that we have impact the other relationships that we have, and that self reflection is a tool for improving all of how that goes.

So when we think about infant mental health from an actual mental health standpoint, the biggest things I think that I think about are, for example, especially for infants. So it's not like we bring six month olds in and we lay them on the couch and we talk with them about.

It's really more like, I'll give an example, a caregiver is having trouble breastfeeding and the baby's kind of chompy, like the latch isn't good.

I've had people during intake for older children tell me things like, I knew my baby didn't like me when I was trying to breastfeed and they were biting me. No matter what I did, they didn't. They did. They wouldn't take comfort from me.

That has impacted the way that they have parented their child and the way that they think about their ability to parent, give comfort. He likes everybody else but me. He only listens to his dad.

If you have someone who is relationship focused who can intervene with that family during the breastfeeding phase, to go breastfeeding is hard. This is how you help a baby gape so that they're not chomping on you. Fed is best.

Does it make sense to supplement then that potential disruption in that relationship?

And, and because relationship is the context of healthy development, that intervention early can help the trajectory of that relationship and the development of that child. That's kind of infant mental health in a nutshell.

That's such a good example to use too. Like, because you can tell that parent is hurting so much too and they're not like causing harm to the relationship intentionally.

Right.

But it's just their own pain coming up and getting in the way, right?

Absolutely. Or like a two year old's tantrum.

I don't know if you've heard of this before, but 2 and 3 year olds are sort of, you know, a nightmare sometimes and that feels very personal to a lot of people. Or there's a period of purple crying. It peaks around four months, three months or so.

And babies start crying more in the evening time, which is coincidentally when the other parent comes home. And now everyone's like, what did you do the baby? Right? And the baby's just crying because that's what babies do.

So having that focus can really be helpful for families in over the long term because noticing and being attuned to and being aware of the relationship is something that's helpful across the age span.

And if we can help folks do that a little bit better early, then it goes better when it's time to potty train, it goes better when it's time to do all of the other things.

And the capacity stuff you mentioned before with the infants, I feel like as the parent now, I'm trying to be so mindful of that. Like the other night my son had a terrible sleep night and I had a whopping three hours of sleep to go on for the day.

And he was having horrible tantrums all afternoon and evening. And I was like really short with him and I felt bad that I was losing my temper a bit. And last night I got eight hours of sleep and I feel glorious.

And I'm like, I have the capacity, yeah, to be calm and grounded when you stand trimming. So just like makes such a difference. But it's easy to take it personally when you do not have any bandwidth.

Left and to like even talking with teachers sometimes. Like I was doing consultation in preschools, right? And it would be like this kid knew he was gonna give me a bad day when he woke up.

I mean, he's three, right? I. He's actually acting in spite of you, which is what you're upset about. You know what I mean?

And that reflection piece comes in because, like you were saying, he's not having fun either. You know, it's a bad day for everybody, right? It's not like he's just trying to make it hard for you.

And, you know, talking with parents a lot when you know you're having low capacity day and he's having a low capacity day, it's great to take a step back and go, should we still have high capacity expectations? How do we adjust? If you were sick and you had a cold or the flu, you wouldn't still be thinking that you needed to give 120%.

What are some signs that, like parents or caregivers could look out for that there might be some mental health things coming up for their little ones or like that they might need to get some help as a family for the relationships to improve for everyone.

So I think about a continuum of care. We, as in the US primarily, and health care specifically, tend to have a wait and see approach. We're not very prevention focused.

One of the things that I talk to the pediatricians that I work with about is you don't have to do that because we've got behavioral. I'm the clinical coordinator for a behavioral health team that's embedded in a pediatrics clinic. Right. So they have access to us.

The pediatricians have access to us all the time.

And if a parent comes in and is losing their mind a little bit because of the level of tantrum that a kid is having, it doesn't matter if that level of tantrum is in the normal range. It matters that there's a risk happening in the way that they are able to interact with each other.

So I think about, for parents in particular, if you're feeling more overwhelmed than not, or you look back and go, I have been making parenting decisions this week that I wouldn't want to tell anyone. You can waterboard that decision out of me. Right?

Like, that is as much an indication as whether or not your child is having too many tantrums or whatever. The thing is, I feel like I'm losing control every time I try and talk to my kid. Even with teenagers, right? Like, we can't go.

We can't have 10 minutes of conversation before we start snapping at each other. That's worth a look at. I think one of the things that's really hard, like, we think about older kids too.

