Parenting After a Mormon Faith Crisis: An Overview

0:01 Guest One.

0:09 Guest 2 Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

0:42 John Dehlin One

0:45 Guest Life to Live. Mind the Time.

0:55 John Dehlin Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis Podcast. Today we are doing a joint release through two channels, the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis Podcast as well as Mormon Stories Podcast. Now that the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis Podcast is coming under the umbrella of the Open Stories foundation, we are looking forward to more cross pollination. And so we're releasing this today, live, streaming it through the Mormon Stories Podcast Facebook page. And we're already getting way more viewers, so that's a good thing. My name is Dr. John Dehlin. I am so excited to be here with you today. Again, it's May 7, 2019 and I am joined as always.

1:44 Margi Dehlin Hi Margi Delin. Good to see you all.

1:48 John Dehlin It's good to have you. Thank you for joining us.

1:50 Margi Dehlin Thank you. Good to be here.

1:52 John Dehlin And as always, the amazing, the thoughtful, the talented, the wise, the resilient, the strong. Did I forget anything?

2:02 Natasha Helfer Parker Oh my Atlanta and my sump pump, which sometimes makes noises in the background.

2:09 John Dehlin Natasha Alford Parker joining us from Wichita, Kansas. Natasha, welcome.

2:12 Natasha Helfer Parker I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for having me. We're getting a lot of rain here in Wichita, so there's a lot of sump pump noises in my background is all I'm saying.

2:21 John Dehlin That's all right. Well, we're glad to have you. And today we are thrilled to be covering a topic that so many people care about and want to know about. The topic is Parenting after a Mormon Faith Crisis. And just already from the feedback we've received, there are several episodes that are going to spring forth out of this topic. This is just going to be one of many, but we're going to spend at least two, two and a half hours today talking about parenting. And today is meant to be an overview because there are subtopics that are also very important. But before we do that, let me give a little bit of explanation for Mormon Stories listeners. Many of you won't know that for the past year, starting in January 2019. Margi, Natasha and I started a new podcast called the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis. You can find it at mormonfaithcrisis.com and originally it was not released under the Open Stories foundation, but we talked to the board and the board has agreed to let us bring this in under the Open Stories foundation as a nonprofit podcast to join Mormon Stories, Mormon mental health and a thoughtful faith podcast. So now we have four podcasts, of course, Dan Witherspoon's Mormon Matters. He's going off to do his own awesome thing and we bless him. But anyway, this podcast has been going for some time and we're up to 27 episodes so far. Just to give you guys a sense for what we've covered so far,

4:05 John Dehlin some

4:06 John Dehlin of the topics have included making peace with Mormonism. Are the stereotypes true about Mormons who have a faith crisis? What are the causes, the most common

4:16 John Dehlin causes of a faith crisis?

4:17 John Dehlin What are the most difficult aspects of a faith crisis? Understanding the Mormon conversion process, Understanding the deconversion process, Coming out as a non believer to family members, tips when navigating a faith crisis, Communicating believing family and friends, Communicating with church leadership, ward members and neighbors during and after a faith crisis, and communicating with children during a faith crisis. And then we just did a four part series that I think is really, really important on the essential role of grief and anger and depression in a Mormon faith crisis. This is also merging in all the episodes that we did on Mormon Transitions Podcast a few years ago. There's some great content there that you'll see us folding into this podcast. And so this is going to be ultimately a one stop shop of everything that you need or that your family or friends or someone you know care about needs to go through a faith crisis and to come out healthy. On the other end. We are also working on a book called the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis that Natasha and Margi and I are working on. And so there's lots of good stuff in the works. We would love it if you guys would share this episode on your wall or with friends or in groups because we want as many people joining us as possible. But let's now that I've given you that overview. Oh also we need your support if you value this content, if you value this sort of effort, we need you to go to MormonFaithCrisis.com and click on the donate button. We've got a handful of donors so far, but for us to keep this podcast alive, we need people to become monthly donors. 10 bucks a month, 25 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month, whatever you can afford. One of these episodes is worth several hundred dollars in therapy, and you're going to get, by the end, 100 or 200 episodes, not just for you, but for posterity as well. So please support us. It'll make a big difference. And so.

6:29 John Dehlin Yeah.

6:30 John Dehlin Am I forgetting anything?

6:31 Margi Dehlin Nope. I think you covered it, Natasha.

6:34 Natasha Helfer Parker I think we're good.

6:35 John Dehlin All right, so let's talk about our mission. Each time we do this episode, we have a mission that we share because we want to make sure people understand what we're doing and why. So, Margi, what's our mission of the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis?

6:50 Margi Dehlin So our mission is to provide positive, practical, and personal tips for navigating a Mormon faith crisis. We call it the three P's. And it is also for those wishing to understand those in a faith crisis.

7:04 John Dehlin So we're trying to keep this friendly to believers and non believers, relevant to believers and non believers, something that will build understanding and bridges.

7:14 Margi Dehlin Absolutely.

7:16 John Dehlin Natasha, do you want to add anything to that mission?

7:20 Natasha Helfer Parker Well, I think our main message is, you know, it's just kind of in the title, the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis. A lot of times, people who are going through a faith transition don't necessarily feel like that's a gift. And people who are living around the person who are dealing with the faith transition also don't necessarily feel like this is a gift. You know, if you're married to somebody and they're changing their belief systems, it can feel. Feel actually very threatening and very upsetting and very sad. And, you know, these are kinds of all the things that we're addressing. At the same time, I think what we want to infuse is hope and also understanding that on the other side of pain and discomfort and growth comes beautiful, wonderful possibilities and things that weren't necessarily in the cards before a faith transition. So whether you shift in your relational intimacy, whether you shift in your parenting styles, like we're talking about today, some of that is hard and painful, and some of it can really bring forward things that people then feel really wonderful about. So it's kind of like the loss of innocence of anything. Most of us miss innocence in some ways. Most of us have painful processes of losing innocence. And yet most of us wouldn't want to go back to innocent parts of our life before we kind of appreciate the growth. And actually, this is very kind of, you know, symbolic. And Mormon theology is this idea of growth and trials bring, you know, experience and things that are helpful to us in the end. So we have this hopeful message.

9:00 John Dehlin I love it. Thanks for sharing the hope, Natasha. All right, so we want to make sure everyone knows that this podcast is available at mormonfaithcrisis.com it's on YouTube under Mormon faith Crisis. It's under itunes. You can subscribe to it there lots of different ways you can consume this. You can also go to the Facebook page, the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis and all the episodes are there. And again, we'll be selectively sharing these episodes in the Mormon Stories podcast feed. And of course, check out Natasha Alfer Parker's Mormon Mental Health podcast if you're looking for specific topics around mental health. And make sure and donate to each podcast. That means a lot to you. Don't just donate to one thinking you're giving to all. It's really important if you want to see a specific project thrive and live on that, you donate to that project. So donate to Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis if you like that. Donate to Natasha's Mormon Mental Health if you like that, et cetera. We do provide coaching separate from our work with the Open Stories Foundation. Natasha, do you want to talk to us about your role as a coach and what you provide coaching for?

10:15 Natasha Helfer Parker Yeah, so I work in faith transition work, of course. I'm a certified sex therapist as well. So I deal a lot with sexuality. I, I deal with the intersection of those two things. Parenting concerns, kind of a myriad of mental health issues. So you can find everything that I do and my online practice. And all of those things are hopefully somewhat clearly delineated on my website, which is natashaparker.org so whether you want to see me professionally or you're interested in my podcast or products, I have some books and webinars that are available. Most of that you can find through following some link on my website.

10:55 John Dehlin And I have people tell me every week that Natasha saved their lives or saved their marriage. So Natasha is a gem.

11:03 Natasha Helfer Parker Thanks, John.

11:04 John Dehlin Margi, do you do coaching?

11:07 Margi Dehlin I do. I do do coaching. You can find all things coaching and all things that I am interested in and passionate about@beautyinthenow.org what types of things

11:18 John Dehlin do you coach for?

11:19 Margi Dehlin Relationships, health and wellness, kind of themes around identity, grief and loss, kind of all the things that accompany major life transitions.

11:28 John Dehlin Healthy marriage, relationships.

11:31 Margi Dehlin So it would be parenting. It would be, yeah, marriages. It would be authenticity or boundaries in relationships.

11:39 John Dehlin How about womanly things? Define just like emerging as a post Mormon middle aged woman.

11:48 Margi Dehlin So that would be identity.

11:50 John Dehlin Yeah.

11:50 Margi Dehlin Yes.

11:50 John Dehlin All right.

11:51 Margi Dehlin Define.

11:53 Natasha Helfer Parker That was good, by the way. Go deeper, please.

11:59 John Dehlin I like it. And then I can be reached@johndelon.com coaching I love specifically faith crisis work and mixed faith marriage work and healthy marriage stuff and sort of healing from midlife crisis stuff and even infidelity. Those are things I really love working on. So check us out if you need help and let other people know really quickly. We do have one event coming up that's kind of really important. June 7th through 9th is the thrive Beyond Mormonism Conference. We're doing it in Salt Lake City at the Maverick Center. We've only got, like a dozen spots left. We're going to be selling out. We have a max of like 250 people.

12:48 Margi Dehlin It's going to be fabulous.

12:49 John Dehlin And so if you are planning on coming, you better sign up, like, literally today, because there'll be no spots tomorrow. But the list of people coming to this event is sort of mind blowing that we're getting so many amazing healers all in the same place. So this includes Margi's going to be speaking. Natasha is going to be speaking, Julia d', Azevedo Hanks, Christian Moore, Anthony Miller, Leah and Brinley Young, John Larsen, David Bacavoy, Jenny Morrow, who's Elf on the Shelf. That's Samantha and Tanner, Alan and Katie Mount from Marriage on a Tightrope. Steve Holbrooke, Crystal and Sean Escobar. So many amazing people talking about all sorts of amazing themes. Faith, crisis, marriage, relationships, parenting, spirituality, finding community, healthy sexuality, mixed faith marriage stuff. You just got to check out. You got to check out Thrive if you're going to be in Salt Lake or want to be in Salt Lake. And the best thing about Thrive is making friends and finding community karaoke. The $75 slot per person covers two and a half days. Two lunches are included and karaoke. And it's gonna be amazing. So go to thrivebeyondmormonism.com to sign up for that. It is not an Open Stories foundation project, but it probably should be, but it's not this time. Maybe it will be next time. All right, so with that, it is time to launch in. We have the what's Working? Section that we do every week, which is just us sharing something that's working.

14:29 Margi Dehlin Yes.

14:30 John Dehlin So, Margi, what's working for you in your life these days?

14:33 Margi Dehlin I'm itching my eye. I'm sorry. Okay. You know, I have a number of things that are working, none of which are particularly deep still.

14:44 John Dehlin That's okay. Last week, Nash's what's Natasha's what's working was nothing's working.

14:48 Margi Dehlin I love that by the way.

14:50 John Dehlin She set a famously low bar for

14:54 Margi Dehlin the what's working segment and was completely real. That was like a. It was so.

14:59 John Dehlin It was profound. What are you talking about? Super profound.

15:02 Margi Dehlin So in my arsenal of simplifiers for the everyday and these things do matter, as it turns out. So the MVP would be dry shampoo. Lately, I'm just saying. So, yeah, I have simplified. Oftentimes when things get busy, the first thing I simplify is kind of my morning routine. And so dry shampoo has come in clutch for that. The second thing I just kind of wanted to offer that is also just sort of a pleasure. A simple thing is I love like smell or fragrance, so like essential oils or diffusers. But I've been trying to upgrade slowly some of my kind of beauty choices to be cleaner. And so in that like, along with that, I have found some fragrances for spring by a place called Skyler. Maybe you've heard of them.

15:56 John Dehlin But now real quick, people are going to think this is some product.

15:59 Margi Dehlin Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

16:00 John Dehlin We do not do product endorsements.

16:02 Margi Dehlin No, they're just things I've been enjoying. So I have this aisle fragrance smell that I've been wearing it, but it's kind of fresh and then so you can actually go on. It's just been fun. So I'm a fragrance person. It helps me kind of with the season, celebrate and I literally smell it all day. And so it's been nice to kind of know that I'm wearing kind of cleaner, some cleaner products. And then last, what's working for me, I am going silver. I've got some silver in my hair. And so it's been really fun this week to, to take a little bit of time to find some gray hair, silver hair mentors. So I've been doing that just kind of to see other women what works for them. And so that's been something that's been fun for me. Those are all working things that are just sort of. They're on the lighter side but, you know, they came to mind for me this week.

16:55 John Dehlin I love it. Thanks for sharing. Natasha, what's working for you if anything? If anything?

17:02 Natasha Helfer Parker If anything, yeah. Hopefully I've figured out something within the week. One thing that's working for me is Margi. Margi is always a really good reminder of mindful practice. I actually did some of that this week. I have this app that records some affirmations in your own voice and So I did that. And I've been kind of trying to sit with that in the morning and. And I know Margi has mentioned it before, but I also recommend it as the Calm app. So I've been listening to some things on there to help me at night and also in the morning. So trying to practice what I often preach. Sometimes I'm better at preaching than practicing.

17:47 John Dehlin What?

17:49 Natasha Helfer Parker Yeah, what? How could that be the case? And the second thing that's working for me because it's been really rainy and stormy is sparkles. So I'm wearing my sparkly sweat and my sparkly earrings because

18:06 Margi Dehlin sometimes you have to create your own sunshine, you know,

18:10 Natasha Helfer Parker you have to be your own sparkle.

18:11 Margi Dehlin That's right.

18:14 John Dehlin Sparkles by Natasha.

18:17 John Dehlin I love it. What's working for me is now that the weather's a little bit better, we are doing canyon hikes. So Margi and I went up to Mill Creek Canyon and we went on a super long hike. And this time instead of just going along. What is it, the pipeline trail, we found some trail that goes up higher in the mountain. And there's a lot of solitude, nature, running water, you know, buds sprouting out from bushes and trees, flowers, blossoms. We even found like a femur bone in a tree.

18:55 John Dehlin Last time we were walking, which was weird,

19:00 John Dehlin but we talked and we connected and we saw some beautiful sights. Get out and enjoy nature. Yes, that's what's working for us. A quick shout out to all the people that are joining us on Facebook Live. Lisa writes, sometimes you're born to sparkle. She's talking to Natasha.

19:22 Margi Dehlin That is true of Natasha.

19:25 Natasha Helfer Parker Somehow now I want to turn this into like a brand. Sparkle.

19:28 Guest That's right.

19:29 Natasha Helfer Parker There probably already is one.

19:31 John Dehlin Sparkle by Natasha.

19:32 Natasha Helfer Parker Seriously.

19:35 John Dehlin Andrew writes, Hi, Natasha. You're doing great things. You, John and Margi have done so much for Ashley and me. So glad you're with us, Andrew. Andrew also writes what's working. He says, apparently the universe is working for me and with me. I'm a big fan of putting our authentic self out there then sitting back and listening. So thanks for sharing, Andrew. Several of you are excited to come to Thrive. Lois is coming. McLean, Rachelle is excited to come, and of course Kristen and Erin, the Glue sisters are coming. We're super excited to have them. So anyway, thanks so much everyone for joining us. And Lindy just joined. Lindy is one of our co planners on Thrive. Hey, Lindy, thanks for coming. All right, so we are going to now dive into the main topic for today and it's parenting. Now we acknowledge that not everyone who goes through a faith crisis is a parent. And we also acknowledge that not everyone who goes through a faith crisis needs help with parenting. Having said that, if we had to make a top five list, maybe even a top three list of the things that the people we work with talk most about, it is parenting. So we're going to dive into it. We do want to let you know that we've already released an episode on the gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis about parenting. And the episode is named something to the effect of communicating with children during a faith transition. So a lot of you were like, oh my gosh, how do I talk to my kids about God? Or how do I talk my kids about the loss of faith or scripture or what we're doing? We just posted a link to that episode in the live feed because we want to make sure you guys know about that. We won't be covering that today. So this isn't how to talk to your kids about religion, how to tell your kids you're leaving the faith episode. That's outside the scope for today's episode, mostly because we've already covered it. So what we are going to focus on is just sort of like once you no longer have the word of wisdom necessarily to rely on. Absolutely. Once you no longer have the law of chastity that you hold. Absolutely. And even at a macro level, once you no longer have prophets, seers, and revelators telling you what's right and what's wrong, bishops telling you what's right and wrong, some of you may not be attending church. Some of you may not have a theology at all. Others of you may. It can feel very destabilizing to stop being orthodox within a Mormon context or to even go inactive or leave the Mormon Church if you choose to do that when you're worried about your kids. I think so many of us have been conditioned to think that if you aren't orthodox Mormon and. Or if you leave Mormonism, that your kids will become immoral or dark or moral less. Or even, you know, bad people, dishonest, drug dealers, prostitutes. You know, we are imbued with so much fear. What's that?

23:07 Margi Dehlin Sex workers.

23:07 John Dehlin Sex workers. Thank you.

23:10 Natasha Helfer Parker Which in and of itself is a valid choice.

23:13 John Dehlin Sasha always likes to remind us on this believer friendly podcast that sex working is a valid choice.

23:21 Natasha Helfer Parker It's a choice. People have agency. And.

23:29 John Dehlin So.

23:30 John Dehlin Yeah, and so there's so much fear around it. And having said that, literally billions of

23:36 John Dehlin people around the world raise their families outside of Mormonism.

23:39 John Dehlin And anyone who's ever, you know, hung

23:42 John Dehlin around non Mormons, whether it's Jews or secular Jews or Catholics or atheists or agnostics or Muslims or Hindus, you know, pick Buddhists, pick your religion or secular tradition, you will be able to find amazing parents raising amazing kids.

24:01 John Dehlin And so I think at the outset,

24:04 John Dehlin wow, can we start with just this

24:06 John Dehlin idea, Natasha and Margi, that people don't need to be super afraid?

24:14 Natasha Helfer Parker Yeah, I always start, you know, I do quite a bit of presenting on faith transitions and parenting. And I always start with this idea actually, like, believe it or not, like, lots and lots of people raise really great kids and lots and lots of people have really significant problems with their kids, you know, and that just kind of true of all kinds of families that come from all kinds of backgrounds. And I think in general, we try to again, have that equational approach, like, you know, oh, if I'm, you know, a drug addict who neglects my kids, my children will be, you know, awful. And the reality is that many people come from very traumatic, very chronically abusive homes that actually thrive and do very well. And then there's people who really provide a very stable environment and have a lot of, you know, kind of assets as a family, and their kids don't always, you know, thrive or maybe meet expectations like parents would hope and expect. So. And I even love how, you know, even in our own Mormon story, we've got right from the beginning of the Book of Mormon, you know, an example of a family system that's very mixed, like, same parents, lots of different results Right. In their children. Nephi, you know, all those, all those kiddos that they had. So I think that sometimes we think we have more control than we do have as parents, and we want to balance that with the idea that, yes, what we do matters and we still don't have a lot of control. Right. So kind of those two things. And there's lots of different parenting styles that can be effective. And there's not just one right way to do it or one right religion or one right culture where healthy, well balanced children come from.

26:02 John Dehlin I love it.

26:03 Margi Dehlin Yeah. This kind of plays on one of the first shifts that happened for me amidst learning about the idea of conscious parenting. And that is that structurally we come from a place that on some level talks about our children as empty containers, if you will. They come into the world and they're a void of morality or goodness or. And so, you know, a lot of the, you know, kind of structures are about we must teach, we must, you know, fill that container or our children will not be good, you know, and so one of those. The first major shifts is this idea of coming. Our children come desiring to do good. They have kindness and a built in sort of sense of morality and, you know, caring about other people. And I think that's interesting because just that shift of sort of that empty container is fear. Oh, my gosh. Because then when you transition out, it's like you're back to the empty container, right? And you're thinking, we have to fill and now we have to teach, and now we're. We have to do all this where the church was kind of helping us before. But. But once you shift to this idea of, you know, my child wants to do good, they actually inherently want to connect with other people. They want to be good to people. They want to, you know, then you have this trust, you have this. It relaxes that sort of anxiety response. So that's something. A shift. That was one of my first kind of shifts coming out is just to realize structurally where we come from, why we feel this intense anxiety, along with the fact that, you know, parenting hits us, you know, very deeply because it's around, you know, clearly humans that we love dearly.

28:01 John Dehlin You know, that is such a. I didn't have this in my notes, but I'm making my notes now, Margi. That is so important. So you're just. You're jumping out with point one, aren't you?

28:10 Margi Dehlin Well, it seemed to kind of like hit you.

28:11 John Dehlin It totally does. It totally does. Just this idea that you are whole. We are whole. We have goodness within us. There's this assumption that we need an extrinsic moral authority, number one, to have any motivation to be good, and then, number two, to tell us how to be good. And then if I had to add a problem with kind of orthodoxy and parenting, it's something that I find problematic theologically, that not every believer believes. And so I hope those of you who are believers will have patience with me as I talk about something sensitive. The core Christian paradigm that I was raised in begins with this idea that we are born in sin, that we're born flawed or broken, that we're born inherently wicked, and that if there isn't some sort of atonement that can wash us clean and wash us clean every

29:21 John Dehlin week,

29:23 John Dehlin that we are fallen, depraved, wicked people. I'm not saying that people who believe that are bad or wrong. I'm saying, for me, I found that to be a real important opportunity for parenting to erase that notion that we would Teach to our kids that they're depraved, that they're fallen, that they're broken, that they're unwhole, that they're unclean. And instead, like you said, Margi, to start with, this idea that you are whole, you are good, you are perfect. Now, that doesn't mean that you will always do healthy things.

30:04 Margi Dehlin Right. Or that you just leave your children to their own. You know, you're good. So carry on.

30:11 John Dehlin Right.

30:12 Margi Dehlin That's not what that means. It just means that you come from this place of, I think, abundance in thinking about your children, that they have what they need and that maybe we facilitate experience, experiences and processing, that they are able to connect with that part of themselves.

30:31 John Dehlin Yeah.

30:32 Margi Dehlin Bring it to light.

30:33 John Dehlin And this isn't me saying that the atonement's bad or that Christianity is bad. And I know a lot of Christians who believe in a very flexible approach to Jesus and the atonement. And even if you don't agree with me, that's fine, too. We try and model differentiation here. But all I'm saying is I don't like this idea that we're fallen and broken. And I don't even like this idea of sin. And I certainly don't love the idea of extrinsic moral authority and sort of a patriarchy needs to be what guides and leads you. I really like starting with this idea that we're whole, that we're good, that we have the goodness within us. It's not even a parent's job to tell the kid how to be and what to be. We do need to protect our kids. Just like, don't let them touch the stove, don't let them cross the street until they learn how to be wise. But I just love that we're able to start from this foundation of them being whole and complete and worthy. And then it's instead of a sin model, it's a learning model.

31:42 Margi Dehlin That's right.

31:43 John Dehlin When you make a mistake, you're not a sinner and broken. You are a human. That just is learning. And every mistake you make as a child is information. It's data to then learn to make better decisions. Natasha, I want to bring you in. We're getting lots of great comments from our listeners. Krista writes, yes, the scarcity we were taught in the church feels like a fear tactic they use to create dependency. Yes, Krista, some people do experience that. Penny writes, I've never fully understood the atonement. I agree, Penny. I didn't fully understand it either. Penny also writes, I've always felt that people are inherently good. I've never understood repentance because of this. Okay, so Natasha, what would you add to kind of this opening idea that Margi shared, that we are full containers in an abundance mentality versus an empty container and a sin shame, unworthiness mentality?

32:43 Natasha Helfer Parker I don't know that I would add much. I think, you know, when I think about kind of Mormon theology again, I think that there's a wrestle within Mormonism where on the one hand, you know, as a young woman, I grew up repeating every week the six or seven, you know, kind of young women's values. And one of them is divine worth, right? So we have this idea that we divine, that we have divinity within us, that we have, you know, that we're very special, we're children of God, right. We have these kinds of worth building types of concepts. And then yet the culture seems to weigh very heavily on this idea of worthiness, which I've written a lot about that. You know, when you start seeing yourself as less than or unable to glean the, the I guess the approval of a divine being or that you have to, you know, kind of hustle for that, you know, it's. It becomes very problematic to people's concepts of self compassion, self esteem, self regard. So. And you know, Brene Brown's work shows a lot about what shame does and we don't do well in kind of toxic spaces of shame. Now, now I think in the church, as I talk to different members, you'll see a great variety of this where some people really feel like the gospel teachings really help them have higher self regard because of this divinity type of message. And you'll have lots and lots of people who feel like they never measured up, they were never good enough, they never were enough per se. So I just want to make room that people coming from Mormonism or in Mormonism have different relationships with these concepts. And yet I think in general, as I talk to many people who work with LDS people in the mental health field, we do see perfectionism as an issue. We do see, you know, kind of this sense of, you know, the checklist type of stuff, you know, where people are always trying to, it's almost like a rat race of righteousness instead of money per se. And we have a lot of message around wealth and how people, you know, if your kids all get married in the temple and if it's like all these ways that we kind of measure whether or not you've done a good enough job and life doesn't work like that. And so really great people suffer, I think, very unnecessarily because of how we function in these ways. So I agree. I'm just saying all this kind of as, you know, complicating a little bit what you're saying, which is when we shape our children, when we approach our children as from a space of trust and a place of wholeness, I think we avoid some of these cultural things that cause harm within our upbringings that we got in our upbringings, I think.

35:46 Margi Dehlin Yeah. And what I love to kind of focus on, which is another kind of conscious parenting value, if you will, is it changes how we relate to our children. When we're feeling like we're coming from a place of trust, that we are generous in the way we view our children, in the way they're making choices, it changes actually our behavior, which is one of the core ideas of conscious parenting. In traditional parenting, it's very child focused. It's very behavioral focused. With conscious parenting, it's very connection focused. And so, you know, parents act differently. They act differently when they're feeling threatened and a great deal of fear and risk than when they actually are feeling like they're coming from a place of, you know, a little more hope, a little more wholeness themselves.

36:47 John Dehlin I have that problem a lot. I. I have always parented. Well, I have often parented from a framework of fear. Fear that the kid will have premarital

37:00 John Dehlin sex, fear that the kid will get

37:02 John Dehlin into drugs and alcohol, fear that the

37:05 John Dehlin kid won't be able to succeed financially

37:09 John Dehlin in the world or find a good mate or raise a good family. And

37:16 John Dehlin I think religion, let's just say certain types of religion can often operate

37:23 John Dehlin from a framework of fear and reward and punishment. And I think that just like you

37:32 John Dehlin said, Margi, what I've learned is when you operate from a place of fear,

37:37 John Dehlin number one, you pass that fear of the world onto your kids. And I think no matter what, I

37:42 John Dehlin don't want my kid fearing the stove.

37:45 John Dehlin I want my kid knowing how to use the stove.

37:49 John Dehlin I don't want my kid fearing crossing the street.

37:52 John Dehlin I want my kid learning how to

37:54 John Dehlin cross the street safely. I don't want my kid fearing sex. I want my kid knowing how to have healthy, intimate, fulfilling sex.

38:03 John Dehlin I want my kid not fearing that

38:05 John Dehlin they won't have a prosperous career.

38:08 John Dehlin I want my kid learning how to

38:10 John Dehlin pursue a healthy, happy career. So I love this idea of getting

38:17 John Dehlin rid of the fear model. I love it. Very good. Ok, we are getting some really good

38:28 John Dehlin comments from our listeners. So let's Just share a couple. Let's see. Krista writes. You want to read Krista?

38:39 Margi Dehlin Oh, we already read that one.

38:41 John Dehlin Okay, let's do Emily.

38:43 Margi Dehlin And of course, being raised in a secular home can produce wonderful children, but parents joining the church can disrupt childhood negativity. Negativity or negativity. Okay, negativity. I saw this firsthand. It's not the place or religion or their structure. It's the nature of changing course.

39:00 John Dehlin That's a great point.

39:01 John Dehlin Some people become better parents when they

39:03 John Dehlin join a religion, and some people without

39:07 John Dehlin a religion can be great parents. And there are plenty of religious people that are awful parents and there are

39:12 John Dehlin secular people that are awful parents.

39:14 John Dehlin And you know what?

39:15 John Dehlin You know what becomes of children raised by secular parents who didn't do a great job? You know what happens to those children?

39:22 Margi Dehlin They join a religion.

39:23 John Dehlin They become religious. Nicole says you're speaking my truth, Natasha. So, Natasha, Nicole's giving you a thumbs up.

39:33 Natasha Helfer Parker Thank you. I want to go back to Emily's comment. I'm not exactly sure if I'm reading this correctly. I'm not exactly sure I know what she means because you're responding to it differently than I would have. So just bear with me here for a minute. When she says people joining a church can disrupt childhood negatively and it's the nature of changing course, I'm wondering if she's mentioning something along the lines of when we change or shift or don't have structure, but somehow that's what hurts children.

40:10 Margi Dehlin Interesting.

40:10 Natasha Helfer Parker Okay, so I just want to. Because I think this is a fear. So whether or not she meant that or not, I do think it's a fear. I hear a lot is, aren't we going to confuse the children? This is what I hear. If we're shifting and changing, are the kids going to get lost in the confusion? Are we going to harm our kids by kind of taking them along on this faith transition when it created structure and community and friendships and morality in a certain space? So my typical answer to that is that I think that most childhood upbringings, I mean, we do know that stability and structure is fairly important, especially in the younger years, like two to seven, two to eight, like bedtime routines and having certain amounts of family traditions and things that they can kind of count on. And of course, if you've got a kiddo on the autism spectrum or anything like that, that even becomes more exacerbated than a need for routine and structure. And at the same time, I think there's a healthy mix between offering structure but also giving Opportunities for kids to have to learn how to be flexible. So I think that we can do a lot in our, in our process of this shift that can lean into flexibility without fearing that the kids are going to be confused and traumatized and that they're going to just, you know, completely fall apart just because there's been a shift in life. I mean, lots of shifts happen in life. We want to prepare our kids for shifts, whether they're faith shifts or a variety of other things can happen. Unemployment, divorce, change of schools, moving. I mean, there's death in the family, right? I mean, there's lots of things that kids are going to have to face that require flexibility. And so I would really encourage people to see a faith transition from that lens, that it's not that we have to be scared or that we're going to confuse or ruin the children, but in this process of shift, which we might see some regression or some concern or some angst around that, what tools can we then provide to make flexibility of value in our home as well?

42:36 Margi Dehlin I love that. Can I just say, I'm so glad you brought that out. And it almost feels like it goes back a little bit to empty container a little bit. Because if you kind of feel like we're kind of wired for change, that's something inherent to kind of being alive, then I really love this idea that as parents, what we really desire for our children is a space for practice, right? So change is inherent. It's coming for them. They will have it as part of their journeys. So if that is true, then this is a perfect place to start them with a coping skill tool belt where they connect with themselves during this process to, you know, start cultivating their own, you know, tool belt of coping and navigation skills which then they can return to and edit for the rest of their lives. But I love this idea of practicing and you are there, you can provide support for that, you can provide awareness for them. And so they're practicing the support in their, you know, kind of childhood teen years as opposed to kind of trying to not have any change. And then they go out at 18 and have, you know, very little practice with navigating that on their own.

44:00 Natasha Helfer Parker And just a few thoughts that come to mind on how to do this. You know, I often talk to parents about tone. You know, a lot of how we tell a story can be self fulfilling or system fulfilling. If you're confused and you're going through your own transition and you're constantly in an angst and angry and upset and causing all of this turmoil in your family system, that's probably going to be a little bit more of a dramatic tone for your kids to have to deal with where if you can sit together as a family system. And first of all, your tone is calm, where you can validate confusion. Like say we're kind of going through a confusing time. You know, we're changing a lot of the ways we think as a family, or at least your parents are changing some of the ways we think and it's making us act differently and it's making us think of different decisions and I'm sure that's affecting you. So I'm guessing this is kind of confusing just to name that can be very beneficial for kids. And then is your tone again, you know, like I always call it that dun, dun, dun tone, right? Like come here. Everything's changing versus you know what, there's some things that are changing and we're kind of light hearted about it.

45:11 Guest Right.

45:12 Natasha Helfer Parker And so kids will kind of get a sense of how scared or worried they need to be about any particular change with how you're role modeling that change and why. I think this kind of ties back to our grief podcast that we did these last few weeks where you really kind of have to do your own work so that your kids can benefit from that. But if the idea is that somehow I'm going to create a nice little bubble where I am a fulfilled, complete person as a parent, we're all setting ourselves up for failure. You're not going to be that for your kids. My new mantra is don't be a chronic abuser. Don't be a helicopter parent.

45:55 Guest Be.

45:57 Natasha Helfer Parker Oh, what's the word I love to use? It was on my be. It's not. Hold on.

46:04 Margi Dehlin Oh, I know what you're talking about.

46:06 Natasha Helfer Parker Be mediocre. Your goal is to be a mediocre parent. That's the love. I. That's the word. I love that word because it implies that you're gonna be so, so sorry instead of having this idea that I'm gonna be this amazing, wonderful, always in tune, always have the best answers. If you can pull off being a mediocre parent. Halla frickin luya. That's great.

46:33 John Dehlin And the reason why that's. And it goes against all of our

46:36 John Dehlin perfectionist, striving kind of natures. But ultimately your job as a parent isn't to tell your kids what to do and answer every question perfectly and to model perfection. It's your kids job to figure out

46:53 John Dehlin who they are and what they want to Be and what's important to them and how they can best navigate the world. And so I like the idea that

47:02 John Dehlin that takes a lot of pressure off, because the truth is, and Shefali Sabri,

47:07 John Dehlin we'll get into this, how we fundamentally

47:10 John Dehlin misunderstand our role as parents.

47:12 Margi Dehlin Absolutely. And in all these situations, this idea of connection over control. Right. And so, Natasha, when you're talking about, you know, sort of the energy or feel or drama you bring to a situation of kind of telling your kids about introducing the idea of change, I love this sense too, of connect, connection, you know, asking your children how they're feeling, asking them, you know, Leah just talked about naming what they're feeling. You know, life provides. Life is wise. Life provides these instances of. Of teaching, or if we're not going to say teaching, it would be like providing opportunities for our children to connect with themselves amidst a process. And just remember differentiation. As parents, we can be feeling something, and our children may have a relationship with the church we don't have, or they may still want to go, or they still. And in that case, you can reassure them the things that won't be changing, you know, in a situation and really, you know, go off kind of that connection piece. Which leads me to another concept which is.

48:25 John Dehlin Wait, are you from.

48:26 John Dehlin From Connection?

48:27 Margi Dehlin I was going to, but I don't have to.

48:28 John Dehlin No. Are you going to do connection over control?

48:30 Margi Dehlin Yeah.

48:30 John Dehlin Okay. I want to set it up. I don't want to give a short trip.

48:34 Margi Dehlin Okay. Anyway, I loved what you said, Natasha, about that, about the idea of sort of, you know, the drama we bring as opposed to an energy where it's like, yep, this comes with life. And where we're, you know, I'm shifting at this point, and you may not be. How are you feeling right now? And here are things you can expect that, you know, may be changing in my behavior. But here's what's not going to change, because I really care about you, so I love it.

49:03 John Dehlin Mary Lee is asking connection. She needs a class about connection. We're going to. We're going to give it right now, Mary Lee. Or at least an introduction, exploration. So can we jump into connection over control? Is that all right? And then, Natasha, we'll do the circumplex model next. Okay.

49:22 Natasha Helfer Parker Okay.

49:23 John Dehlin So connection over control is a concept that we found through Shefali Sabery. There's three books that we strongly, strongly recommend for parenting. And in fact, we're assembling a reading list of. Of books and a listening list of podcasts that we're going to share in these blog posts or in these podcast posts so that you can have lots of references. But three books that Margi and I kind of look as the Holy Trinity of parenting. Okay, that's dramatic. But good books on parenting are all from the same author. Shefali Sabery. That's S H E E F A L I.

50:05 John Dehlin Right, Shaifali.

50:06 Natasha Helfer Parker Yes.

50:07 John Dehlin Sayberry T S A B A R Y.

50:09 John Dehlin Is that right?

50:10 Margi Dehlin True.

50:11 John Dehlin And it's basically Eastern secular Buddhism merged with parenting. And the first book that we read by Shfali Sabery is called the Conscious Parent, and it's an introduction to merging executive Buddhism with parenting.

50:28 Margi Dehlin Yeah. The way I think about the Conscious Parent is it's very meta. So it's kind of philosophical in nature, which can be frustrating for people starting out who want to see more practical. Like, what does this look like? So I will say that it's highly philosophical.

50:47 Natasha Helfer Parker It's frustrating for Mormons.

50:49 Margi Dehlin Yes. Right. Because you want the practical, the secure, the. Just tell me. Just tell me what I need to do. And the Conscious Parent is very foundational. I love the book. I don't normally start people out on the conscious parent because I find they get frustrated.

51:05 John Dehlin Which leads us to the second book, which is my personal favorite by Shfali Sabery, and it's called out of Control, and I think it has a subtitle. Right. But basically it's a book that digs deep into contrasting the control paradigm or the control model with the connection model. And really quickly so that we list all three and we don't forget what's the third book?

51:27 Margi Dehlin So the third book is called the Awakened Family, which is my favorite as just a whole entity because you'll get a little bit. She goes over the myths of kind of traditional parenting. And then in the back section, you'll find a lot of practical. It looks different. Conscious parenting looks different in every scenario depending on the child and the parent. But it gives some of the more grounded. Hey, here's what this can look like. Here are some ways that it's different from traditional parenting. So.

52:00 John Dehlin Okay. And so check out those books and I'll set it up. So in some people's experience in orthodox religions, and again, I'm always gonna, with Natasha, try and provide disclaimers that this won't be everyone's experience. This isn't a condemnation of religion. There are lots of people that do parenting and religion.