Like, the research 15 years ago was teenagers spend roughly 60 of their time alone in their room. What do we think that is now? Right.

80 at least, at minimum.

Right. And if we think about like what I say, you know, like they're in their room. They're always in their room. Okay.

What would they be doing if they were out of their room? And so now we're all sitting in a room looking at our phones together.

Like, if you're feeling like I don't know how to connect with my kid or with my partner or whatever those things are, I think those are, are indicators as well, because again, I'm a relational person. Right. And we can often feel that if we stop and take a second. I think people are kind of looking for the diagnosable thing sometimes.

It doesn't have to be that other obvious things are more like the kids hurt themselves a lot or hurt you, like physically a lot or those kinds of things. And some, some kids are tearful, sensitive kids, and that doesn't necessarily mean there's something wrong with that.

Again, temperament, personality, are all, are all things.

But if parents are worried about something, I usually recommend that they talk to their pediatrician first and to feel like they can advocate for themselves.

For some parents, if they talk to their pediatrician, the pediatrician's like, this is in the normal range or it's a phase, it's likely to get better or whatever. The parents go, okay, my kid's not on the road to psychopathy. Right. And that feels like enough.

And for some of them, they're like, I don't care if it's normal. Can I talk to someone? Or can we spend a little bit more time with this?

Or can I schedule a follow up with you in a couple weeks just to check in to see how this is? Most pediatricians will say yes, but because the peds person isn't offering it, families don't necessarily ask for it.

Do you have a list of people who, you know, might be able to talk to me about this? Like those are, are, I think pediatrics as a location for where most parents already go with their kids is an underutilized.

Yeah, that is good for parents to know that. That's, that's a good first stopping point for them.

Right.

I don't know if I would think of it necessarily.

Right. I mean, it depends on what it is. Right. Because sometimes kids will, parents will come in and they'll say, I'm really worried. I think my kid has adhd.

And I'll say, okay, what did the pediatrician think? And they go, I didn't tell them, I didn't know that was something I talked to them about. But the pediatrician is really sort of the head of the team.

Sometimes they're required for referral but sometimes they also have access to things that other people don't have access to.

So to get a little personal and ask if my husband and I both have childhood trauma and we both have been to therapy a lot, we're both like pretty self aware, we're trying our best. Are we still doomed to traumatize our kid?

Oh yeah, for sure, for sure. Doomed is a tough word.

Maybe not doomed, but is it inevitable?

Is it inevitable? I don't think anything's inevitable. That's a very psychologist answer. There's nothing that is inevitable.

And really it sounds like you guys, this might not actually be a personal situation, are worried about that. And sometimes it's that worry that can get in the way. Right. Like so sometimes I'll talk with parents about like how do you usually handle worry?

Do you tend to be someone who swoops in and then attempts to like anxiety? Sometimes looks like I'm going to hold everything so close and still that I don't allow there to be any movement from anyone else.

That is an environment that's hard to grow healthy in. Right. Some people respond to their worry more like I can't even do anything. And so then it's a very all or nothing or it's very unpredictable.

So when we think about particularly from an attachment lens with kids, what we really like to see is kids ability to explore and make appropriate mistakes and to have someone to come back to, to check in with who can help them make meaning of the situation and who can make help them make decisions, make the decision when they need to make the decision because they're the grown up. But also help the kids make decisions in a developmentally appropriate way. Like that's good attachment.

And what happens is that sometimes our worry gets in the way of our ability to do one or the other of those things. I can't let you go out and explore.

I can't let you go and make mistakes or when you come back to me, I'm a little bit rejecting you didn't want me before. That's really the disruption that I think about.

Not like whether or not someone has been through trauma but how that trauma is maybe showing up in their ability to form an attachment with their kids.

It's funny because I feel like you somewhat just described my husband and I to a t of me being the more rigid, controlling one. And he is a little more like no Schedule, go with the flow. But I think we kind of balance each other out to some extent.

And our son is, like, so happy and resilient and, like, just really curious. Explorers does so much, and he's so funny.

Like, he knows when he's pushing the boundary and he'll, like, laugh when he's doing it, and he knows that we still love him. So I feel like it's. Feel like it's going well. I shouldn't say that and jinx it.

I don't know.

But it's.

We can't should all over ourselves. We can't what should all over ourselves?

With all the social content out there these days, I feel like there's a lot of conflicting information that parents might see about how to parent. Do you have any advice for parents on how to, like, parse all of that information and, like, know what to go with?

Like, do you go with your gut and ignore everything you see online? How do you know what's, like, such a tough question?