52:21 John Dehlin Right.

52:22 John Dehlin But sometimes in the religion model, especially the orthodox religion model, it's a paradigm of authority and extrinsic.

52:34 John Dehlin Source

52:36 John Dehlin of morality or control, and this notion of control by rewards and punishments. And so it's very simple. It's this idea you parent like you understand God to be, which is what we've given you commandments as parents, as your home gods, you know, we've given you the commandments written on the tablets of what you're supposed to do and who you're supposed to be and how

53:04 John Dehlin you're supposed to live.

53:06 John Dehlin And if you obey the commandments as given to you by your parental prophets, we will reward you with kindness and praise and maybe even attention or money and approval. And approval and worth. But if you break the commandments, we will punish you. We will punish you with negative attention, which can actually be a reward, by the way, which is a subtle complexity in psychology, but will punish you with negative attention, with criticism, with, you know, a withdrawal, withdrawal. With a withdrawal of disapproval, with a downgrading of your. Of your worth or our perception of your worth, and with curfews and with groundings, maybe even don't give you a car if you don't go on a mission or don't give you money if you don't go to church. Like, it's basically this kind of like, lay down the law commandments and then punish or reward. And there's lots of different ways to do it. Is there anything else you guys want to add to the kind of the control model of parenting? Before we talk about the connection model?

54:24 Margi Dehlin You know, one thing I just like to do is provide an understanding of why we are this way. And I think it's very understandable being that, you know, if we look at sort of our primary layer of like, sort of culture, our culture is very authoritarian, authoritative model when it comes to children. Like, we all know, you know, well mannered child, a polite child. Our culture is, you know, quite Christian, you know, in sort of the way we perceive a lot of things in our culture. So we have that as a layer, you know, where you get a lot of cultural dictates of what a good child is and what it looks like. And then you have this layer of, you know, probably our experience. And for many of us, not all of us, but for many of us, what we experienced as children was most likely an authoritative or authoritarian structure. And so that is what we've seen, that's what we've grown up with. That's what we've. That is how we have, you know, experienced love. And then the final layer, of course, is the religious layer where that is again reinforced because our concept of God is very authoritative, authoritarian. And so we come by this honestly, we come by this idea of control and experiencing love and relationship through control in a very honest and also amplified way. There are layers to it.

55:57 John Dehlin Natasha, anything on the control model before we talk about the connection model?

56:02 Natasha Helfer Parker Well, just that when I talk about this, I always kind of tease our Mormon selves in that I kind of, even though I get it, why this is, you know, kind of seen as authoritarian from God. But really, you know, I see this more as Satan's parenting style than Heavenly Father's parenting style. Right. Like, the whole idea of, you know, we're going to control the outcome, we're going to know who's going to get back here, we're going to have idea of the ultimate, you know, measuring stick. All of that supposedly according to Mormon doctrine was rejected. Right. And so the plan of agency and choice and personal progression and personal agency and even the invitation to become as God, a peer of God is quite different in Mormonism than, I think, a lot of the more Christian sects that keep, you know, you always under God. Whereas this Mormon idea that you kind of get invited to become a peer at some point. So, again, I feel like we have some of these concepts in our upbringing or in our theology, but we don't lean towards it culturally. We don't. We lean towards the authoritarian. Even in our ways of talking about God. In most Sunday, you know, meetings, we lean authoritarian versus this agency God that we supposedly believe in. So I just find that interesting. I find that kind of a comical way to kind of call ourselves out. And by the way, when I use the word Mormon like I just did previously, you know, like, Mormons don't like philosophical books. I mean, all of us, I don't mean just practicing believing Mormons. I mean, all of us who've transitioned or who've left, we have a lot of that intrinsically within us of being solution focused, being checklist ers, of wanting information. Some of that comes from Mormon culture. Some of that comes, like, Margi, you talked about American culture that, you know, kind of values independence and solutions and goals, you know, instead of just kind of ethereal, you know, more Buddhist or more Eastern philosophies, you know, around being and accepting and thinking and contemplating. So I just want to tease us as Mormons, I mean, all of us, all of us who come from that in one way or another.

58:22 Guest Yeah.

58:23 John Dehlin Isn't it true that there's so little that's uniquely Mormon? I mean, we think we're so unique and different all the good, you know, we go on both sides. Only good families can be Mormon. Only moral people can be Mormon. Only good marriages are Mormon. Only healthy people. That's all hogwash. And, you know, Mormonism is bad and, you know, we have all these awful things and the church is bad and the church is harmful and it's patriarchal and it's controlling. You know, neither of those are true. There's good and bad everywhere. Right.

58:54 Natasha Helfer Parker Well, and we come from a very puritanical society here in the United States. So to think that our entire culture hasn't been very formed by the puritanical movement that started this country is to be kind of ill informed. So, yes.

59:09 Margi Dehlin One last thing I will say about control, just because it's. We're going to show sort of something in contrast with connection is control tends to be. Not always, but it tends to be very behavior focused. So we're not talking necessarily about what the child actually feels. What we want is what it looks like. And if. And it's just very behavior like obedience or, or listening to me or this idea of respect is what that looks like and what I'm like. And so that is something that's going to contrast quite a bit with connection. But I just wanted to kind of make that point.

59:49 John Dehlin All right, so we've identified the control model. And I'm going to just say the downside of the control model, from my

59:57 John Dehlin perspective,

59:59 John Dehlin is that, number one, it kills intimacy. Because ultimately the Mormon teaching of free agency is actually one of the things I really like. But if your approach as a parent is do what I say, follow me, punishment, if you don't do what's right, nobody likes it. I don't like to. Margi always reminds me whenever I'm being controlling with my kids, she's like, how would you feel if I talk to you the way you're talking to the kids right now? And if anyone knows me, they'll know that I absolutely hate control and I

1:00:39 John Dehlin hate being told what to do.

1:00:41 John Dehlin Well, our kids are no different. Right. So when somebody's telling me what to do and criticizing me and nitpicking me all the time, it makes me not

1:00:49 John Dehlin want to be around them.

1:00:50 John Dehlin It makes me sad, it makes me just unhappy. Kills my energy, it kills my motivation. And so one of the downsides of the control model is it's demotivating and it kills intimacy.

1:01:05 Margi Dehlin That's right. Another thing it does is it can reinforce a sense of tantruming in the parent. So as we're very, very, you know, attentive to the behavior we're seeking in our children, seeking to control in our children, we are often flying off the handle. We're really upset at them, we're really angry. And that is why in this model, the focus is actually on the parent being aware of their own reactions. And this idea is that our children, it is a spiritual practice of sorts where our children allow us to see the parts of ourselves that need healing and resolution. So you would ideally be aware of the fact that as you're trying to control your child, what is really happening is the child may fall in line temporarily with you, but will most likely disconnect and disrespect you on the inside over the long haul. Right. And that's if they do conform or with certain personality types, you will have, you know, people acting out of rebellion because one of the things we all really, really value is agency and this idea of. So, you know, either way, it's kind of a lose lose. And even if you have an obedient child that is compliant, what you lose in that situation is this sense you are duplicating a model that is extrinsic. What you want is in essence to say, my will over your will. Listen to me, I'm the extrinsic authority. I'm going to tell you how you need to behave in this as opposed to more of a connection model where what you're really seeking is for the child to have an experience of connecting with themselves. And so I just wanted to say that in the control model, we become this extrinsic force of just listen to me, your mind and your emotions and what you're feeling and your values. Right now, mine trump yours. And I am disrespecting your process so that I get to have what I want. And so, you know, as we're talking about wanting respect from our children, in those moments, we are actually not embodying this idea of respect. And you can do that with a 5 year old as well as a 16 year old.

1:03:29 John Dehlin Lindy writes, Holy moly. My dad parented 100% through the control method. And now as adults, our relationship is strained. It has minimal love, intimacy and respect. Thank you for agreeing with Lyndy.

1:03:43 John Dehlin That's what we want, Lindy.

1:03:43 John Dehlin We want everyone to agree with what we're saying. We welcome. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, yeah. Natasha, I want to bring you in. We're talking about the downsides of the control model. Anything you want to add?

1:03:58 Natasha Helfer Parker No. I ran across the out of Control book years ago and really really loved it. It's a challenge. I mean, it's a challenge with me and my husband. We both grew up, like you're saying, in authoritarian type households, probably him more than I. And I think there, I can see I probably lean more towards this model that we're talking about, but I still fail at it on a fairly regular basis. My husband uncomfortably leans towards it, and I can see the fear in him that as our kids make mistakes or maybe they're slacking or they're doing this or that I can almost see, like, oh, my gosh, I haven't held them accountable. Right. That's the word that he uses. A lot of times I haven't held them accountable and now I'm failing them because they're not maybe whatever X, Y and Z as far as these behavioral outputs. And that's a really hard thing to fight against that fear because I think that we all come to parenting for the most part with wonderful intentions. We only want what's best for our kids. And then in the process, you know, we try a lot of different things. Margi, what do you think about my thought?

1:05:15 Margi Dehlin John, I just say I love what you were just talking about, this idea of how empowering it is to come back to values as a family. I love that we did. We actually did a Mormon transitions podcast called Creating a Family Culture, I believe, where we kind of touched on that a little bit. This is a. This is a wonderful time for this layered approach. Values are kind of part of that as well as. Can you help me? Can you pull up the. So it's like a multi tiered approach where what you have is you kind of start out with values, and then underneath and values is this idea of embodiment where as parents, you embody these values that you've kind of put out. And then the next layer would be rituals and traditions that help support the values that you talk about. So whether that's like a family dinner or for peace, it could be. Or nurturing. It can be doing backs before bed and then just this idea of a home environment, the space and the feel of your home. But it's a really creative, empowering thing to go about with sort of freedom and intention and creativity to sort of, you know, start from the beginning and create as a family the type of experience you want to have in your home. So I love that you mentioned this values idea.

1:06:54 Guest Yeah.

1:06:54 John Dehlin And I'll just add absolutely to that. Those of you who have listened to

1:07:00 John Dehlin the Leah and Cody Young, Brinley Young

1:07:03 John Dehlin episode, the Youngs Give a great example of how they've implemented this idea of values. When Leah was losing her faith in Mormonism and Cody was still holding on,

1:07:14 John Dehlin they felt like they had nothing in

1:07:18 John Dehlin common and nothing to guide their family.

1:07:20 John Dehlin But what they did is they went

1:07:22 John Dehlin through a values exercise where putting theology and religion and doctrine off the table and even putting this fight about truth claims and the historicity of the church

1:07:32 John Dehlin off the table, they did a values

1:07:37 John Dehlin inventory which was basically, what are the things we value in our family? Things like honesty, kindness, service, compassion, love, charity, fun, recreation, joy, physical fitness, humor. There are all sorts of things that a family can value. What's crucial is that you not focus on what you no longer believe and that you not focus on what you're angry about or what you've left, but that as a family, you focus on

1:08:07 John Dehlin what you want to be about and

1:08:09 John Dehlin what you want to work towards. And just like there was the proclamation on the family that we all hung,

1:08:16 John Dehlin actually, we never hung it, but that many of you hung in your homes.

1:08:20 John Dehlin What you could do is you can cross stitch or macrame or stencil or get on Etsy, or get on Etsy, engrave, paint, whatever you need to do. Make a family constitution, a family proclamation of yours, of your own family values.

1:08:37 John Dehlin And you put that up there and

1:08:39 John Dehlin you talk about it, you reinforce it, you have family meetings about it.

1:08:43 John Dehlin But there is. Religions do not have a monopoly on

1:08:48 John Dehlin values or morals by any stretch. And so you don't need to worry that your family won't have an anchor, that your family won't have a foundation. Create the foundation intentionally and the benefit is it can be yours. It's not going to be some set of values that you don't feel excited about that were handed to you by somebody else. And it doesn't even have to just be the parents. The kids can participate in the creation of the values.

1:09:14 Margi Dehlin I would actually say that's crucial that the kids be involved in. Or again, you're having this external frame come in of the parents saying what the family will be. But it's so much. The kids have so much more of a buy in. They feel part of the process. If they can actually be part of that, you know, what do we. And it also can be a key kind of place of connection. What do we value? What's important to you? How would that show up in our home? How would we see that? How is that lived? These are all wonderful, wonderful ways to connect and explore around values. And you can even choose values that maybe you received from being a member of the church, but you reframe them, you make them your own. So you may still want contribution or service, but it looks very different now. It feels different and it's in a way that kind of honors you. So get creative and utilize and have everyone you know be involved in that creation process.

1:10:17 John Dehlin Yeah, super important, super valuable. And Natasha, thanks for bringing that up. And also, Margi, I love your chain of sequencing. Come up with the family constitution of values that then you embody.

1:10:31 John Dehlin And by the way, there's always that

1:10:34 John Dehlin saying who you are rings so loudly in my ears that I cannot hear what you're saying. The most important Shefali saber, he talks about this. The most important thing you can do as a parent is embody how many

1:10:45 John Dehlin of you as parents, nag your kids

1:10:47 John Dehlin about their use of social media and are always on your phones or on social media? Right.

1:10:52 John Dehlin How you embody your values is going

1:10:54 John Dehlin to be way more important than some Sunday school soccer meeting, lecture or sermon that's given.

1:11:01 John Dehlin But have your values embody them.

1:11:03 John Dehlin Create rituals and traditions around the values

1:11:06 John Dehlin and then create a home and environment that reflects all this.

1:11:11 John Dehlin And we did share in the live feed the episode from Mormon Transitions that will eventually migrate to Mormon Faith Crisis. That's called Creating a Family Culture. I.

1:11:30 Guest 2 Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org. One is a song by singer songwriter Mindy Gledhill off of her new album Rabbit Hole and album chronicling the heartaches and rewarding discoveries of her Mormon faith crisis. You can purchase her album on itunes or by visiting mindygledhill.com

1:12:05 Guest but they're all the same to me Wouldn't we worship

1:12:10 Margi Dehlin love

1:12:13 Guest and though we may speak and in different tones May our hearts be sewn together when our hearts feel so undone to our pe. One life to me forever Mind the time while it takes we're all here in this moment let's unwrap it like it's the most beautiful thing.

0:01 John Dehlin One. Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support. One

0:45 Margi Dehlin Life to Live Mind the Time while it Takes we are here. Can we go back to Control for a second?

1:37 John Dehlin So you covered the circumplex model and values and rituals and spiritual practice. We'll probably come back to that. But what we really want to get back to is control and connection. We were talking about how the control paradigm ultimately fails the downsides to it, and we were talking about how it's demotivating, it's extrinsic, and it can create lying and rebellion. It doesn't teach self awareness or self control. It models bad behavior on the part of the parents. It kills intimacy. It's not fun. And I'm just going to say, just personally, that I retained my very controlling, punishing, fear based approach to parenting long after I lost my orthodox Mormon belief, especially with my daughter Maya. I was always about curfew, about who are you with and what boy are you with and I'm scared you're going to have sex and don't have sex and don't you make out and how long are you in the car and did you go parking somewhere and you're five minutes late for your curfew and I don't want him around, you know, that sort of. And I'm probably mischaracterizing how I was

2:51 Margi Dehlin you had some really wonderful moments of showing up as well.

2:54 John Dehlin But it certainly, in my mind and in my emotions, I was feeling all those things. And the downside of that is that it taught Maya number one, that sexuality is scary, that it's dirty, that it's bad. And like Esther Perel says, you bring that dirty sexuality into your marriage. Right? But it also, it was a fear mentality. It made her scared all the time, it made her relationship stressful. And most importantly, it killed my intimacy with Maya for a while where Maya felt like she probably couldn't be fully honest with me. She felt scared to tell us the truth. She didn't want to share her happy experiences with us. If she was sexual, let's just say Theoretically, she certainly wasn't going to want to talk to us about that. And ultimately, it led to a position where she wasn't always safe, where she might get herself in situations that she wouldn't have wanted to get herself into or that she would need help getting out of, but because she felt scared and not close to me or us, you know, she probably, you know, wasn't always safe as she. As safe as she could have been if she could have called us at any time or talked to us at any time about anything.

4:13 Margi Dehlin Yeah. So there are a couple things in there that I would love to highlight. And the first thing is another aspect of control that is difficult is that you may control behavior on the surface, but oftentimes it drives those behavior underground, those behaviors underground. And that is what ultimately, you know, I think. So then you have split your child into behavior that they may show around you, and then you've got the behavior that happens kind of in the dark or, you know, underground. And so just for an overall healthy paradigm, that's something that's probably not so desirable. So this idea of, you know, driving behavior underground. And then, yes, on some level, without going into detail, Maya as an explorer, as someone who was very, very lit up and alive with her life, very much a developmentally appropriate young woman, I do feel like what you also sacrifice is when your child may be facing something large or uncertain or they are less apt to trust you with if that behavior comes. If your relationship is defined by judgment and kind of obedience, and then you will not have influence. You will not have, you know, the relationship where they're confiding and you're able to be there for them. They, at times in life when they may need you, are more left alone. And that is something that we have really, really come to value. Maya was our teacher that way. And we have shifted a lot of things from our experience with Maya as the amazing human being that she is. So a little side on that.

6:09 John Dehlin Yes. So that's for all those reasons. That's why control, from our perspective, isn't the optimum model. So now, if it's not control, what is connection? What is connection, Margi and Natasha? How do you know if you have it? How do you foster it? And what are the benefits? Do you want to go first?

6:36 Natasha Helfer Parker Before we go into that, can I just share a few things you just said? First of all, there's a quote that I just shared, actually on my Facebook page. It's more about partners and sexuality. But Ellen Bader, Ph.D. says, When you forbid a partner from doing something, you invite them to keep a secret. And I think that that is very much what you're talking about. And I think as parents, it's hard to balance that because then you're like, well, am I just supposed to be okay with anything and anything goes? And we're not talking about that. And I think that's what we'll get into with connection type parenting. So I'm not going to go into that very much right now. But I also want to say that the research has been very clear that when they talk to trauma survivors, sexual assault survivors, especially women, and they ask why they did not tell their parents, parents or their father in particular, it's because they were afraid of the reaction the father would have about either the perpetrator and that then the father would get in trouble by going and killing this guy or, you know, hurting this person or something along those lines. So in other words, they did not trust their parent to be able to handle the information of their pain and suffering. And that is profound. When you think about what we want to be as parents, if our kids have the idea that you can't handle my truth, you can't handle my thoughts or my ideas or my behaviors, then we do invite this sense of secrecy and the sense of just being kind of divorced from huge aspects of our children's lives. And that's just. I think we just have to decide to choose. Do I want to have authority and accountability or do I want to have conversation? Do I want to have trust? And you really can't have both. So you kind of have to decide which approach you're going to take. Now, when I make mistakes, because I don't always stay in my trust space, I do repair attempts. I go back and tell my kids, I lost it. I'm sorry. I reacted stronger than I would want. And so hopefully I'm regaining that trust because you're not going to be perfect at this whole process.