And there are two other faculty members that work with me in the early. On the early childhood team, and we just recently actually did a presentation about this.

It's really difficult because one of the things that's so important is authenticity. One of the things that I think is really hard for parents is trying to do something that doesn't feel like it fits for them.

And I think sometimes we have to take a step back and think about what our values as parents are, which is a little bit tough because, again, I think we get a little bit caught up in the. What is a specific behavior? What is the strategy?

For example, and this is an older kid, actually, it's probably very related to younger kids stuff, too. Screen time. Like, we were just talking about, like, how much time we all spend on computers or phones or whatever.

And some of that we can't get away from because it's our work, it's our school, it's our job, it's our podcast, right? But one of the conversations that comes up a lot is, my kid spends too much time on the. On this phone, okay?

And they're like, well, I've heard they shouldn't spend more than two hours. I've heard they shouldn't spend 10 hours. You know, all of the sort of things, right? What's important to your family?

And for lots of people, spending time on the screen isn't a value. They have physical activity together. Time having dinner together might be an example of that.

They have all of these other things that are being pushed aside because this thing is getting bigger.

And then the goal becomes how do we shift so that you're doing more of the things that are important to you so that you're doing fewer of the things that aren't. It's not about getting rid of screen time. It's about making space for things that are important.

And I think that feels like an underlying thing for parents when they're thinking about, like, what parenting style, which it's only helpful if it's helpful.

I think that there is no one way of thinking about parenting that's going to fit everyone and probably no one way that's going to fit anyone all the time. I have a value around not hitting kids, which works really great because the research suggests we shouldn't be hitting kids.

It's a non relational strategy. And so it's easy for me to align with that.

And if I have a family that maybe they're still smacking their kid on the leg or whatever, I talk with them about what the values are within their family, about trust and about aggression in general. And we think about how to replace some of those things because most people don't want to be hitting their kids.

So I think that is sort of like a long winded answer to say, like, parents should take a step back and think about what's important to them as the head of their family.

And then if they're reading about parenting strategies or styles or approaches or whatever, to take what makes sense for them and to not feel like they have to become someone else.

I love that advice to remember your values and go back to that. Because it's so easy to see, like, this real and that TikTok and you read that book and they all contradict each other.

Like, I want to do this thing and this and how do I piece it together? But no strategy works every single time. Right? Right. All the kids are so different too.

Right. But also, like, the situation is different. How we do it is different. I would say, like, if you're gonna try something, try it more than once.

But also it's never, it's not gonna work out. Like, it's, it's like any, any kid, right.

Today is their spaghetti is their favorite, and then you try and give them spaghetti tomorrow and they've never liked spaghetti. Right. And you're like, okay, okay, buddy.

I always thought those were so dramatized when people said that kind of stuff. And now I'm like, oh, no.

It's like, like, I thought you wanted the banana. I wanted to open it and now it's over. The Banana. The banana is done.

I'll just ask one more question before we take a quick break. I know you're a very avid reader. Do you have any book recommendations for parents and caregivers?

Whether that's like the kind of reading I do. Emily, first of all.

Well, you could also give fiction that's related or like children's books you love.

I do have a couple of books. So the Whole Brain Child was a book that I really liked for parents to think about.

Again, the way that the child's brain is developing when they're little.

Again, so that we're not taking it personally, so that we're meeting kids where they are as opposed to expecting a two year old to behave like an eight year old. And there's this great idea about, like how kids like flip their lid. So like the hand model of the brain, so it talks a little bit about that.

So that one I really like. And then for older kids, there's a series of books that's something like how to talk to kids so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk.

It really talks about making space for kids and again, meeting them where they are as opposed to sort of like chasing after them all the time. So those are two parenting books that I recommend fairly often for children's books.

I mean, I think the act of reading with your kids is so powerful, it almost doesn't matter what the book is about. Pick your favorite.

I see so many book recommendations on Instagram or like, friends will recommend some that are so like, almost didactic and preachy. And those are not the ones my son gravitates towards.

But if he wants to read the same book about like a truck or a dragon, a hundred times, like, I will love reading that to him 100 times. Like, I'm just glad we're hanging out and reading. It's so fun.

Yeah. I mean, whether it's a truck. Not Thomas, that's a weirdo. No, I'm just kidding.

He does love Thomas and the messaging.

Everybody does. If there's a face in it. Like, I wonder what he feels like. Oh, he's got an angry face on. Like you can do. You can do that with any book.