8:48 Margi Dehlin So important. I just not to plug my own blog. But I just did a post on apologizing to children as a conscious.

8:57 Natasha Helfer Parker You should plug your own blog. There's nothing. You know what? By the way, here's a thought I have. This is totally tangential. We constantly apologize for plugging our own stuff and for making money. I want to do a podcast on that. John.

9:15 Margi Dehlin Word.

9:15 Natasha Helfer Parker Whoa.

9:16 John Dehlin Natasha's unleashed.

9:18 Natasha Helfer Parker We just went somewhere different. Sorry. Let's release me.

9:23 John Dehlin Reel it back in.

9:24 Margi Dehlin Anyway, the power of an apology, especially as parents to our children, it is, you know, we want to embody again this idea that we are all journeying, we're all imperfect, and what it looks like to make a mistake and take responsibility for it and learn from it. And so I love that you brought that up.

9:48 John Dehlin And just as a capstone little story that gets kind of heavy really quick. And it just is a reflection of things we've already talked about. I'm able to talk about this because our daughter Maya has talked about this publicly. So I'm just gonna just lay this down. For me, this real moment of truth came one night when Maya attended a party and. Had an experience that led to a sexual assault. And she's talked about this publicly. And I'm just gonna say there's a lot we could talk about there. But the thing I'm gonna say is I learned from that experience that if I, you know, I don't know that I could have fully prevented that. Sexual assaults happen, you know, in all sorts of scenarios with. With parents doing right and wrong things. What I know for sure is that Maya didn't feel comfortable when she got into a tough situation, reaching out. And that left her in a vulnerable spot. And so I took away from that experience a renewed resolve to love and make my kids feel safe first. So that regardless of what situation that they got in, especially if they're in an unsafe or an unhealthy situation, what I wanted them to feel is safe. Telling or calling us to help us make them safe again, that's a really serious, heavy thing that I just kind of dropped there. But if it helps you remember the importance and the stakes, the stakes can be really high. What you want is your kids feeling safe with you. You want your kids feeling comfortable telling you everything. And you want your kids feeling like no matter what situation they're in, they can either tell you or call you to get support. And there's real risks if you don't have that. So we've talked a lot about the downsides of the control model. We're really quickly. Sean Escobar. Shout out to Sean. We just interviewed Sean and his wonderful wife, Crystal Escobar.

12:03 Margi Dehlin Amazing.

12:04 John Dehlin Wanna be balanced. Sean's been featured recently in the New York Times about his confrontation of a child of an adult who sexually abused him as a child. Sean writes, my relationship with my 13 year old daughter is at a critical tipping point. I have to be conscious of what I do and don't do. My relationship with her is the most precious consideration at this time. Sean, thanks for your vulnerability and your awareness. And this conscious parenting doesn't come natural to People raised Mormon and who have been parenting as Mormons for a long time. So, Sean, that's why we're all in this together, to kind of help each other. Sean goes on to write, how do these kids grow up so fast? I didn't see this coming. I thought I had a few more years to lie back. Nope. Time for me to grow.

12:50 Margi Dehlin Oh, I love that. I love that, Sean.

12:52 John Dehlin And that's what he said where he says, margie's already said it. Children are our best teachers by far. I mean, I'd say spouses are really good teachers, but in addition to spouses, children are phenomenal teachers in all the ways we need to grow and all the ways that we have good skills. Super important. Lisa writes, acceptance and understanding by listening can build a trust and safe place. Absolutely.

13:19 Margi Dehlin We're going to talk more about that in a minute.

13:21 John Dehlin Okay. So, Margi, what is a connection? How do we develop it? And then, Natasha, I'll bring you in.

13:30 Margi Dehlin Yeah.

13:31 John Dehlin How do we know if we have it? What is it? What is this elusive thing called connection?

13:36 Margi Dehlin Yeah. So, you know, connection starts with a connection with ourselves in any given moment. And so. But it's also a genuine desire to connect with our child's experience. And I find that it's easier to talk about this in practical terms, to take a situation where you might normally use control and replace it with connection. And that because I'm so practical and our podcast is also practical. We could do that. If you feel like that would be helpful.

14:12 John Dehlin Let me start. You put something out there, just so essential, and I don't want to jump by it. You said it starts connection to our children begins with connection to ourselves. That's something that you would hear a guru say or a coach.

14:28 Margi Dehlin What does it mean to connect with yourself?

14:30 John Dehlin And why is that important?

14:32 Natasha Helfer Parker Okay.

14:33 John Dehlin For a parent to be connected with their kid.

14:36 Margi Dehlin If we fail to connect with ourselves in a moment, then we are more apt to act unconsciously, to react to a situation. Right. And to have our children hold something that they shouldn't hold, meaning a wound or a reaction or a state of being that truly in their world, they are not prepared to hold. It's not even in their sphere. So that's why we connect with ourselves, to be able to take responsibility for our own emotions, which is what we're wanting our children to learn to do. So that embodiment is there.

15:14 Natasha Helfer Parker So.

15:14 Margi Dehlin So let's take a situation where, you know, maybe you're wanting your child to participate in cleaning up the table. Okay. And your child is Rolling their eyes. Maybe let's say a son, he's rolling his eyes at you. Or a controlling thing would be like, you know what? You can do this. I've done things all day. You know you can, don't you?

15:36 John Dehlin Don't you look at me that way.

15:38 Margi Dehlin You know, don't roll your eyes. It's disrespectful.

15:40 John Dehlin Don't show me disrespect.

15:42 Margi Dehlin Pick your version. Pick your version of what words are said.

15:45 John Dehlin Oh, is it hard for you to set the table, or is it hard for you to clean the table? I cleaned the table when I was a boy. You know?

15:52 Margi Dehlin Or if you don't. If you don't clean the table, I'm gonna take away your phone. Give me your phone. Or all of those are kind of control. A connection model would be like, oh, I know.

16:02 Natasha Helfer Parker Are they frozen again?

16:06 Margi Dehlin Are we.

16:08 Natasha Helfer Parker You were for a minute.

16:09 John Dehlin Oh, no.

16:10 Natasha Helfer Parker I was gonna have to throw another party.

16:12 Margi Dehlin No, I was wondering, are we back?

16:17 Natasha Helfer Parker Yes, yes, I hear you.

16:19 Margi Dehlin Okay. So anyway, to go with the connection model, really quick, what it involves.

16:25 John Dehlin Can I add something to that?

16:26 Natasha Helfer Parker Yes.

16:27 John Dehlin So when you talk about connection to self, this is true not just in parenting, but also in relationships, we come to parenting wounded. We come to marriages wounded. Whether it was a controlling parent or a abusive, verbally abusive parent, or an emotionally abusive parent, or negative emotional codependencies. Right.

16:56 Margi Dehlin We also call a template. We have been shown the way. We have had experiences that have shown us a map, if you will, that if we aren't conscious, then oftentimes we unconsciously will act upon what we've experienced.

17:13 John Dehlin Right, right. And so the reason why self control, self understanding is so important, self awareness for parenting is if you can get to understand your triggers, your traumas, your unhealthy coping mechanisms, your unhealthy codependent patterns. The extent to which you do that work to understand the mess that you're bringing to the parenting, the easier it is for you to recognize that and then to not introduce all that mess to your child and pass it on.

17:52 Margi Dehlin Absolutely.

17:53 John Dehlin That's why you have to do that work.

17:55 Margi Dehlin Yes. An obedience model oftentimes is a way for us to have the feeling that what we say matters, that what we want and need matters, and that we are heard. Right. So being aware of that in the model of what we're really looking for, that allows us to connect with the idea of, you know, how would we react in a similar situation. Our children are no different than we are in their emotional experience of things, in how they Value their own autonomy and have a desire for wanting to create their own lives. And so to bring it back to that situation, connection involves a lot of questions. It would be like, oh, I'm noticing, you know, are you feeling like a little bit of pushback right now? Can you tell me about that? What are you feeling right now? Maybe your child would then say, I have a headache. I've got a bad headache. I've had a hard day. I've had a. It humanizes them. It differentiates them from you. And from there, you can choose to connect with them. I'm sorry you have a headache. I'm sorry you've had a hard day. And then from there, you are not in this fight control position anymore. And you can decide what you want to do with that. Right? You can decide at that point. And we can talk about this with enlightened boundaries how you want to respond. But what you're not is unconscious. What you are not is just reacting in that moment. Obey me. Yeah, we'll clean up the table. Yeah. Well, where your child is not real to you in that situation.

19:33 John Dehlin Yeah. Reactive anger and vehement speaking, speaking out of anger, punishing out of anger. All of that is toxic to connection. And so if you can't manage your triggers, be aware of your triggers, manage your own stuff. You're just gonna bring a bunch of mess to your relationship and kill the intimacy.

19:53 Margi Dehlin So the first, the two things to really be aware of when you find yourself in situations where you're noticing anger come up or there's a power struggle, is to first connect with yourself. What am I experiencing? What am I feeling? Right. And to check that and then get curious about your child. And you can. One easy thing to do to connect is to just observe. I noticed this. Do you want to tell me about that? I'm noticing that I feel like a little bit of impatience from you. What are you feeling right now? What's going on right now? And this is something that is a normal response for things that you would term as like, rudeness or, you know. You know, our children get to differentiate and have moods and have feelings, you know, and have. And so it's a way to connect with what's going on. What's going on. And then the gift is they connect with themselves. They are self aware in that moment. Maybe they didn't even know they were being rude, but it gives them this information in a safe place. Hey, I'm noticing this. This is coming up. You seem a little short. You want to tell me about it? Do you need space? Do you need, you know,

21:05 John Dehlin I love it. Natasha, we need to give you a chance to jump in here. What do you think about what we're saying so far?

21:10 Natasha Helfer Parker I think it's, it's really good. I have a lot of different thoughts and then of course when you give me the minute, I'm like, wait, what was I thinking? I think, you know, one of the ways that I try to tune people into this is the use of our bodies. A lot of times our bodies are great clue givers and it's hard to stay in tune with our bodies when we've been taught to be so intellectual about things and we stay kind of in our cerebral space. So what is your gut telling you? What is your heart rate telling you? What is your neck and your shoulders telling you? What is your facial expression telling you? And so as you clue into your own kind of body, that is letting you know, I'm stressed or I'm anxious or I'm upset or I'm frustrated. You can also not just ask questions to your kids, but role model that by expressing your own stuff. Like right now, as I'm sensing some pushback from you, I'm noticing I'm getting frustrated. I'm noticing that because I can feel this tension in my shoulders as I ask you about it. I can also role model how to talk about it from my own perspective and hopefully build empathy from them as well. Because maybe you also have a headache, but you've been doing lots of things all day long. Is it okay just because we have a headache to not fulfill our responsibilities or things like that? This is also where it can come back to the family values exercise, where you have values around work, around home chores. What does it mean to be part of a family system? What does it mean to live with other people? What types of responsibilities should we share and how do we make sure that it's fair and egalitarian? How do we again, kids, especially preteens and teens, really like research based reasons, not well, God told us so reasons. So I mean, you can share that, you know, some of the biggest reasons for divorce and separation and even roommate struggles, our unfairness of egalitarianism and chores. Right? And so if mom's always the one picking everything up or dad is, or a certain kid is better at that than all the other kids, how does that fit into our family values? So that you're having those discussions prior to the conflict, but then in the moment of conflict you can bring up, like, remember when we talked about this, how does that fit into this situation where you have a headache or you've had a long day? Do you think that it would be okay to swap your chores with your brother, but then you take on their chores the next day? Or what are some solutions that you can help them come up with that aren't just, well, this is what you have to do.

23:58 Margi Dehlin Yeah, that's a big part of this. It is a huge part of it. And it does kind of fall back then to which is the idea of the family culture, creating a family culture and kind of this paradigm that everyone sort of participates in. Yeah. A number of comments are coming in around younger children, so I thought I would just say something really quickly. Lindy writes, yes, I have a 5 and 3 year old. Not the easiest to have a logical, rewarding conversation with pint sized ones. And that's true, I think with younger kids. I'm just gonna kind of focus right there. And Christy writes, how do you deal with this when they're very small? I know my 3 year old needs some structure and rules in her life, but she's not quite old enough to understand why she needs structure and why there are rules. Yes. So, and this is going to kind of fall into the enlightened boundaries. So conscious parenting is one of the myths around it is that there's no structure, that it's like child led, that, you know, and that is just simply not true. How that's negotiated and how boundaries are held and created and communicated, it can be quite different than the control paradigm. But it is not that there is no structure. So the one thing that I just wanted to bring out with young children is, you know, and John Gottman has a book about this that you can look up on. It's something around emotions, teaching your children, you know, the value of emotions. And really when children are small, all your main idea is this connection with what they're feeling. So again, it can look, it can be questions, it can be noticing, it can be actually providing space, it can be understanding their natures to know, you know, maybe they get overwhelmed at the grocery store and how to kind of meet their personalities there. This is all conscious parenting that you're connecting with the child. They are. But it's as simple as, you know, I notice, are you feeling angry? I notice that you're, are you feeling upset? What are you upset about? And really in this way, having a very egalitarian, accepting approach of all emotions. Because what tends to happen in parenting is we tend to approve of the positive ones and want to time out or isolate or, you know, minimize the more the emotions we perceive as more negative. Anger, tantruming and what you want to do. I feel like the whole kind of, oh focus for young children is an awareness of emotions. And so Natasha's body kind of connection to body is very much that way. Being able to name the emotion and then having them eventually grow into identifying emotions they're having and being able to work through those emotions by saying, do you need space? What can I do? Do you need a hug? Do you need. And not like kind of rushing in to necessarily punish because your child is sad at the grocery store or if that makes sense. So that's just one thing I wanted to bring out, is just sort of this idea of familiarizing your children with their emotional terrain and not unknowingly biasing that our children have positive. That positive emotions are. And that there are negative emotions that they're not welcome. We try to really minimize. Or I kind of put you away in your own space when you have those. If that makes sense.

27:40 Natasha Helfer Parker Yeah. Don't ask the kid to do something that you have no control over. Right. Like stop crying. They may not have control over that, and you definitely don't have control over. Don't ask your kid to do something that you have no idea what the result is going to be. So if you notice the crying or the tantrum, you can create spaces for that. You know, you can try to say, well, that's okay, it's okay for you to be angry. Let's go do that in this particular space. Or, you know, ignore it for a while. Or, you know, there's lots of different tactics, but to just flat out try to dictate, stop this particular. Or don't feel that way, or stop doing this. It's just not something that is necessarily in their control and definitely not in your control. So you're gonna. You're gonna start a control battle that you're gonna lose. So why put yourself in that position?

28:32 Margi Dehlin And really, connection can really help here. If your child is repeatedly having issues at the grocery store, you know, looking at things like timing or their personality, do they need a list? Do they need to play more of a part, you know, during that time? Do, you know, do you want. Make sure they're well fed? I mean, you know, just kind of really considering your child as a human being, as a person, that's worth considering as opposed to kind of fall in line with my structure. And if you have a problem with that, I'm going to have a problem with you yeah, I'll just give my

29:08 John Dehlin quick amen to everything Natasha and Margi have said. My quick answer to Lindy and to others who asked about little kids. Rochelle and Christy, a couple things. Number one, self compassion. Like we started out, I really love the thing Natasha said, if you do mediocre job of parenting, you're a success. Remember that. Accept to some level, you are going to mess up and screw up your kids. You are going to lose your temper, you are going to be impatient. So a lot of that just self acceptance with little ones and big ones. But I also want to say, remember that it's very easy to minimize the importance of what our kid is thinking and what they have to say. That we tend to think that as parents, we know what's right and what's best. And we tend to think we know what our kids should do, but our kids. And so it's easy to run roughshod over what they think and feel and want inside. And what I want to just plant a seed in you for those of you who aren't tuned into this, is that oftentimes, even at three or four or five years old, your kids understand themselves a lot better than you think. Your kids have thoughts and feelings deeper than you would think. And they often know things about themselves. They know more about themselves or about others than you think. And so Lindy and others, if all you do is just get in the habit of just taking a little bit more time to, like Margi said, ask those questions, ask them what they're thinking, ask them what they're feeling. Number one, you'll learn more about them. And number two, you'll teach them to be more reflective, to look more internally, to be more thoughtful, to become more emotionally intelligent. And all I'm saying is you may not always have time to do it. It may not always work out successfully, but just the practice of trying to remember, to check in with them, to ask them what they think, what they feel, to give them the practice of expressing it. I'm just saying that even if it doesn't have the outcome you want in any particular situation, just the discipline of practicing, nurturing with them their own intellectual and emotional awareness, I believe will pay dividends and it will, in the end help you guys work out a better system. With Winston, I'm learning this, that Winston, Winston is 15. Winston's 15. And so I'm not. I'm kind of changing the subject, but maybe not really Winston. He is really his own person. He really has his own set of values. He is motivated when he's doing something aligned with his own values. But if you try and force him to do something that isn't aligned with his values, either he's going to do it half heartedly or, or he's going to grumble or he's going to defy you, or he's going to disconnect and not want to be around you. I'll give you a perfect example. So we were out with a family member at dinner, and it didn't seem like Winston was having a great time. And so we talked to him later about that and we're just like, hey, you should always, you should always be engaged with everyone that you're with all the time. And Winston's response was, I didn't really want to be there. And this particular.

32:53 Margi Dehlin And that relationship isn't.

32:55 John Dehlin This particular family member hasn't always resonated with me. And so I just, I believe in showing what I'm feeling. I don't believe in showing that you're happy and engaged when inside you don't feel that way. And, and that was, you know, we could have just punished him for being disconnected at dinner or got mad at him, or made him feel bad or lectured him, and we probably did a little bit of that. But once we asked him what he was thinking and feeling, and he was able to express, number one, that idea that I don't like to show, you know, behave in ways that aren't consistent with what I'm feeling, that was actually a really wise insight that he was trying to. In his mind, he was practicing authenticity where his behavior matched his thoughts and feelings. He also was able to express his concerns about that family member, which we wanted to validate and were legitimate. But then finally we talked to him about his values and we talked to him about the value of kindness. And it turned out that he did have a value of kindness, even if he also had the value of authenticity. And we said, okay, maybe you don't love being around this particular family member all the time. Maybe it's not fun for you, but the way you behave can be perceived as unkind to other people. And it was really, once we just took the time to talk to him about it, connect with him about his values, and then we've found a value that matched the behavior that we felt might be optimal for him. He was able to pivot and say, oh my gosh, I do have the value of always behaving kindly. I didn't think about the fact that I wasn't behaving in a kind Way next time we have dinner with this family member, I'm going to behave more engaged because I never want to act unkind. I always want to act kind. And that may seem weird or kind of goofy or I don't know if it's New Agey, I don't know what that may seem to you, but all I can say is it was a fundamentally different conversation with a fundamentally different outcome when we moved from sit up straight and act engaged at dinner. Because that's the way you should act and that's the way we expect you to act. When we were able to frame it within his value system, his whole demeanor changed and it became something he was excited about versus something he would have left the conversation resentful about and resisted.