So there are lots of books that are like, my mouth was a volcano or I don't like the word no, or like all of those kinds of ones that the therapists who work with little kids will use. It's not like, check, check, check is working in their brain. There's a relationship that's happening.

You're spending time Together you're co regulating and there are opportunities to maybe use some feeling words and for the grownup to tolerate what those feeling words are.

There's one he loves called the Bakery Dragon and there's a page where the dragon is like so sad with these big eyes and he's always like, he like points at the sad dragon and gets so, like upset for the dragon. And then as we go, he gets happy as the dragon, like solves his problem. It's really sweet.

We love a little matching. That's great.

Okay, let's take a quick break and then we'll talk more about your experiences as a parent after that. So I believe you're the first parent of adult children I've had on the show. What is it like to be a mom of two grown up kids?

Well, it's nice. I like it. It doesn't mean that, like, the worries don't stop because I have good relationships with both of my kids.

But I think the hardest thing about being the parent of a young child is how they need you literally all the time. And like, at some point, it's almost developmentally appropriate that you have not gone to the bathroom by yourself in a week.

Like, and that would be really weird. My kids are now 29 or 29 and 25 years old. So they go to the bathroom alone and I go to the bathroom alone.

And I still have again, from an attachment lens. Right. We still reach out to each other. I still want to know the risks that they're taking. Within reason, some of them, I probably don't want to know.

I still have to. When they make a decision that I wouldn't have made for them. So that feels like a mistake to me.

I still have to monitor that because they have to make their own decisions about stuff. I can still be curious about that. Right? Like, oh, how'd you decide that? Or I wonder what you're hoping will happen next or whatever.

The thing is, my most popular post on my PhD Facebook page is a video that I posted that basically said something like, my daughter called me and said, thanks for picking up. And I said, I'll always pick up. Which reminds me of young families that are told, if you keep picking them up, you'll spoil them.

That was literally my goal. If they call me, I will answer. And that's been my approach. And it's still my approach now. Now that they're older, I can say things like, I'm gonna.

I just bought one of those brick things to shut your phone down so that you can stay the hell off of social media for.

Yeah, I've got one of those, too.

I'm going to break my phone, but the texts are going to come through. Right? But I'm going to be dead on the phone. The reason why I like it is because the text messages are still there.

They don't need me every single day, but if they did, I'm going to answer. It's nice. Like, I didn't read this much when they were three and six. I didn't go to film festivals. I didn't go to book cons.

Because your priorities are different at different points in parenthood. We're on a developmental journey. Also. The new parent is different from someone who's parenting teens to someone who's got adults.

But the attachment lens for me is still there.

I saw that reel you posted that was about your daughter and picking up the phone for her. And that hit me hard because I was like, oh, I don't have the kind of mom that I would call when things came up.

So was there anything in particular, you think, that built the relationship that made it so she would still rely on you from time to time? Is it mostly just being there and being that responsive?

I do think that responsiveness is the big part of that. Right. But I was just actually just talking to somebody about this the other day, another adult person. And how.

And in other contexts, too, this idea of trust, Right. That oftentimes parents will say, you can trust me, but then they don't behave in a trustworthy way. Right.

Or they can't tolerate the thing that's coming in. And I think that's part of that. That thing, like what we bring in from our own experiences of being parented.

There's this little video that I show sometimes. It's called Shark Music. And it's about this man. It's a little animated thing.

And it's about this man who is at the playground with his daughter and he says, it's time to go. And she starts crying. And then it zooms in on his face and he starts to have a really hard time because her crying is triggering for him.

Because his mom used to tell him that you weren't allowed to cry in public. And so, like, the idea is that parents and everyone, we always have this sort of like, danger done it.

Donna, Dana, that's going on that is triggered by different things. What happens for a lot of parents is that they have little kids that they're kind of trying to socialize into doing what I say. Don't talk back. Those kinds of things.

And then when the kids are teenagers, they expect them to be open with them and to come to them, but the ability to do that has never been established.

But now that they're adult, now that they're teenagers, it seems like they should just know that you're trustworthy or I have a lot of kids that it really feels more like protection. My parents get sad when I talk about this thing that makes me sad and I don't want them to be sad.

So there's not an establishment of safety in the trust of the relationship. So I think it feels like we have that, that I have that with my kids. And that's not to say that they tell me everything.

I think that would be, I think parents who say like, my kids tell me everything are a little naive also. I don't want them like, like sometimes they say stuff and I'm like, I don't know if I want to be this close to you.

You know, like, you know, like, don't tell me about that. Right? My older daughter, she was much more likely to be caught in doing something not good. She was more impulsive.

My younger daughter was probably just as misbehaved, so to speak, but much more strategic about it. And she's more likely now to be like, oh yeah, I remember when I was young and I did this thing and I'm like, Winnie, I don't.

If I didn't know it then I probably don't need to know it right now. And I loved my kids as teenagers, which I know is something that nobody, nobody says.

We're all supposed to say, you know, teenagers are so horrible, right? But they're so funny and smart in different ways. And not to say that they didn't do stupid, stupid stuff, because they definitely did.

But you build that tolerance as they're getting older, right?

Like if you're someone who can tolerate your 3 year old throwing a tantrum in the floor long enough to help them know that the tantrum is not the appropriate Wegman's behavior that helps you build the muscle for tolerance. When they skip school when they're 12 and go hang out with their friends, we're building our muscles too. It's not about us, it just feels like it is.

And that's part of the, part of that piece, right? Like whether we're going to try and be so strong armed with them because of how it looks on us or how it makes us feel.

So I think that those are things that kind of come to mind in terms of like establishing a Relationship that is flexible enough, but you still got to have boundaries, right? Permissive parenting is not good. But parenting, excuse me, jerk, jerk. While parenting, also not good, right?

There's this balance, and we're all gonna get it wrong sometimes. And are you the kind of person who spirals for two weeks because you got it wrong, right? Or are you the kind of person to be like, buddy, I yelled.

I'm so sorry. I'm gonna try and do better. We're gonna work on it. I'm gonna work on that, right? Like, and so you're not. It's like, you made me mad.

Is not an apology.

I love that you mentioned, like, building the muscle for those things and how that you grow as a parent as your kid is growing, because I. I think I needed that reminder. Like, I am building the muscles now with the tantrums.

Especially that when he throws himself on the floor on his stomach, screaming, yeah, and I sit and tolerate it. That'll help later too, in other ways.

Oh, yeah, for sure. And he knows that you can sit with him when you know you can sit with him.

You also mentioned, like, loving having teenagers and, like, those other phases, which is nice to hear. I had another guest that I asked for, like, a positive, just you wait instead of all the negative ones.

And I shared that clip online and so many people said, like, lovely things about middle schoolers and high schoolers. And it was just really nice to hear because people don't say that that often. Like, we're so cherish every moment.

They're only little ones, and we don't remember that all the other parts have wonderful things about them too.

That's so true.

Do you miss, like, things about when your daughters were little, or are you mostly just fully embracing the grown up?

Sometimes I miss dressing them up in little cute outfits. But no, I mean, in my. My younger daughter teases me that I was traumatized as a young parent. My older daughter, I was 20 by two weeks when I had my.

My older daughter. I was 23 when I had Winnie. And I don't always remember every little thing. I was also prefrontal cortex completely being done. You know what I mean?

I think there's benefits to being a little oblivious with little kids, you know, So I wasn't I wasn't as attached to this idea of their behavior reflecting on me in the same way I think I would be. Maybe, maybe not now, but, you know, at other phases of my life. But the things I really miss, I guess I miss them having to do what I say.

I miss them being close. Right. I miss being in charge of things that I feel like are about their health. My older daughter vapes. She was, she quit because she got pregnant.

Never vape, never smoke. Right. It's so hard to stop doing it. It's so bad for our health. We know so many things about it, right? It's.

And lots of people start and then they can't stop. And at least when they lived at my house, I could say, you can't do it here, right? Like, or like go to bed.

Like, I, Dorian had a bedtime and Winnie never did because she would just go to bed. But like, I could help them in a more concrete, direct way make what felt like good health related decisions when they leave.

And you're a grownup, you just get to do whatever the hell you want. And I'm like, do you really want to? Okay. Like, I love you.

I'm going to love you even if you're doing ridiculous, stupid, dumb, horrible things no one would recommend. Oh, you're going to date that person. Okay, stop it. Exactly. You want to be able to do that.

But like, if you are a don't do that thing, they're never going to tell you anything. They're never going to talk to you.

Right.

And it's not about knowing, which I think is an important thing.

It's not that I think we should be investigating our kids, it's that we are the safe place to bounce ideas off of so that they can make decisions that make sense for them. For some parents, wanting your kids to tell you things is really more about like wanting to know. And that's not really what parenting.

I don't think that's exactly right. Like I'd known parents who had cameras in their, in their house so that they could know every little thing their kid was doing.