35:29 Margi Dehlin So really what I feel like that story illustrates is what happens when you shift from external, which is. And really what it was was saying we experienced you this way. Is that the way you know you want to be experienced? And his response was, that's what I was feeling.

35:46 Natasha Helfer Parker Right.

35:47 Margi Dehlin So. But what we did then was pivot to say what's important to you. And that shifted it from external. Our judgment and what we were hoping

35:58 John Dehlin for to him, what we were expecting of him.

36:00 Margi Dehlin Yeah. To him being able to connect with, well, here are my values. And in that situation here. And so then we were able.

36:07 John Dehlin He realized he wasn't living up to his own values.

36:09 Margi Dehlin That's right. So shifting it to an internal kind of connection made a difference. Yes, made a difference. Natasha, do you have something you want to add?

36:18 Natasha Helfer Parker I would just going back to the little kiddos, just two little thoughts or strategies. One is to just offer a choice that can be helpful. So like, well, would you like to continue to cry out on the couch or would you like to continue to cry in your room? Choices that, that make them feel like they have some say, but they're choices that you're okay with. So like, do you want spinach or green beans tonight? Because you know, we'd like to have a vegetable. And then the other thing is just always ask them for their thoughts. So this is where you start. Critical thought and solution focus ideas. So do you have an idea about how we can fix this? Can be a very simple way. Or do you have a thought on how this can get better? Because then you know, you'll kind of. Again, like John was saying, you kind of get a sense of what their ideas or thoughts might be. And even if they're not super realistic, then at least you have some, some place to start from.

37:20 Margi Dehlin It's so true. And an example of that would be like, even with a five year old or a four year old, let's say you have to go to the store and they're having a meltdown about going to the store. Kids sometimes don't want to go to the store. They want to stay in their PJs or they want to that even just the process of saying. So here's the deal. I get you don't want to go to the store, you know, and you want PJ time. You know, I'm in this position where I have to go right now, but what's something that. And you want PJ movie time. So how about we go to the store? It's just like bringing them into their own world. And then when we get home, you can have PJ movie time or allowing them to kind of show up in their own lives. So it's this balance of structure and bedtimes and meal times and yes, that's completely appropriate for those kind of, you know, early childhood, middle childhood years. And so you want this structure that's a balance of, you know, as a parent, things you do have, things you need to get done sometimes. Right. But also weighing their needs in there, too, and their voices so that they feel heard as well. And then just make sure that that structure in the end is really honoring to them. A bedtime is honoring. Right. We can talk about health and we can talk about, you know, and so being able to recognize, you know, why those things exist and being able to accept, explain them in a nurturing way to your child.

38:58 John Dehlin I love it. All right. Rochelle says she's loving this conversation. Sean Escobar is saying, you guys are so human, and I love it. I love humans. Thanks, Sean. Krista writes, my takeaway is, quote, I'm experiencing you in this way. This is what she would say to her child. I'm experiencing you in this way. Is that how you meant for me to experience you right now?

39:25 Margi Dehlin Love it.

39:26 John Dehlin That's. That's a really great restatement, Krista. Thank you. She also writes, how do you want to be experienced? Those are all really good.

39:35 Margi Dehlin Yes.

39:36 John Dehlin So when we've talked about connection, so far, we've talked about being connected with yourself, having a desire to connect with your children, asking lots of questions, really listening to the answers, honoring them, helping them connect with their own values. We've talked about giving options. All those things are some examples of connection.

39:59 Margi Dehlin Two questions that are really easy. I find people like, kind of easy go to scripts is not only, you know, here's what I'm noticing. I'm noticing, you know, that you're so that phrase. Or also, you know, you seem sad. What are you feeling right now? What's going on inside you right now? And you'll find a three year old, a four year old, a five year old can get there. They really can. Young children can really go there. So that's. Those are some examples of, you know, how to get to kind of connection I'm experiencing or I'm observing this in you, you know, do you want to tell me something about. Do you want to tell me more about what's going on with you as well as, you know, I'm noticing you're upset or, you know, can you tell me how you're feeling right now?

40:46 Natasha Helfer Parker There's some great feeling charts that are kind of fun to hang up in a kid's room or just even have on your phone as something that you can show a kid, like, which emoji per se before you.

40:58 Margi Dehlin There are like so many. There are some you want to kind

41:02 Natasha Helfer Parker of also, like complicate feelings. It's not just sad, angry, happy. Right. Like there's like a myriad, you know, confused, scared, disgusted, you know, like neutral, calm, you know, like, how do you give them a wider variety or wider vocabulary around feelings? Again, because we're somewhat not fluent in this in general ourselves. Right. So variety of emojis. There was emoji charts before emojis.

41:35 Margi Dehlin Right, Right.

41:36 John Dehlin Lindy writes this stuff is gold. Thank you so much. It's so hard to have only one way of parenting because of your upbringing. I always knew there was another way. I just didn't know how to do it. Us too, Lindy. We're just learning. We're just kind of figuring this out too, and we're all learning together and we're glad you're along the ride. Trent makes a really important point. He says it might be important to distinguish that these techniques may not always be ideal or applicable to children with special needs or with an SMI diagnosis. Some parents carry incredible guilt because children with extreme needs are not always typical. Natasha, what is smi? I'm sorry, I don't know what that is.

42:21 Natasha Helfer Parker I am looking that up as we speak.

42:23 John Dehlin So Trent tells what SMI means.

42:26 Natasha Helfer Parker I'm so bad at, like, I can barely just remember things like ptsd. So I'm sure it's something reasonable for us to.

42:33 John Dehlin And I'm going to just add Trent, that's absolutely true and I'm going to even add it. We told our son Winston that we would be talking about parenting this morning. And Winston said, I have one request. And we're like, oh, really? What's that? He said, tell them two things. Number one, that there's not just one way to parent, that there are lots of ways to parent effectively. And the second is, please tell them that every child is different and that you may need to exercise different approaches with different kids.

43:06 Margi Dehlin That's right.

43:07 Natasha Helfer Parker Very wise. And SMI stands for Serious Mental Illness. So, yes, if you have a kid with an ADD diagnosis, if you've got a kid with oppositional defiant disorder, if you've got a kid with bipolar traits, if you've got a kid with clinical depression, even, these are all very, very challenging things. I have several. I'm not going to share who or what, but I have several kids with official diagnoses that we have had to get professional treatment for. And it is very hard to shift your parenting style. And it's something that I recommend that you talk about openly in your family systems, because otherwise, on the kids who are not diagnosed or diagnosable oftentimes feel like maybe they're getting special treatment. The other siblings, or why do you parent them differently? Or why are there, you know, what they might consider the rules being different. So we talk about not everybody is the same, not everybody's going to have the same issues or complications, and we are going to parent you as best as we can from kind of an IEP perspective. Right. An individual education plan that they do at school. Well, we have an ipp, an individual parenting plan for each kid. And so, yeah, it may not always be the same, but we're doing the best we can to meet you, where you're at, where your brain functions, where your emotions lie, where your capacities are, and you may not all be able to do the same thing. I also make a lot of metaphors about sports, since my kids are kind of into sports. Like, you may have one kid who's doing a lot more effort than another kid, and yet he doesn't jump quite as far as the other kid does. So effort and results are not always correlated. And helping them understand that. And that's why we parent you differently.

44:54 Margi Dehlin Love it.

44:55 Natasha Helfer Parker Yeah. It's important to have these conversations out in the open.

44:58 John Dehlin Kristen, were you going to say something?

45:00 Margi Dehlin Yeah. This idea of differentiation amidst parenting, and I'm so glad that comment came through. And I would also say the techniques from child to child clearly will look differently. And conscious parenting, I would argue, has a place with what you're doing, because I think Especially if you have a special needs child or child that falls outside, you know, sort of, you know, a box of that, then you really, it is important that you're aware of your feelings, aware of yourself because you know, you could be wearing, you know, you could be blazing your own trail with this child, per se. And so you know that that sort of turn to self awareness is, you know, very, very important. And also that truly seeing your child, their brain, how their brain works, how they process those things are still essential in your desire to connect with your child and in your desire to choose your reactions as opposed to react.

46:08 John Dehlin Kristin asks a really important question that goes along the lines of the special needs point that Trent made. And I have to go answer the door. But here's Kristen's question I'm going to throw to you guys and then I'll come back. Kristen asks, what do you do if you have a kid that doesn't like to talk about their feelings? How do you emotionally connect with a kid that doesn't like to talk about their feelings? So you guys go, I'll be right back.

46:36 Margi Dehlin Do you want to take this first, Natasha

46:41 Natasha Helfer Parker or I forget that I put myself on mute because I start talking and then I'm like, oh, you can't hear me? Yeah, I think that not all children are going to want to meet you where you are excited to go. Right. And so you have kids and I have these personality differences in my own kids. Some kids that are very expressive, some kids that would love to talk for hours, other kids that, you know, you get kind of the grunts, I call it the Chewbacca movement in my house. Right. Like, And that's okay, you know, it's okay to kind of allow them those kinds of general proclivities per se, while at the same time I still make consistent effort. I make consistent effort and every now and then with my more introverted or quieter kids, I do get a look into their perspective, you know, maybe on a car ride or something exciting that's happened to them or. But it's not going to happen as often as maybe with my more extroverted or connective type of kids. So we are kind of wired differently in some of these ways. And at the same time I always just share things, like, I hope that you can talk to me about this. I hope that you can be open. I want you to be able to be expressive. I also notice, is this a trend that is with me or in general? So for instance, we have a kiddo who's very social, not so Open with me and dad. Okay, well, so I'm less concerned, right? Less concerned. He's able to be expressive with people of his choosing for whatever reason. Dad and I, you know, with a 16 year old boy is not necessarily the place he wants to go deep and, you know, deep and dirty. So that's okay. Now if he was isolated in every aspect of his life, my concern would maybe be higher and I would want to, you know, make sure that we're not missing something again. If you've got kids on certain spectrums, they may or may not be as interested in, you know, deep dives into emotional connection, the way we typically think of that term. Find out how they feel connected. Sometimes feeling connected to some kids is just playing video games side by side or going on a walk or doing some type of physical activity, like playing basketball out in the basketball hoop, you know, or things like, you don't have to get deep in your emotions to feel connection from your kid or for your kid to feel connection from you.

49:15 Margi Dehlin I love that. And that has been true for us with our children as well. We have children that really love to like, process verbally. Could do that for, you know, you know, longer amounts of time. And that's intimacy to them is sharing that inner world, that inner experience with you. And we have other, other kids that are very much like, not so much that if you're with me and we do something together, it's that being together and shared experience that's, you know, something. So I love, I really appreciate you bringing that up as well.

49:53 John Dehlin Yeah. With me, with me, a couple things like timing really matters. So there are some of our kids that hate the mornings and they're grumpy in the mornings. And so we would always, like we make a breakfast in the morning.

50:08 Margi Dehlin So we're like, we're like, hi, good morning.

50:11 John Dehlin Yeah, like how are you feeling? And some of them are, I'm with your kids. Others are like, don't say a word, shut up. You know, leave us alone, just try

50:21 Margi Dehlin and get out the door.

50:23 John Dehlin Yeah, and same thing. Some kids when they get home from school want to talk all about their day. And then others, the last thing they want to do when they get home from school is to have to be asked, how was your day today? But then I noticed like with one of our kids, he gets really chatty at night and he turns on at 9:30 or 10. And if I'm busy or tired or disconnected, I won't pick up on that and I'll miss it. And so some of these Kids, and this is for Kristen, Some of these kids that are quiet or disconnected, some of that is about timing. Not always, but sometimes I'd also just reflect this idea of doing that. You said, Natasha, with one of my kids, I was just wondering, how am I ever going to connect with this kid? And then I just. We started snowboarding, and it cost money. We had to buy boots. We bought snowboards. But I found that on the drives to and from snowboarding and on the lifts, sometimes if I was like, let's have a conversation now. Okay, we're driving. It's time for us to talk. What do you want to talk about? That would ruin it, right? But if I would just be with them enough in some sort of activity that was meaningful, they would. After they were having fun, after they were feeling space, after they were feeling connected, they would let a couple things slip. And so part of it's timing, part of it's creating activities where the communication can happen. And part of that just has to do with them feeling safe and them liking you. This is something that, again, I'm not naturally fun. I'm not like, naturally kids ride on my back and let's play hide and go seek and, you know, ride me like a horsey, you know, on the ground kind of. Dad, I can be that, but it doesn't come naturally to me. And so I tended more to be the dad of, like, are you doing your homework? How are your grades? How are you feeling today? Did you do your chores? Oh, your hair looks different. You know, and then noticing the problems, and I just noticed that the more I was, like, controlling. Critical, serious business dad. There was just a general lack of good feelings between me and my kids, whereas the more I would just watch the Simpsons with them or go snowboarding or take them to breakfast or take them to lunch or go on a walk, whatever their language was. If I would allow it to be. Allow our relationship to have fun and connection and happiness and joy time together, then in some instances, they would open up. Now, Kristin, again, there are some kids with personality differences or even developmental differences where none of the things I'm about to say are going to be helpful. I'm just saying, in my case, we had one or two kids who didn't like to talk, who didn't like to connect, and these things ended up being helpful for us.

53:34 Margi Dehlin Yes. And another thing I would just add to that is watch how quickly control creeps up. Right, in this, that we can become controlling around conscious parenting principles. Right. So all of a sudden, we're Getting upset or feeling fear if our child doesn't connect with their emotions or isn't expressing or isn't. And the whole kind of point here is this idea of invitations. We can provide invitations for our kids to connect, and they may or they may not take them. But I do like this idea of, you know, particularly with younger kids, if you have younger children and what you're saying is, you know, my children, you know, don't. I have a child that doesn't really go with, want to talk about feelings or connect with feelings, connect with where they are, connect with whatever. If they're coloring or if they're take some moments to just kind of connect with wherever they are and watch that sort of control piece that can show up in our. In sort of this way of expectations, right? Because we are. We kind of have our operating systems this way in our brain. And it is. They are astute and they are sly and they can appear even as we try to consciously parent and try to create this new paradigm of connection instead of control, we can get very controlling about our connection.

55:03 Natasha Helfer Parker How not Mormon of us.

55:06 Margi Dehlin Wherever you go, there you are.

55:09 Natasha Helfer Parker One thing that I wanted to revisit, there was a question earlier, you know, when we were talking about the values kind of exercise. Is this something that you should kind of revisit? And I would say absolutely, yes. And these are good reasons to revisit. I like documents feeling fluid, you know, like, even if you do the Etsy thing and spend a bunch of money on a family proclamation, not redo it every few years, you know, that's fine. But as you come up with issues like this, and even somebody I think mentioned something recently about, you know, a kid who likes to play a lot of video gaming and maybe doesn't have a lot of balance in their lives. How do you first have conversations around values? What do we want healthy lifestyles to look like? And how do we make room for entertainment like video games and Netflix and going to the movies and things, you know, instead of, oh, is the bad, you know, screen time. I think our kids are sick and tired of hearing how screen time is so bad, bad for them. So how do we incorporate screen time into our lives in ways that are balanced with physical activity and, you know, schooling and relationships and how to, you know, screen time has become more relational. I mean, my kids, I mean, I realize now that my house is no longer a private space. Like, the kids in the other houses can hear me yelling, like, who's done their chores or not, because they're playing some Xbox game. Right. And so I'm like, oh, you know, so they are being relational in ways with their screening oftentimes, but how do we balance screen time connection with in person connection and what's the difference? And having conversations that you can back up by again, research or ideas from other people instead of just this is the way it should be can be really helpful to then when you are bringing something up like, hey, I've noticed that you spent a lot of time today on this game and it looks like you really had a good time. Tell me about it. And then also, does that fall into this balance thing that we all talked about? How are you feeling about that? Do you feel like you're in balance or not? Oftentimes with one of my kids, they'll immediately get defensive and say, of course I'm in balance. And then a week later they'll come back and say something like, you know what? I think you're right. I think I need to rethink this or whatever. So again, you're not going to get rewarded all the time immediately using these tactics. Sometimes it takes a minute, a week, a month, a year before some of these things start sifting and influencing your kids in ways that you can see some seeds coming out of the ground that you're happy about.

57:38 Margi Dehlin That's so beautiful. I'm so glad you said that. What were you going to say?

57:41 John Dehlin We're getting some great comments from listeners. Penny writes, I invite my kids to weed with me or walk with me or work in the kitchen with me. And amazingly, they sometimes decide to participate, even though they usually don't. I've learned not to be demanding. Inviting can create a surprise. Totally true.

57:58 Margi Dehlin And control can be sniffed out. Like, if there's just a little bit of expectation or control in there, it can be sniffed out in a second.

58:07 John Dehlin Oftentimes it'll be like, hey, do you want to help me with the dishes? They're like, no. And then if you're like, oh, well, that's rude, blah, blah, blah, then you lost it. But if you're like, okay, that's fine. And then you let them sit with having told you no, and then you have them watch you do the dishes alone, they'll change their mind and come. But it will have been their own choice, not some emotionally or verbally manipulative thing that you expressed.

58:32 Margi Dehlin Yeah, and another thing that kind of comes up a number of times is this idea. Just be aware of times when you know it's a very natural thing to come up. But when we were Talking about the morning paradigm, you know, our excitement at a new day and really, you know, overly peppy around children that may not be feeling particularly excited about going to school and all that that means for them. But, you know, just be aware of when you're asking your children to meet your needs. I think that's something that oftentimes we do. We want that sense of approval and being needed and take care of me, take care of me so that I'm feeling good. So when they actually have emotions or their own feelings and that differentiation, you know, we can get very. We can have feelings of rejection, we can have feelings of abandonment. And so to just kind of watch that, watch that we're asking, we meet our needs and we have our own village of people to kind of work with us on that. But we're not having our children have to take care of our needs in that way.

59:39 John Dehlin Shefali is really good about that. It's not your kid's job to meet your emotional needs. You go get your emotional needs met. Don't put that on your kids. That's beautiful. A couple other comments that are being made. Let's see. Penny writes, my sons with autism and depression turned on at night, and I am always available for them. It is so fun to interact with them and be silly with them sometimes. We have serious conversations, too. I love it. Karina writes, I have a child that is an introvert and feels more comfortable playing video games online with their peers from school. It's hard trying to find balance and getting that child out of the house to do something. One attack. One thing I've tried with Winston lately is playing video games with Winston. It's not, you know, I grew up playing video games. I was probably addicted to video games growing up, but I stopped at some point, so it's not natural for me to play again. But then I realized that if I just sat and played with him for 30 minutes, he may talk about stuff or he may mention stuff, or more importantly, he just may feel more connected to me. So that if later I say, hey, let's do a chore, or will you help out with this or that, or speak nicer to your mother or me or whatever, he'll be more open because we have that emotional connection. So consider meeting your kids where they are.