And I'm like, that's like, your kid isn't any worse than any other kid. You just know every incident of him doing something stupid. But kids are supposed to do stupid things.

I could give you a laundry list of all the things my mom told me not to do as an adult. And that definitely hurt our relationship. And I stopped asking her for advice.

So, like totally checks out that being the non judgmental, safe sounding board is much More helpful.

I mean, I wish I could say non judgmental, but at least available. And I think the word judgment gets a lot of bad rap in general.

But you're allowed to have opinions. We're all human.

Exactly. I will judge your decision, but we'll still love you.

The unconditional love.

Yeah. And trying not to say as much as you can, I told you so. Those are not things that help people ever want to talk to you again.

I'm still like thinking about the missing littler kids thing. Like, it's kind of refreshing to hear you just like wishing for things that are for like, for their good as adults.

Like wishing you could still help with their health or things like that.

It's like one trend I've seen a lot lately is like, this is the moment I'll go back to when I'm 80 and it's like your 2 year old and your 4 year old holding hands and having a picnic or something, which is cute, but it's like, I would hope you're also a happy 80 year old remembering all the happy memories and not just when they're 2 and 4 because I feel like it just makes it seem like the 0 to 5 is the only time you're gonna enjoy having kids and the rest of it is like not fun and they're not special anymore. I don't know.

There's so much to not enjoy about 0 to 5.

Yeah, it's really hard.

But like when I see things like that, what I'm imagining they're talking about is the sense of peace, not necessarily the specific ages of those kids. And I actually do have a picture of my, my kids as they were probably 16 and 19 or something. And we were at the mall and they were holding hands.

I mean I took a picture from behind. Right. I love that picture. And I love that picture partially because they don't always like each other and I wanted them to like each other more.

So those moments where I'm like, oh, maybe they don't hate each other today, I will miss those times.

And when they were younger they like to do, they were around each other more so there were more opportunities to see that they could have been better friends. But they're very different people and that just is how it is.

It's funny how people can, siblings can turn out so different. And I hear so many people like, I'm going to give my child a sibling so they have a built in best friend.

And I'm like, it might not work out that way.

Right, right. It might Not. I've got three siblings. I like them all, but there's one of us four that we all like the best, and it's not me.

And there are lots of pros and cons about that because we were at Thanksgiving last year, and I'm like, oh, my God, I'm so glad that Mark is everybody's favorite. Phew. It took so much pressure off.

That's so funny where you fall in the birth order.

I'm third.

Okay. And is he the oldest or.

He's the second oldest. So the oldest is seven years older than me, and then four years older than me. Me. And then seven years older than me.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So what are you looking forward to about being a grandma now?

Oh, gosh. Riling them up and sending them home. That's the number one thing.

So Dorian's partner has a four year old already that we get to spend time with sometimes.

And that's what I really like about him because, you know, we miss him and we go pick him up, and then he comes over and I'm like, oh, maybe he'll spend the night. And then, you know, four hours later, I'm like, well, 10 more minutes and we're gonna pack up and go.

So it's really nice to have the fun part without necessarily having the parents part. I mean, and that's. That can be the case. Like, non custodial parents often feel that same way. Right.

They get to have the weekend, and then the custodial parent has the homework days. The imbalance there doesn't necessarily make sense for two people who are co parenting, but the whole role of grandparenting is the fun part.

Every time I bought her something for her house with the kids, I bought one for me. So, like, we can have to.

If I want to go over and pick the kids up and come over, I don't want to have to deal with whether or not we have the stuff that they need.

How have you been supporting her postpartum now?

Well, she's only been postpartum for about three days, so I've gone over there every day, so that's one thing. Took her grocery shopping, of course, to get all the things you have to have and food. Went over and made judgments about how hot it is.

And I text her fairly often. Her partner sent me some impromptu pictures of the baby yesterday while I was at work, so that was really cute.

And I'll probably go over today because he was gonna go to work today, so this would be her first day there by herself. And she wasn't worried, so that's good. But the usual approach, right, is I'm here if you need me and I'll probably be there soon.

It's pretty much the relationship I've had with her.

Yeah, she's lucky to have you both, like a loving, supportive mom and all. Your psychology background could be helpful too.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it. I mean it, it probably is in that it helps me stay calm. I don't know that there are other things.

Well, before we wrap up, let's like pivot and talk about something completely different. Your Bookstagram account. Can you talk a little bit about why you created. Reviews may vary and like, what types of content you like to make there.