1:01:00 Margi Dehlin I love that. And I also love connecting, you know, maybe trying to gain a little more insight on what the video games, what their purpose is or what he loves about them. So ask, you know, what do you love about this game? I noticed that you you know, you love to play it. What is it that you love about, you know, video games in general? And what do you love about this video game? I've been surprised when I've done that, you know, with Winston. He has very, like. There are deeper reasons. I'm oftentimes surprised at what he's enjoying, whether it was connecting with kids when we moved from the old neighborhood that he missed or, you know, wanting a break for his brain or, you know, really getting, getting into a substory or a subtext or, you know, it's. It's a great, it's a great thing to have that information as a parent. And it's even better that they realize, you know, how that video game is showing up for them in their lives and what its purpose is, what it's doing.

1:02:03 John Dehlin Love it. Krista writes something super important. She writes, I'm going to be listening to this episode on repeat. I'm so excited to revisit all of this. Such a powerful conversation. Christa. I just want to reflect that if you looked at our Shefali Sabery books, it's like scriptures should be or should have been. We've read them five, ten times each. We mark them up, we go back to them. If we're fighting with a kid or in a struggle, we'll find a chapter that relates. Here's the part about teenagers, here's the part about boundaries, here's the part about, you know, Linda, you're asking about enforcing consequences. These books have chapters and sections on all these different topics and we'll revisit them. Because you don't just, like, learn how to be a good parent. You work over years to develop parenting skills. And it takes repetition, it takes revisiting, it takes reminders, it takes practice, it takes discipline. So, yes, listen to this over and over. Read those books over and over again. And by the way, Holly's asking for book recommendations. We've posted a lot already in the feed, but Holly, the ones we're recommending most, for starters are, at least for me and Margi, the Awakened Family by Shefali Saberry. If you just Google Shefali S H E F A L I, you'll find these books the Awakened Family. The second book is out of Control, and the third book is Conscious Parenting. Those are three books by Shefali Saberry that we're highly recommending. Earlier, Natasha recommended Raising Emotionally Intelligent. What is it, Natasha?

1:03:47 Natasha Helfer Parker Raising Emotionally Intelligent Intelligent Children by John Gottman. Well, I think one of you mentioned it, but I. Yeah, mark it.

1:03:53 John Dehlin Raising an emotionally intelligent the Heart of Parenting by John Gottman, and even the

1:04:00 Natasha Helfer Parker concepts of emotional intelligence. I think I listed a book on that as well, just for us as parents to do our own work.

1:04:08 John Dehlin And we have a lot more books that we're going to be recommending because we have just started, it is time to wrap up, and we have only scratched the surface of all the things we want to share with you about parenting. And so we will be coming back next week with more on parenting. We've got a lot of really good things to come, but it is two o' clock and it's time for us to wrap up. So we want to thank everyone who's been enjoying, who's been partnering with us today, sharing their feelings, sharing their thoughts, sharing their experiences, asking questions, sharing their stories and perspectives. And a million people have shared their questions and comments and feedback and stories on Facebook and Reddit. We're gonna do our best to incorporate all that into future episodes and also into the book that we're writing. So we're really excited about that. So we've come to another end of a Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis episode.

1:05:12 Margi Dehlin We have indeed.

1:05:14 Natasha Helfer Parker Oh, wow. That tone changed, right?

1:05:16 Margi Dehlin It was meant to be, like, kind of funny.

1:05:18 Natasha Helfer Parker It got very dramatic.

1:05:21 Margi Dehlin We have reached the end.

1:05:22 Natasha Helfer Parker Yes, I'll do this part this time because I feel like John always does it. But if you find value in these types of podcasts, please consider financially supporting the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis. It's a standalone project. It's part of the Open Stories foundation, but it's a standalone project. And if we don't have financially support, then at some point or another, we're going to have to call it good and say, well, it was a good try. As John mentions, it doesn't just help you. It hopefully can be something that will be standing out here in the Internet forever. If people come across faith transitions a year from now, a few years from now, they'll be able to access all of these rich resources that we're trying to create here at Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis. So. So please consider a financial donation. We love doing this work, but I'm very comfortable saying I need to be paid for the work that I do. I'm not embarrassed about that or feel guilty about that. I think sometimes coming from our Mormon background, we expect a lot of things for free. We volunteer our times and we do a lot of that. And I believe in that as part of my value system. But I also believe in my value system of being paid for the work that I do, which I've taken a lot of time and I know John and Margi also have taken a lot of time to get our educational backgrounds, our processing and experience to be able to give you these types of resources the way that we're able to do. So if you can't do a financial contribution for some reason or another, the next best thing that you can do is offer us a positive review. If this is helpful to you, share the information on social media sites, participate by offering comments and questions like many of you already do. But for right now, this is not a financially sustainable project and we definitely want it to be because we feel like this is an area where so many people need help. We constantly get feedback that people like our stuff and that people want our stuff. So I want to just challenge about having you help pay for our stuff. So. And I do that with love and respect and I would love to support anything that you create a value too. So any future thoughts about that? Because I feel like, John, you're always asking for that and I want to be part of that process.

1:07:39 John Dehlin Thank you. And so go to MormonFaithCrisis.com, click on the button there. Pick a monthly amount, $10 a month, $25 a month, 100 bucks a month. And you will be helping yourself and you'll be helping other people. And the more monthly donors we have, the more we can kind of schedule these and do them regularly and make it worth everyone's while. So please become a monthly donor. It means the world to us and other people.

1:08:06 Margi Dehlin And thank you for joining us. Thanks for sharing all of your insights and being part of this podcast. We love the collaboration.

1:08:15 John Dehlin Absolutely. And so without any further ado, everyone, thanks for joining us.

1:08:21 Natasha Helfer Parker Thank you.

1:08:22 John Dehlin Please give us your comments. Email us@mormonfaithcrisismail.com Please share this on your walls, please give us positive reviews and please join us again soon for another episode. You guys are awesome and we love seeing you.

1:08:37 Margi Dehlin Bye.

1:08:38 Natasha Helfer Parker Sounds good. Take care, everybody.

1:08:40 John Dehlin Thanks Natasha for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org. One is a song by singer songwriter Mindy Gledhill off of her new album Rabbit Hole, an album chronicling the heartaches and rewarding discoveries of Mormon faith crisis. You can purchase her album on itunes or by visiting mindygledhill.com but they're all

1:09:23 Margi Dehlin the same to me when we worship love and though we may speak in different May our hearts be sewn together when our hearts feel so undone to our pieces

1:09:51 Natasha Helfer Parker become.

1:09:56 John Dehlin One

1:09:59 Margi Dehlin life to live my time while it takes we're all here

1:10:16 Natasha Helfer Parker in this moment

1:10:20 Margi Dehlin let's unwrap it like it's the most beautiful.

0:01 John Dehlin One.

0:09 Guest Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the donate button on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

0:42 Natasha Helfer Parker One

0:45 John Dehlin life to live. Mind the time.

0:55 John Dehlin Hello everyone and welcome back to another

0:57 John Dehlin episode of the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis podcast. I'm one of your co hosts, John Dehlin. It's May 14, 2019. We are joined today as always, by Margi Delin.

1:11 Margi Dehlin Hello everyone.

1:12 John Dehlin Thanks for joining us, Margi. It's good to have you.

1:15 Margi Dehlin Thank you for joining us.

1:16 John Dehlin John, you are wonderful.

1:18 Margi Dehlin How are you?

1:18 John Dehlin And brilliant.

1:19 Margi Dehlin Thank you. How's are you?

1:20 John Dehlin And good.

1:21 John Dehlin Good.

1:22 Margi Dehlin I am good.

1:23 John Dehlin And we are joined by our wonderful, fabulous, spectacular, marvelous, wise co host from Wichita. Why are you holding your nose?

1:34 Natasha Helfer Parker I always giggle a lot during these introductions.

1:39 Margi Dehlin I don't know why.

1:40 John Dehlin Does that mean you don't think they're sincere?

1:43 Natasha Helfer Parker No, I actually think they're very sincere and they're very lovely and probably needs to. It's probably some reflection on me needing

1:51 Natasha Helfer Parker to be able to accept compliments better

1:55 Natasha Helfer Parker and I just, it's, it's, it's kind

1:56 Natasha Helfer Parker of like a go to way that we do this. So it's lovely John.

2:00 Natasha Helfer Parker You do a lovely John. Lovely job because you're going.

2:02 Margi Dehlin There is no problem here. There is no problem.

2:05 Natasha Helfer Parker Brilliant and amazing and savvy and witty.

2:11 Margi Dehlin Oh, I like savvy.

2:13 John Dehlin How about tenacious? Can I be tenacious today?

2:15 Natasha Helfer Parker Tenacious.

2:19 John Dehlin Well, it's good to have you.

2:20 John Dehlin We are doing this episode or this series of episodes as a joint release with Mormon Stories Podcast. As many of you know, the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis has come under the Open Stories foundation board of

2:36 John Dehlin directors and the nonprofit.

2:39 John Dehlin And we're really excited about that. And so we're able to do more joint episodes with Mormon Stories podcast and other podcasts like Mormon Mental Health Podcast, because oftentimes there are topics that are shared amongst our audiences.

2:54 John Dehlin So we're thrilled about that.

2:56 John Dehlin This is a continuation of several hours, a couple hours that we recorded last week and we have so much to cover on parenting after a Mormon Faith Crisis that we are. We're going to continue the discussion today. You're going to get Three or four at least really good hours. And this episode is going to spawn other sub episodes. There are so many topics that are so big, for example, like raising kids in a mixed faith marriage, that we just decided to punt those and cover them in a totally separate series.

3:31 John Dehlin But welcome to you all.

3:33 John Dehlin Really quickly, let us make sure and get to the most important beginning which is discussing our mission. Natasha, do you want to lay that out for us?

3:43 Natasha Helfer Parker Yes, our mission. Except I'm always so like involved in sharing all of these things on my things that then I totally forget where we're going.

3:53 Natasha Helfer Parker But our mission is the three P's.

3:57 Natasha Helfer Parker So help me because I'm doing a mind blank.

4:00 John Dehlin Margi, you're doing the three P's today.

4:02 Natasha Helfer Parker Okay, I do know that there are three P's. Woohoo. My brain is working at that level today.

4:09 Margi Dehlin We've got positive, we've got personal and we have the practical.

4:15 John Dehlin The three Ps and what are we

4:16 John Dehlin trying to do with those things?

4:18 Margi Dehlin We are providing hopefully some personal strategies and tips for navigating a Mormon faith crisis while also hoping to help those who are in relationships with those in a faith crisis understand and be able

4:33 Natasha Helfer Parker to support

4:35 Margi Dehlin and yeah, so our intent

4:37 John Dehlin is to be believer friendly and non believer friendly, church friendly and non church friendly to try and build bridges. That's our goal and our sub message is that this whole faith crisis thing feels sometimes at first like a crisis,

4:51 John Dehlin but it can go like a caterpillar,

4:56 John Dehlin from a chrysalis to a beautiful butterfly, from lemons to lemonade, if you are willing to engage the process and find the right tips and tricks and tools and guides along the way.

5:10 John Dehlin And we want to help be some

5:11 John Dehlin of your guides along with our wonderful listeners who are usually joining us, many of them live on Facebook and are

5:19 Natasha Helfer Parker so, so wise and are wise and

5:20 John Dehlin give us good ideas and tips and tricks and suggestions and questions of their own.

5:28 John Dehlin So really quickly.

5:30 John Dehlin All of us do have coaching practices that are burgeoning, but we still like to advertise it just because we want to make sure if anybody is really in need now or in two years or five years they have somewhere to turn because sometimes it's hard to find resources and support. And we are firm believers. We are firm utilizers of therapy and coaching. At least Margi and I are. Natasha, do we even want to put you on the spotlight to find out?

5:58 Natasha Helfer Parker I do. I do get my own help too.

6:01 John Dehlin All right, good practice then.

6:03 John Dehlin We are not only utilizers of coaching and therapy, we are also providers of faith crisis coaching. And in Natasha's case, actual clinical therapy, marriage and family therapy, sex therapy, etc. But Natasha, tell us really quickly about your practice for those who want to

6:19 John Dehlin know what you do.

6:22 Natasha Helfer Parker Well, you can find out anything you want to know about my practice on natashaparker.org I'm a clinical licensed marriage and family therapist.

6:30 Natasha Helfer Parker Have been for over 20 years.

6:32 Natasha Helfer Parker About almost 10 years ago now, I

6:34 Natasha Helfer Parker went down the road of sex therapy certification and so definitely involved in that part of the field as well. I do online work and in office work. So regardless of where you're at geographically, I can probably either see you professionally or at least provide you with directions on where to go. And my online practice name is Symmetry Solutions. So that's me. You can find all of that on natashaparker.org Beautiful.

7:04 John Dehlin Great.

7:05 John Dehlin I have people tell me every week that Natasha saved their life and or their marriage. So she's good.

7:11 Natasha Helfer Parker Well, thank you goodness.

7:13 Natasha Helfer Parker That's a nice thing to say.

7:15 John Dehlin I hear it all the time.

7:16 John Dehlin I can't escape it no matter how hard I try. But he's pursuing me today.

7:20 Margi Dehlin Everywhere he goes.

7:21 John Dehlin Everywhere I go.

7:24 John Dehlin Margi, tell us about your wonderful practice.

7:27 Margi Dehlin Yes. So you know all things Margi. I'll just direct you to beautyinthenow.org I have a coaching tab there, but you can also my blog, I tend to write about the things that I coach about, so. So that's a way also to kind of see what I do and yeah, you can come visit me there.

7:49 John Dehlin All right.

7:51 John Dehlin And I do have a coaching practice@johndeland.com coaching. I specialize in faith crisis stuff and mixed faith marriages specifically.

7:59 John Dehlin I love helping save and improve mixed faith marriages. It's kind of my favorite jam, but

8:07 John Dehlin I'll also do individual stuff as needed. All right, so with that, it is time to move to the what's working section. And I mentioned this last week, but I'm going to list as my what's working a video game called League of Legends.

8:26 John Dehlin And I already again, have talked about

8:28 John Dehlin this in previous sessions, but Margi and I sometimes were frustrated at,

8:35 John Dehlin you know,

8:37 John Dehlin at video game usage in this generation. But sometimes we're like, hey, Winston, we want to spend time with you, but

8:44 John Dehlin you're on a video game.

8:45 John Dehlin And I broke myself down and said, shoot, I used to love video games. Why don't I just play video games with my son and have that be a way we spend time together? Like, are video games any less virtuous than a board game? Like, in fact, they're in some ways more advanced and More sophisticated. And so I'm learning League of Legends, which is a really complicated game that I'm awful at.

9:07 John Dehlin But I'm spending good time with my

9:08 John Dehlin son and I'm already seeing good dividends from that. So that's my what's working.

9:12 Margi Dehlin Yeah, it's really helped build connection, I feel like, with Wynn. And I love that Winston's teaching you something that's lovely.

9:20 John Dehlin He's super engaged. Like, come on, dad, you can do better. You know, it's a nice role reversal. It's like, it's okay, dad.

9:29 John Dehlin You know, even though you're awful, I believe in you.

9:35 John Dehlin So it's been good. What's working for you, Natasha?

9:41 Natasha Helfer Parker So two things I'm going to mention. One is just cherry tomatoes. It's that time of the year where

9:46 Natasha Helfer Parker I just love to pop cherry tomatoes and it's better than potato chips, so I love them.

9:53 Natasha Helfer Parker So this is. I'm not sure if it's a what's working thing, but it's something that I guess worked for me this week because it was super nice. You know, we oftentimes come at ourselves from a self deprecation lens.

10:04 Natasha Helfer Parker You know, it's hard to where I was overwhelmed or thinking about what we could be doing or should be doing. And, you know, the shitting on ourselves is kind of a classic problem I think many of us can commiserate with.

10:16 Natasha Helfer Parker So for Mother's Day, my kids kind of went around the table and decided

10:20 Natasha Helfer Parker to tell me something nice about me,

10:22 Natasha Helfer Parker which, since we're on the topic of parenting, I really try very hard to have good boundaries. Like, I don't. My job as a parent is one way. You know, I support and they want

10:33 Natasha Helfer Parker to give me accolades or be nice

10:36 Natasha Helfer Parker to me, that's fine. And there's a certain level of respect that obviously needs to be there, but I'm not looking. I try to be very mindful that I'm not looking for my own self esteem or my own, you know, processing through my kids that that's not their job to take care of me.

10:49 Natasha Helfer Parker So this was kind of. They. They did this on their own to

10:52 Natasha Helfer Parker come up with something that they liked about me.

10:54 Natasha Helfer Parker And three of them, it's like, well, she's nice, she's kind of simple things. Which were nice to hear.

11:01 Natasha Helfer Parker So that was good.

11:02 Natasha Helfer Parker But my daughter in particular, who's now

11:05 Natasha Helfer Parker an adult herself, really kind of went off on just.

11:09 Natasha Helfer Parker We need to understand how hard mom

11:13 Natasha Helfer Parker has worked to build her own business and how hard it is to be an entrepreneur and how difficult it is to manage all of us in that process.

11:22 Natasha Helfer Parker And.

11:23 Natasha Helfer Parker And she does all these different things,

11:25 Natasha Helfer Parker and she's constantly worried.

11:27 Natasha Helfer Parker I can tell she's worried about things a lot, but she doesn't bring that

11:30 Natasha Helfer Parker to us, you know, and does, you know, like, she's fairly upbeat with us and our family.

11:35 Natasha Helfer Parker She just went off for, like, five

11:37 Natasha Helfer Parker or seven minutes, you know, talking about.

11:39 Natasha Helfer Parker And, you know, and all the kids and Andy were nodding their heads.

11:43 Natasha Helfer Parker So it was a really nice working

11:46 Natasha Helfer Parker for me moment because it helped me, first of all, get some positive regard from my child, which is always a nice perk to parenting when that happens. It doesn't always happen. Sometimes it never happens, but it's nice when it does.

12:01 Natasha Helfer Parker And secondly, it was nice to see,

12:04 Natasha Helfer Parker even though I think balancing mothering and career and all that stuff, and that's a whole other issue, you know, and faith transitions. But that's been a hard thing for me my whole life.

12:15 Natasha Helfer Parker It was nice to see my daughter

12:17 Natasha Helfer Parker in particular kind of talk about that particular topic in the way that she did. So that's what's working for me.

12:24 Guest Beautiful.

12:25 Margi Dehlin I love that.

12:27 John Dehlin Do you grow your own cherry tomatoes

12:28 John Dehlin or do you buy them at the store or both?

12:30 Natasha Helfer Parker No, I'm lame with the gardening I

12:33 Natasha Helfer Parker tried back in my Moore, trying to do the checklist.

12:37 Margi Dehlin That was a should for such a long time.

12:40 Natasha Helfer Parker Yep.

12:41 John Dehlin We had to wish gardening well. We had to wish gardening well for other people.

12:45 Margi Dehlin That's right. Now we support.

12:47 Natasha Helfer Parker And I have garden envy, like, anytime people are good at it or love. And I kind of love the idea of it. And then the. Dewey.

12:55 Margi Dehlin Yeah?

12:56 Natasha Helfer Parker I'm lame.

12:57 Margi Dehlin Me too.

12:59 John Dehlin Yeah. What's working for you?

13:03 Margi Dehlin So let's see. I feel like all the kind of normal things of what's working, like meditation is working, but I thought I would go in a different direction this week for what's working. So what is working this week for me is this conceptualizing little blocks of time, like 15 or 20 minutes, and doing a bit of organizing. So, like, oftentimes with organizing, I find, you know, you can have a big project like your kitchen or something, and basically that never happens. Or it takes so long, because when do you have, you know, the two hours or four hours to really attack the entire kitchen? So what has been working is with 15 or 20 minutes, I can organize a drawer in the kitchen. I can organize my sock drawer. I can organize our filing system or the. And I am moving around the house. I mean, things are getting done, and I literally will say 20 minutes. So it makes me super efficient. I Pick the project carefully. And I'm feeling like I'm feeling progress, which is oftentimes something that can stop. You know, the process of organizing is just, you can feel very much like it's too big and you. You just will never get to it. So it's been nice to break it down and to feel like I'm actually moving forward and it's been really, really fulfilling. So organizing with 15 or 20 minutes and picking those projects really kind of carefully.

14:43 John Dehlin Love it.

14:43 Margi Dehlin Yeah.

14:44 John Dehlin All right, well, thanks for sharing your what's working listeners. We always love it when you guys share your what's working as well on the Facebook livestream. We don't have any today, so let's jump right into a continuation of our topic, Parenting After a Faith Crisis. We covered a lot of good stuff last week and we've still got a lot to go. Some of the things we focused on last week included

15:14 John Dehlin parental acceptance and understanding

15:17 John Dehlin that there's no one way that every child is different, that

15:24 John Dehlin we need to

15:24 John Dehlin bring this idea of kids being whole versus kids being incomplete or broken. We talked about perfectionism, parenting without fear. We talked about modeling mediocrity, the importance of structure.

15:41 John Dehlin And then we did a big old

15:43 John Dehlin section on connection over control, which comes from the work of Shefali Saberry. We talk some about values and rituals and gratitude and spiritual practice. So go back and listen to those episodes. If you haven't, they're really worth listening to. And let's continue and start talking about other things. Natasha, one of the items that

16:10 John Dehlin you

16:10 John Dehlin touched on last week, but we want

16:13 John Dehlin to have you talk about it again,

16:15 John Dehlin is the Circumplex model.

16:18 John Dehlin We know that that's an important model

16:19 John Dehlin for parenting and for marriage and family

16:23 John Dehlin therapy that you've been trained on.

16:25 John Dehlin So can you tell us a bit about that and how it helps with parenting?

16:29 Natasha Helfer Parker Sure. So just for anybody to know a

16:33 Natasha Helfer Parker little bit what I'm talking about, you

16:34 Natasha Helfer Parker can Google Circumplex model and there's lots of images and charts that come up that help you kind of understand this.

16:42 Natasha Helfer Parker It's not horribly complex.

16:43 Natasha Helfer Parker And yet we spent an entire semester study this and how it applies to different family systems.

16:49 Natasha Helfer Parker But what I like about the model is that it helps you understand kind

16:55 Natasha Helfer Parker of your particular system from two different dynamics. One is what's the level of flexibility

17:03 Natasha Helfer Parker in the system and what's the level

17:06 Natasha Helfer Parker of cohesion in the system. So flexibility would be, you know, like how much structure, how much, you know, rigidity is there in the system, and cohesion is how much Is the system organized on the connection in between people.

17:24 Natasha Helfer Parker So just to go over some of these really quickly, you've got, you know, on the.

17:28 Natasha Helfer Parker On the cohesion part, you've got disengaged.

17:32 Natasha Helfer Parker So not a lot of emphasis on

17:34 Natasha Helfer Parker family unity or togetherness, A lot of emphasis on individuality.

17:40 Natasha Helfer Parker On the other side of that, you've

17:41 Natasha Helfer Parker got enmeshed, which is a lot of. Of emphasis on togetherness.

17:47 Natasha Helfer Parker In fact, if you don't kind of

17:48 Natasha Helfer Parker agree with the system, you can be seen as being disloyal or disrespectful.

17:54 Natasha Helfer Parker Not a lot of room for individual kind of processing.

17:58 Natasha Helfer Parker So you can see how those are two extremes, and where we probably want to be somewhere in the middle, right, to be in kind of healthier spaces. We want to have some level of cohesion with our family members and at the same time allow for some level of individuality. On the flexibility scale, you've got chaotic, which is kind of like zero structure,

18:19 Natasha Helfer Parker lack of leadership, not necessarily anybody, having

18:23 Natasha Helfer Parker too many roles in family, where you have, on the other end of that rigid, where you have very strict discipline, very strict ideas about, especially behavioral modification. You know, you have to behave a certain way to be accepted within the system. So again, we're looking at the middle ground being the more healthier spaces to be at, which are considered flexible, which means you lean a little bit more towards less structure or structured, which means you lean a little bit more towards structure. But they're all considered kind of healthier spheres. So what I like about this model is that it ends up giving you four different circles in the middle that are all considered healthy systems.

19:09 Natasha Helfer Parker And so, again, to our point that you don't have to come up with one way of doing things.

19:13 Natasha Helfer Parker You might have a family where there's

19:15 Natasha Helfer Parker a little bit more focus on following the rules or discipline or consequences.

19:20 Natasha Helfer Parker You might have another family that has less, you know, structure around those things, but still have enough structure to keep things kind of enough structure for the kids to feel, like, stable in their system, things like that. And all of those can fit into those healthy systems. Then you've got the middle circle, which is kind of like we're kind of starting to lean into some dysfunction. And then you've got kind of the outer circle, which is the worst cases

19:48 Natasha Helfer Parker of those extremes coming together.

19:52 Natasha Helfer Parker I really recommend for people to use this chart and kind of do a self assessment and do it on several counts. One is, how do we feel that

20:03 Natasha Helfer Parker we're engaging right now with the kids that we have? Are our immediate family structure, where Would

20:08 Natasha Helfer Parker we put ourselves on that graph? I think it's also very interesting to consider what family system did I come from? So where would I put my family

20:16 Natasha Helfer Parker of origin on the graph?

20:19 Natasha Helfer Parker And it's also interesting to kind of look at it from a community perspective.

20:23 Natasha Helfer Parker So you can put your ward on the graph. Right.

20:26 Natasha Helfer Parker So I've lived in lots of different wards and stakes because I was a military brat.

20:30 Natasha Helfer Parker And I've moved around a lot too, as an adult.

20:33 Natasha Helfer Parker There's differences in how these ward communities or state communities, or even geographically where

20:39 Natasha Helfer Parker you live, how the church shows up,

20:41 Natasha Helfer Parker you know, on these systems. And you can even have a thought process about where the church at large would fall in this graph. So anyway, that's, I think, a nice tool to be able to help you consider some of the strategies that we're talking about, consider some of the structures that you have in place or would like to have in place. How much is too much, how much

21:03 Natasha Helfer Parker is not enough, and you know, create

21:08 Natasha Helfer Parker hopeful system, hopefully systems and be part of systems that fall somewhere in that middle trajectory. So that's My Very Basic 101 Introduction

21:17 Natasha Helfer Parker to the Circumplex model.

21:19 John Dehlin Okay, so I'm finding a lot of different circumplex models on the Internet. But tell me if I'm hearing you right. If I try and summarize. There's cohesion and you can have sort of like this disengaged family or let's just say an enmeshed family, right. In terms of how close everyone feels. And you want to strike a balance between being overly enmeshed and completely disengaged. Is that axis one, is that right?

21:47 Natasha Helfer Parker Yeah. Right.

21:48 John Dehlin And then second is adaptability, which is sort of either being super, super rigid or really chaotic. And you can have like this highly structured home or this totally chaotic, disorganized home. You don't want it over rigid or overly chaotic. You want to find a balance between those two. And then the nexus of those two things is sort of a balanced family in terms of its cohesion and its adaptability or, you know, flexibility. Is that right?

22:31 Natasha Helfer Parker Yes, that is correct.

22:33 Natasha Helfer Parker And you know, when you think about

22:35 Natasha Helfer Parker a lot of things that we complain about in post Mormon world is that we.

22:43 Natasha Helfer Parker A lot of times people feel like there was too.

22:47 Natasha Helfer Parker It was. The system was too rigid, it was

22:50 Natasha Helfer Parker too enmeshed, meaning that there was where

22:52 Natasha Helfer Parker the type of system, Mormonism is the type of system that there was too

22:56 Natasha Helfer Parker much cost in order to be an individual self. Now there are people that complain about

23:02 Natasha Helfer Parker different kinds of systems, right?

23:04 Natasha Helfer Parker Where there's not enough emphasis on togetherness,

23:07 Natasha Helfer Parker where they felt too isolated, too alone, too left on their own devices. Right.

23:12 Natasha Helfer Parker So Mormonism in general, I kind of

23:15 Natasha Helfer Parker like to tease, as in some ways,

23:16 Natasha Helfer Parker like an Italian grandmother. Right. It's going to be highly offended if you disagree.

23:21 Natasha Helfer Parker It's going to not let you come to Sunday dinner if you're behaving in ways that Grandma doesn't agree with.

23:27 Natasha Helfer Parker Right.

23:27 Natasha Helfer Parker So that's rigid and too cohesive and meshed.

23:32 Natasha Helfer Parker Right.

23:32 Natasha Helfer Parker Instead of like having.

23:33 Natasha Helfer Parker And this is where the whole concept

23:35 Natasha Helfer Parker of differentiation skills can be very useful in helping us. It requires differentiation skills to be in

23:42 Natasha Helfer Parker the middle both of those systems.

23:45 Natasha Helfer Parker Because differentiation is that the whole idea

23:48 Natasha Helfer Parker of that word means that we are different yet connected.

23:52 Natasha Helfer Parker Different yet connected.

23:54 Natasha Helfer Parker Not individualized, not.

23:55 Natasha Helfer Parker Oh, I'm fine on my own now.

23:57 Natasha Helfer Parker There's connection and difference that are able

24:00 Natasha Helfer Parker to tolerate one another.

24:02 Natasha Helfer Parker And so those are the skills that

24:04 Natasha Helfer Parker we develop to be able to stay

24:06 Natasha Helfer Parker in the middle of both of those graphs.

24:10 Natasha Helfer Parker Does that make sense?

24:11 Margi Dehlin Yes.

24:12 John Dehlin Love it. Thank you for sharing. Good stuff.

24:15 Natasha Helfer Parker Yeah. I think it's a great.

24:17 Natasha Helfer Parker It's a great model.

24:18 Natasha Helfer Parker I really love it.

24:19 Natasha Helfer Parker I love using it with families.

24:20 Natasha Helfer Parker I love figuring out where we fall and have people think about it from that perspective.

24:26 John Dehlin If I think about our family and Marg, you can tell me if you think this is right or wrong. I think that we have tried to err. If we err on the side of talking about everything and high emotional connection. I think that's been a real priority for us. And I think mostly because of your leadership, Margi. We're much more structured than we are chaotic. And so if we have ever had to guard against anything, would it be fair to say that it's kind of the rigidly enmeshed? That's what we would need to guard against. Is that fair to say? I'm just trying to apply this assessment to our family.

25:10 Margi Dehlin I would probably say in the earlier years more that when I look at Clara and Winston and kind of our schedule and kind of how we do things now with, you know, there are. To me, it feels like it's much more flexible. That structure is for, like, meals or, like, bedtimes are now or what their activities are or, you know, driving when to skateboard after dinner with no moment's notice or. You know what I mean? I feel like I would definitely.

25:41 John Dehlin You're saying we have a good balance now.

25:42 Margi Dehlin I feel like we're in the balance realm now. But I do feel like probably starting out and particularly when we were in the church and for our two olders we were probably more rigidly enmeshed.

25:59 John Dehlin And also I think, you know, with, with a therap, you know, with like a psychologist and a coach and you know, talking about feelings all the time. I feel like it was such an important thing for us to talk about feelings that we've talked about them so much that I think we've had to realize that sometimes we may have overcorrected in terms of wanting to be there for our kids emotionally where maybe they've had an adulthood to learn a little bit of self emotional regulation that they didn't have to learn because we were always hyper there to talk to them about their feelings. Now again, this isn't about being self critical. I'm just saying heavy times we had to look at emotional enmeshment to see if we were allowing our kids the space to self soothe and find ways to manage their emotional regulation that didn't always involve us. Do you think that's.

27:00 Margi Dehlin I definitely feel well and that's coming from a place of wounding. So oftentimes where in your own childhood maybe there were things that you really would have valued but didn't have then you cannot overcompensate. Right. And when you're not conscious then that's something that. And we probably over corrected a little bit there for some years, particularly when suffering starts entering the picture. So yeah, I think it's probably pretty fair to say.

27:34 John Dehlin Natasha, where does your family lean off balance? If it ever leans off balance. I'm sure it doesn't because I mean, you know, you're a marriage and family.

27:44 Natasha Helfer Parker Right?

27:44 Natasha Helfer Parker Because I've got it all figured out. Well and one thing I want to say even before I answer that question,

27:49 Natasha Helfer Parker that just listening to you, she's gonna,

27:53 John Dehlin she's been looking at us, she's analyzing us. We're under eye, we're under Natasha's eye.

28:00 Margi Dehlin I welcome it.

28:00 John Dehlin Her all seeing eye.

28:03 Natasha Helfer Parker Now is this idea that yeah, I think different developmental stages also we do shift sometimes. You know, I think we might be

28:11 Natasha Helfer Parker leaning a little more structured when our

28:13 Natasha Helfer Parker kids are 5 and 6 years old, you know, versus when our kids are 16 or 17. And hopefully we can adapt to what

28:22 Natasha Helfer Parker the system needs, you know, at any given time. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have

28:26 Natasha Helfer Parker to be in one of these quadrants the entire time you're parenting or you might shift from a, let's say structured

28:34 Natasha Helfer Parker connected space to a flexible connected space just because of a faith transition. For example, those still fall within those

28:42 Natasha Helfer Parker four kind of healthy quadrants.

28:44 Natasha Helfer Parker Right. So by no means am I trying to imply that you should be in one space the whole time.

28:50 Natasha Helfer Parker As far as me, I mean, I think that we. I grew up in a home environment where I would say it was a bit enmeshed.

28:57 Natasha Helfer Parker You know, I think we leaned a little too much on emotional connection. And if you disagreed or had some type of experience that was, you know, outside of the family norm, that was difficult for my family to tolerate.

29:11 Natasha Helfer Parker And I think in some ways, even

29:13 Natasha Helfer Parker though my husband comes from kind of a stoic cowboy family, I think that was the same for them.

29:18 Natasha Helfer Parker You know, a lot of times we don't.

29:20 Natasha Helfer Parker We think of enmeshment as emotionally needy. And that's not what enmeshment is. Enmeshment is that we cannot tolerate other people being different than us. And so we kind of have tantrums and, you know, fits and get very stern when people are different than us. So that can be a form of enmeshment.

29:40 Natasha Helfer Parker So I think that really quickly.

29:43 Natasha Helfer Parker Sorry.

29:44 John Dehlin Thanks for educating me a tiny bit. So when certainly there's a scenario where family members don't learn to kind of emotionally self regulate and they always depend on talking to their parents or other people to kind of cool down or, you know, I struggle with this myself. That's not enmeshment. And is that codependence? Like what is there another word for that? Is there some category that fits in

30:08 Natasha Helfer Parker or not you're talking about when you're relying on other people to soothe your own difficulties? Yeah, well, that's a whole nother topic. But I will say this.

30:23 Natasha Helfer Parker I think that sometimes we, especially in American culture, we tend to think we're

30:30 Natasha Helfer Parker codependent, when in reality I think we

30:32 Natasha Helfer Parker do need relationships to self soothe. I think in some ways pop culture

30:36 Natasha Helfer Parker has kind of pathologized that and this word codependent. And not that there aren't issues with

30:43 Natasha Helfer Parker true codependency, clinical codependency.

30:47 Natasha Helfer Parker But if your idea. I think a lot of times the idea is that I need to be

30:51 Natasha Helfer Parker able to take care of myself.

30:53 Natasha Helfer Parker I need to be able to self

30:54 Natasha Helfer Parker soothe, I need to be able to cope.

30:57 Natasha Helfer Parker Kind of like we're an island. And then when I'm able to do

31:00 Natasha Helfer Parker that, then I can have a relationship in a healthy way.

31:03 Natasha Helfer Parker And I'm constantly telling people that's not how relationships work.

31:07 Natasha Helfer Parker And that's not how pack animals work, which is what we are. We grow up in relationship, we require relationship for well being, and we do better when we have support system now where that can become a problem, where we do need some self soothing skills is that our support system isn't 24,7 available to us all the flipping time. Right. And so where you run into problems

31:33 Natasha Helfer Parker with this is when you have like

31:35 Natasha Helfer Parker parents who are way too neglectful, just aren't around at all. And so now the child, you know, these are like attachment issues, right, that you study in psychology where the child has to over depend on self and kind of distrust the whole world because they were never able to rely on anybody.

31:52 Natasha Helfer Parker Or when you get kind of the

31:54 Natasha Helfer Parker helicopter parenting approach, right, where you have people that are just never allowing for the child to feel discomfort or have to problem solve or do some of that stuff and kind of glean resiliency on their own.

32:07 Natasha Helfer Parker But in general, we do need people

32:11 Natasha Helfer Parker around us to soothe ourselves. That's not a bad thing. And that can definitely fall in these connected and separated quadrants that we see in the Circumplex model.

32:24 Natasha Helfer Parker I typically say, okay, so like 80, 80% of the time, 90% of the time, you know, if you use somebody else, okay, you can probably find somebody

32:31 Natasha Helfer Parker in your support system who's available to you 80 to 90% of the time, especially if you have a diverse system.

32:37 Natasha Helfer Parker Right.

32:38 Natasha Helfer Parker This is really a problem when you only depend on one person, one main primary person. If you've got good friends, if you've got a supportive spouse, if you've got some supported extended family. Now there's a variety of people that in a time when you need, you know, social support, you can count on somebody to show up. But if you're expecting all of that from a spouse, for example, then that's going to be a problem because nobody can be available 24, 7. Right, right.

33:06 John Dehlin Got it.

33:07 Margi Dehlin Yep.

33:07 John Dehlin Okay, thank you for that. That's really good. All right, Circumplex model, everyone please check that out.

33:13 Margi Dehlin Margi, and get back to what you were saying about your own family.

33:18 Natasha Helfer Parker Yeah, So I think that, you know, in general, probably most of the fights that Andy and I have had are

33:24 Natasha Helfer Parker because he leans structured and flexibility and Eileen flexible. Right. And so he wants to have more accountability and more rules and more consequences all laid out. And I'm more like, you know, do we really need to do that?

33:38 Natasha Helfer Parker And so that's a lot of where

33:40 Natasha Helfer Parker our parenting maybe, you know, fighting or I don't know if fighting is really the word, but you know, conflicts come up in our different styles.