And I was doing Ogden Farmers Libraries annual, like they have a book challenge thing. And one of the book challenges was to read a book out loud to a child.

And I didn't have any children, so I did a video for YouTube and it was the first video for YouTube that I did. And so I was like, oh, maybe, maybe I want to do this right? And so I started making videos for YouTube and the editing. Bless the editors.

I'll just say bless the editors. But I did it for a while and then I had a personal Instagram and I started posting, Hey, I just posted a YouTube video.

Like I was using it to promote the, the, the non thing. The important thing about this is that my YouTube is terrible. So no one go there. I'm not suggesting anyone go look at it.

So I was interacting in real time more on Instagram through book chats or like follow trains were such a big deal for a while.

Or people were starting to do more remote book clubs because we were isolating, you know, but that opened up cross national ways to interact with people. So I started following more people. They started following me. I went through a number of different names.

I've had a blog or some sort of social media adjacent thing related to what I was reading. Like I had a blog. What was that GeoCities thing from Yahoo,.

You know, way back in the day.

Way back in the day. You know, I've always wanted to be a blogger or like a journal kind of person. I just lack the follow through really.

But Instagram gave me opportunities. Like it's, it's short form. It was, it was really photo focused for a while.

TikTok made everything more video focused and then TikTok irritated me and I left that. But I just really liked the reviews may very name partially. I really thought of it as sort of like personal, like I'm not for everyone.

Like, reviews about me may vary, but it worked really well with, with what I was doing anyway. So I think for a while my Facebook page was called like Kenya Writes or. And then it was maybe Kenya Reads.

And then maybe it was like, can you review stuff? And then it was like, you know, that kind of thing. I went through that sort of like evolution of naming things.

Is there anything that you've read this year and really loved that you would recommend?

Oh my gosh, Emily

you're kind of a tough critic, aren't you?

I am a tough critic sometimes. So the book I'm recommending the most right now is probably Theo of Golden. And it's not that it's great, it's that it is heartfelt and inspiring.

It's about this 86 year old man who goes to this small town and goes into a coffee shop where there are 92 portraits, pencil portraits, hanging on the wall from a local artist. And he finds out that it was supposed to be sort of like a way to help this artist's career kind of take off, but no one's really buying them.

And he uses buying the portraits and giving them to their subject as a way to get to know the people in the town. And the ripple of effect of this really kindly old grandpa like guy meeting people and how that brings the community together. And it, it was a.

There are spots where it drags a little. The pacing is a little slow. I definitely recommend the audiobook.

I just had a book chat with a friend about it yesterday and she found that, you know, eyeball reading was not like it was a. It's a little slow. It's a little.

And then he turned down the walkway and walked out of the gate and closed the gate and walked down the sidewalk into Sons. You know what I mean? And you're like, okay, we get it. He left, you know, so like the audio descriptive. Yeah, the audio was more like.

It created more atmospheric in the moment vibes. Whereas if I were reading it, I'd be like, okay, let's get to the dialogue, you know?

But it's very wholesome.

Yes.

And you read a lot of horror too, don't you?

I do.

I haven't been surprised that this was, like, your recommendation. It doesn't sound.

Well, I don't recommend horror to everyone.

Okay. What would be a good horror recommendation?

Not so tough.

I read a really fun horror this year that just came out called Nothing Tastes as Good.

Oh, yes.

Have you heard about this?

I have heard about it.

Oh, my gosh. I would definitely recommend it. It gets a little, like, campy by the end.

Oh, I love camp. Yeah.

But for listeners who might not have heard of it, it's a satirical novel about a weight loss drug called Obexity that is, like, basically playing on GLP1s. But there's also a gene therapy component.

And the main character, who is in the clinical trial, starts to lose weight so fast, and everyone's treating him very differently, and he's feeling really good about himself. And then he also starts low key, forgetting things and maybe craving human flesh.

Nice.

So unexpected.

Cannibalism is. Is having a little heyday right now. Yeah. Which I think is great. But again, it's not. It's not for everyone. Yes.

Reviews do vary on the cannibalism, for sure. And sometimes there'll be a book that's about it, and it's still boring. And I'm like, how did you do that?

A certain hunger is one that everyone raves about. And I thought it was quite boring. Even though it's like a lady.

The plan was boring. Did you read the Lamb?

I haven't read that yet.

And everybody's like, oh, it's it. Last month, the group read Hungerstone, which is a modern retelling of Carmilla, which was the book that inspired Dracula.

So Carmilla's from the 18 somethings about a young woman who ends up in this house with this sick woman who ends up being a vampire. I don't think anybody ever uses the word vampire, but it inspired Dracula Gothic, you know, whatever. And then Hungerstone, which we read for.

And the thing about meeting with big nerds is that if you assign a book that's a retelling, we all read the original also, and it was small, so it worked out great.

But Hunger Stone is pretty much very similar story, but it adds a domestic thriller component to it, which was completely unnecessary, I'm just gonna say, with making Carmilla better. But we all liked Hungerstone. Fine.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Yeah, we like. I mean, we liked it. Fine. I don't read the book before I pick it. It's just like, this one looks like it could be good. Or this cover is cool.

And sometimes that works out really well. And sometimes they're like, what? What is this?

I'm the same way most of the time with my book club. Sometimes I read something and love it so much, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna force everyone to read this.

But most of the time it's something I've just picked and hope it's good.

Yeah, we just. Just pick it. And so they tend to like things that are more gruesome. It's not gruesome at all.

The new Chuck Tingle is very gruesome. I just read an arc of that, so your group might like it. It is also campy. Yeah. Fabulous bodies.

The plot kind of went off the rails by the end for me, and I was like.

Which is Chuck Tingle, I think, right?

Yeah.

Cause he has that whole set of books that's like, banged by a triceratops. And then he has the other sort of like camp Damascus, bury your gaze kind of books.

The ones that you can set out and the ones that you maybe put away.

Exactly. I laughed at my book club last month. We were discussing murder bimbo and someone was like, wait, where's Kenya? She hasn't come in a while.

And I was like, like, I don't. She's not in this book club. But everyone knows you. Multiple people were like, yeah, I haven't seen her at book club.

And hilarious. What book club is this?

Do I need to go serve me the sky book club? Everyone's like, where's Kenya?

That's so funny. There are a couple book clubs that I've gone to. Like, Emily reads a lot. Or Emily reads a lot. I don't know. She's red haired.

She has a book club with the Alt bar. So I don't know if you know the Alt bar. Okay, good. But everyone should know the Alt bar.

And then the woman who owns the chocolate place just up the street from that Laughing Gull. Laughing Gull. She has a book club as well. And all their books are food related.

Oh, cool.

I mean, we read Ina Garten's memoir, would not recommend. And the Edible Woman. Have you read that?

No. Tell us how you really feel.

Would not recommend. I like to go to book clubs a couple. And I told Emily, I was like, I'll come to the first few. And that's where I read the Everlasting last year.

And that was one of my favorite books of 20, 25. I said I will come to a couple, but I'm sort of like, notorious for dropping out of book clubs.

No, I've got like 80 people on my email list and like six come regularly. And some people we see twice a year, some people we see every month. So it's fun.

Well, I'm like the Instagram for genre snaps book club. I think it's up to 100 or 200 and something. Six of us are there regularly, which is actually a manageable.

It's a good amount.

Yeah.

Well, before we wrap up, I just wanted to ask, what is bringing you joy lately in times when the world is a lot?

Well, just became a grandparent, you may have heard. So that brings me joy. I mean, I think books bring me joy.

One of my goals as of a couple of years ago was to spend more time with people in real time, which is why I had a book chat yesterday. So or. And even like online counts.

But like three years ago, I read over 200 books in the year and I was like, kenya, that's probably indicating something. It's not great. Yeah, that's more than you probably needed to, you know, whatever. So that really made me sort of like, try and find more.

That's why I know there's a book club at the Alt Bar and why I know there's one at Laughing Goal. So I think finding ways to engage with people who are interested in the same things that I am, but do different things.

Because I also don't like to, like, leave work and talk to talk exclusively about work with people, which is what happens when you hang out with people at work from work a lot. So I think spending time with. I mean, isn't that such a goofy answer? I think spending time with others brings me.

But like, when you're with people who are having fun, it's fun.

I mean, and I know I've mentioned Anomaly a couple of times, and that's probably partially because of folks in the room, but I always say, like, I. I don't see a lot of movies. I triple the number of movies per year that I see because of the film festival in November.

I go because everybody there is having the best time around a topic that they all really like.

It's always a great crowd at those shows.

Right.

And so that's why when I go, when I help out at a theater, like I house manage at Blackfriars Theater, it's because the people who go there are so into what they're doing that you can only be having fun doing it. And so those are the kind of things that bring me joy.

That's awesome. Well, thank you so much, Kenya. This was really fun.

Yes, thanks for having me.

This has been a presentation of the Lunchador Podcast Network.