33:48 Natasha Helfer Parker And I think in our general family, I think that we are somewhat in the, I don't know, if we're in the I we like, it's a little

34:00 Natasha Helfer Parker leaning more towards I.

34:01 Natasha Helfer Parker And I especially feel that now that

34:03 Natasha Helfer Parker my kids are teenagers, and I would

34:05 Natasha Helfer Parker like it to be more in the we I like. I'd still like to feel a little

34:09 Natasha Helfer Parker bit more cohesive than I'm feeling with my kids, but they're resisting that. But I don't think that we're enmeshed. I think that we've done that. Both Andy and I have done pretty good job of not bringing a lot of that enmeshment from our families of origin.

34:24 Natasha Helfer Parker And not to say that our families

34:26 Natasha Helfer Parker of origin were awful, because we both really have what we would consider good families that we came from.

34:31 Natasha Helfer Parker But I think there was just less

34:33 Natasha Helfer Parker tolerance for when you didn't adhere to the system, if that makes sense, than what we're trying to provide for our kids.

34:41 John Dehlin Thank you. Thank you for sharing. All right, well, let's move to the concept of embodiment. Margi, this is something that Shefali Savery also talks about, Is that right?

34:56 Margi Dehlin Yeah. So the idea behind embodiment is basically anytime you notice so an issue coming up with your children, let's just say, always being late, right? So they're never on time, or they're late to school, or they're. That one kind of thing to think about is to reflect first on your relationship, yourself with being late. And so that is almost always kind of the first step as you're looking at an ongoing issue. Not just something that you know, because we all are late, but, like, something that keeps coming up is to reflect. And this could be the same with, like, phone use, that before you ever start expecting or communicating something to your child about changing a behavior, you go ahead and you reflect on your own sense of embodiment with the issue at hand. And so that is something that I particularly appreciate, number one, because I think reflection is always a good space to be in. I think it allows you to, you know, confront the issue or to talk about the issue in a way where you're connected, where you can actually share. You know, there have been times when we're talking about something that I also am struggling with, and I say, I'm going to work on it, too. And I say, what's difficult for me and try to connect with what's difficult for them. And it allows for just a deeper connection, a deeper awareness around the issue at hand. It also allows you to have some sense of the environment you're creating. For example, if you're always rushed and you're always late, then that actually creates an environment where that's more apt to be what they, what your children experience. And they're more apt to kind of follow suit or to not have the skill set to kind of follow through on that. So that's the basic idea of embodiment is just a level of self reflection that you use that in turn, you know, you're, you're working on healing yourself. One of the big things on about Shefali saberry is that parenting is actually growing ourselves up. It is actually less child focused than, you know, traditional parenting modalities. And then also that it allows for us to connect more deeply with our children's experience and, you know, be less judgmental if we struggle with it too.

37:38 John Dehlin I have a really hard time with embodiment sometimes. Sometimes, especially with social media, especially because my job is so related to social media. I'll be frustrated that the kids are too much on social media. And that might even be an accurate assessment. But I'll have those feelings. But then I'll want to be on my phone and I'll say, well, this is work. I need to be, I need to be doing work, you know, and works different than just, you know, mindlessly browsing Instagram, which of course is a really disrespectful way to characterize even what they're doing. Because in many cases what they're doing is either socially normal or appropriate or even, maybe even healthy and who knows? But all I'm saying is sometimes I heard as a child, do as I say, not as I do. And I think that's rubbed off on me a little bit. I'm just being honest and you're grinning.

38:34 Margi Dehlin I think it's very common and I do think we, you know, it is sort of an operating system of sorts that we can come by naturally, especially when we're unconscious. But you know, the other thing with that is it kind of checks your expectations, right? I mean, as an adult, if you're having a hard time regulating your own media use, you'll probably communicate that hopefully in a different way to your. At least that's the opportunity and that's what it's about. These are invitations for you to self reflect, for you to think about your values and then to kind of reach out to your child in connection as opposed to judgment, control and hypocrisy. Asking your child to embody something that you yourself have not figured out. And children sniff that out really, really quickly.

39:24 Natasha Helfer Parker I like all of that. I really like this idea of the

39:30 Natasha Helfer Parker fact that we are all still growing

39:33 Natasha Helfer Parker up, you know, that we're all growing up together. And I really find it interesting, especially in midlife.

39:39 Natasha Helfer Parker You know, the developmental tasks of adults in midlife juxtaposed with the developmental tasks of teenagers that we're usually raising at

39:49 Natasha Helfer Parker midlife kind of create some room for chaos, you know, because teenagers are kind

39:56 Natasha Helfer Parker of becoming more independent. And we're, in a sense, refocusing a lot of our ideas and our thoughts and behaviors even. And so there's a lot of shifting that's happening when those two developmental stages kind of collide. And so this idea that we're all kind of growing up together and then the embodiment, meaning that we're not taking this stance of I am expert. I am expert at all things. I am teacher and mentor of all things. I direct all things.

40:30 Natasha Helfer Parker It's more of this idea of I

40:31 Natasha Helfer Parker am with you on the journey. I am also working on these things.

40:36 Natasha Helfer Parker Even with simple things like organizing the

40:38 Natasha Helfer Parker home, you know, if you're going to be like yelling from the couch, like, everybody get everything cleaned up, or, you know, you're not very good at some of those things yourself, it's less effective of a model, usually than being involved in the process. You know, and let's do this as a team or let's figure it out, or how are we role modeling those kinds of behavioral aspects.

41:01 Natasha Helfer Parker Right.

41:01 Natasha Helfer Parker That we all would like to see improve in our households, I'm guessing.

41:05 John Dehlin Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's super hard. I also think just it's not just with the social media for me, it's also emotion regulation, controlling my emotions, my anger, my sadness, my temper. I think that the extent to which I model healthy emotion regulation is just super healthy for the kids. And the extent to which I'm not modeling it myself, how can I expect them to have control of their emotions or manage their emotions better?

41:38 John Dehlin Right.

41:39 Natasha Helfer Parker Yeah. I have a wonderful example of this.

41:41 Natasha Helfer Parker If we're going to get vulnerable

41:45 Natasha Helfer Parker because I'm so good at emotionally regulating myself. We just had an incident in our home where a teenage child. I always try to say, I have

41:56 Natasha Helfer Parker a lot of teenage children, so hopefully it's not. This doesn't out anybody.

41:58 Natasha Helfer Parker But teenage child, who happens to be

42:00 Natasha Helfer Parker bigger and larger than me, got very angry and came in the front door

42:07 Natasha Helfer Parker and just slammed it super hard and

42:10 Natasha Helfer Parker broke the frame on our door. Right. And I think that child was a little shocked by kind of having to come to grips with their own strength, their own ability to cause damage. And of course, my immediate response was like, oh, my gosh. I'm raising an out of control child.

42:30 Natasha Helfer Parker I'm raising this child that doesn't know how to emotionally regulate.

42:34 Natasha Helfer Parker And I go into a little panic mode.

42:36 Natasha Helfer Parker And then when I sit back and

42:37 Natasha Helfer Parker think about it, I have fairly successfully

42:41 Natasha Helfer Parker modeled that as an appropriate way to deal with anger. Now, I happen to be a woman and I happen to not be as

42:48 Natasha Helfer Parker strong as maybe my husband is.

42:51 Natasha Helfer Parker But a lot of times my kids

42:53 Natasha Helfer Parker have seen me walk to my room, slam the door, and that's kind of

42:59 Natasha Helfer Parker like mom's pissed and she's gonna be

43:02 Natasha Helfer Parker in her room for a while mumbling or whatever I do in the room.

43:07 Natasha Helfer Parker So that was kind of a wake

43:09 Natasha Helfer Parker up call to be able.

43:11 Natasha Helfer Parker And so when I talked to my

43:13 Natasha Helfer Parker kiddo about this, we did talk about the concerns of that. And as you're growing into a bigger human being, you know, you have to watch what you can physically do and how, you know, appropriate ways to anger. But in that conversation, I owned that. I owned that.

43:28 Natasha Helfer Parker I said, I think, you know, even

43:30 Natasha Helfer Parker though it's not an excuse, and just because your parents make mistakes doesn't mean that you now have full blown reason

43:39 Natasha Helfer Parker to make the same mistakes.

43:40 Natasha Helfer Parker I do recognize that I have modeled this behavior and I'm not proud of that. And I need to improve in this particular area of my life.

43:51 Natasha Helfer Parker And so, yeah, so it was just

43:53 Natasha Helfer Parker part of that kind of recognizing that we're all on this journey together. So I think that's.

44:00 Margi Dehlin Yeah, it is.

44:04 John Dehlin And thank you for sharing and disclosing. That's important.

44:07 Margi Dehlin And that's where we all are. I mean, we are, you know, human beings learning and growing. And I think so much of the authoritative authoritarian model, respect is kind of one of those key words, I think, that can come up around that model. And I think the irony is once as a parent that you begin to own your we model that too. I'm going to own my stuff. This is what it looks like. And instead of really going to that place of a lot of, you know, shame or that's another thing we can model too, is just this idea of what we do when we make mistakes. Do we berate ourselves? Do we really get defeated? Do we, you know, what owning looks like? What if you've hurt your child, what an apology looks like, and then how to move forward as a resilient being. And that's the thing about parenting, is we're modeling all the. All of that, and our kids get a sense for how I should treat myself as I'm learning and growing and making Mistakes. And some of that can come from how we embody that ourselves.

45:23 Natasha Helfer Parker And I just, I don't know if I'm just having this thought out of nowhere, but, you know, we've talked about

45:28 Natasha Helfer Parker the circumplex model, we've talked about embodiment, we haven't really talked about post faith transition. But I hope that what people are

45:35 Natasha Helfer Parker gleaning from this is the reason why we're talking about these things is because again, on the circumplex model, I think

45:41 Natasha Helfer Parker we've been mainly modeled enmeshed and rigid types of structures throughout typical upbringings in Mormonism. I'm not saying all upbringings, but typical or even that's how the church sometimes as an entity will treat even adult people, you know, and they're kind of quote unquote, parenting of us as, you know, members.

46:03 Natasha Helfer Parker And then with this embodiment idea, again,

46:05 Natasha Helfer Parker it's not a typical way that I think in classic Mormon or religiously conservative cultures that there's a lot of room for this. It does tend to be more authoritarian. It tends to be more, you know, do like, like John was saying, do what I say. You know, don't worry about what I'm doing. You do what I say because I'm the authority figure.

46:26 Natasha Helfer Parker So we're bringing up these concepts not

46:27 Natasha Helfer Parker just because we're talking about parenting in general, but because we think these concepts are not necessarily skeptical skill sets that we have in general gleaned in Mormon upbringings, if that makes sense.

46:38 Natasha Helfer Parker I just had to.

46:39 Margi Dehlin That's right. And another layer, another layer is cultural. I mean, we come by it really honestly, culturally. Everyone knows what a good child looks like in public. Right. Or a naughty child or a disrespectful child. These things. We have many, many layers. And, you know, they're cultural. They're in our own families. They're the church layer as well. So.

47:03 Natasha Helfer Parker Yeah, well, and especially here in the United States. I mean, Mormonism is not divorced from

47:09 Natasha Helfer Parker the puritanical roots of Christianity. And there's lots of parenting dynamics just from, you know, spare, don't spare the rod, you know, those kinds of ideas that we've been grappling with as a country for a long time. And just parenting dynamics. And there's a lot of research, for example, coming out. Really, the American Pediatric association has really come out very strongly with some position statements against spanking, you know. Sure.

47:37 Natasha Helfer Parker So it's, it's something where it affects

47:39 Natasha Helfer Parker us from an American culture, it affects us from a Mormon culture, and it affects us as a Christian culture. Right. So that's a lot of overlay.

47:47 Margi Dehlin Absolutely.

47:49 John Dehlin So we've got a lot of work to do.

47:50 Natasha Helfer Parker Yes, we do.

47:52 Margi Dehlin We've got a lot of rewriting.

47:53 Natasha Helfer Parker Me. Stopping slamming doors.

47:56 John Dehlin Stop slamming doors, Natasha.

47:59 Natasha Helfer Parker And I usually say a few nice words. I'm just gonna say I'm gonna work on that. You guys can hold me down.

48:08 Margi Dehlin Thank you for sharing that.

48:12 John Dehlin Okay, well, Natasha, you have a point about an intentional approach instead of a programmatic approach. Do you want to talk about that? Sure.

48:25 Natasha Helfer Parker So I think one of the things that we see, and I'm not the

48:29 Natasha Helfer Parker only one who's talked about this, you've talked about this quite a bit too, John, in our co presentations, is that the church offers a very good program per se.

48:39 Natasha Helfer Parker And I like to make the metaphor

48:41 Natasha Helfer Parker of like public school versus a homeschooling program. Right. So those of us who want to take advantage of the public school system, there's not a lot that you have

48:51 Natasha Helfer Parker to do other than pay your fees

48:53 Natasha Helfer Parker and, you know, send your kids off to school. The teachers are there doing the curriculum, there's administrators in place, there's, you know, sports. There's all kinds of systems set up to help your kiddo.

49:06 Natasha Helfer Parker For those who maybe want to take

49:07 Natasha Helfer Parker a homeschooling approach, well, that takes a lot more time, a lot more energy, a lot more kind of intentionality. And I'm not saying anything pro or

49:18 Natasha Helfer Parker against homeschooling versus public school system, but

49:21 Natasha Helfer Parker I'm just saying the church kind of does something similar. You know, from prime, from nursery on, there's a program in place that if you plug your kid in, they're going to have community, they're going to have curriculum, they're going to have social environment, they're going to have activities, they're going to have kind of.

49:41 Natasha Helfer Parker They're going to have expectations that go

49:42 Natasha Helfer Parker along with that of what comes next. And, you know, all the way up to mission and temple marriage and ongoing service in the church community as an adult. So it's ready made, it's autopilot type stuff.

49:57 Natasha Helfer Parker So for those of us who are

49:58 Natasha Helfer Parker transitioning away or don't want that, to have such an influence, even just nuanced Mormons or things of that nature, you really have to start intentionally, either creating something completely different or finding other systems to plug your kids into if you're gonna leave or if you're gonna stay, kind of in a nuanced approach, you have to really understand the curriculum, understand what's being said, you know, and create a lot of stuff on Your own, that addresses things that you're uncomfortable with or that you want to give a different perspective on.

50:33 Natasha Helfer Parker So I think that this is a

50:35 Natasha Helfer Parker helpful metaphor in just owning the work. You know, owning the work that if you want to create, if you don't like what the church has provided or you want to step away from what the church has provided, you either have to create something different or be okay with there not being a spiritual program necessarily. It doesn't mean that you leave and you have to create something that's similar to what the church had.

51:01 Natasha Helfer Parker But you may want to create something

51:03 Natasha Helfer Parker in the sense of service projects or volunteer work or community.

51:08 Natasha Helfer Parker You know, how are your kids going to get some of the things that

51:10 Natasha Helfer Parker they got in the Mormon Church, outside of the Mormon Church? So that's something that I think is worth talking about a little bit.

51:19 John Dehlin So, you know what? Probably half of all the comments we've received from our listeners are around this issue. So let's dive into this. And this may take a good 30 minutes of time, but I think it's worth it.

51:34 Natasha Helfer Parker Let's do it.

51:35 John Dehlin So,

51:38 John Dehlin yeah, so basically this reminds me of the workshops that we do in the retreats because, you know, we talk about all the holes that Mormonism fills. Mormonism fills spiritual, you know, spirituality hole. Your moral. It meets your moral needs. It meets your community needs. It resolves your concerns about death in the afterlife. It, you know, provides you the community. It has social and friends. It's a support for parenting and family. Like, there's so many needs that Mormonism provides. It's almost like a public school. You just literally drop your kids off and come back in six hours. And they may not have the best education in the world, but they've got at least a solid framework. And Richard Rohr, we've mentioned him a lot, he talks about this. He talks about first half of life and second half of life, that you need to have some structure that you're raised in to then allow you to have a faith crisis in whatever structure that is, to then allow you to construct a life of whatever you want it to be. But if you don't have a certain socioeconomic level, a certain education, a certain moral structure, discipline, work ethic and ego, as he calls it. You know, you aren't able to even have the luxury of getting to the phase of having a faith crisis so that then you can make life exactly what you want. Because if you're just stuck making ends meet, working minimum wage, working three jobs, just trying to survive, you're not going to have the luxury of a faith crisis to then build a life that's to your liking. You may not have the monetary or the social resources or the mental health or the physical health resources to even allow you to construct a life of your own choosing. And so one of the questions that people asked, and I think this is super relevant for a faith crisis, is what if I'm no longer a believing Mormon, but I want to raise my kids in. And we'll take as the first option a Mormon church. Not because it's true, not because I like everything about it, but just because it provides a lot of those structural elements. And one wise listener wrote it provides them something to rebel against. So what do you guys think about this idea of intentionally raising them Mormon, not because you believe in it, but because it provides so much. And once they're to the point of rebellion, hopefully they rebel in a, you know, in a more progressive, liberal, even secular direction. Margi, you look skeptical. Natasha, you're giggling.

54:36 John Dehlin So I want to know, Margi, what's your skepticism about?

54:39 John Dehlin And then, Natasha, what's your giggling about?

54:42 Natasha Helfer Parker Awesome.

54:45 Margi Dehlin You know, it would help to kind of know the ages, maybe that we're. We're talking about as kids kind of get older. I like the idea of children being part of. Part of that process for themselves, that it is a decision. Things become invitations, and they can kind of decide a little bit. Yes, the answer is absolutely. I feel like it is possible to have children grow up in the Mormon church and, you know, be able to independently think, be able to kind of think things through, be able to discern. And I think it starts with a lot of the things we've been talking about. So. So this is something that pairs well whether you're still going to church or you're not at all. And so I go back to the full container approach, which means kids come with a desire to discern goodness, with a desire filled with kind of light and are. You know, as parents, we love to create opportunities where they get to feel that they're in touch with that. But so something really common that I talk about when it comes to going to church and differentiation, again, is this idea when they get home, when you're having an evening meal, that you start asking questions that allow for your children to connect with themselves. That if, as parents, you feel differently, you emulate differences with a real positive sense of regard and love for one another, that it allows for you to practice creating environments where your children are reflecting on things that they're hearing, not just to blindly accept but to think over, to mull over and decide for themselves. And the way you begin by doing that, you begin to do that is just simple questions and then, you know, creating environments where it is very clear that everyone is respected at the table for their opinions and that this, this is an unconditional love paradigm where everyone is welcome and valued and there's this expectation that we likely will feel differently on, you know, different from topic to topic. So that's just one sort of. I love it being a perk. If Richard Rohr is saying, hey, here's a perk of growing up in a structure, it's that later on you get to have something to rebel against. But I don't find that as something that is essential for everyone. I feel like there are many wise, beautiful people who find wise, beautiful lives that are fulfilling to them without ever having a religious structure to begin with. So I just like looking at, oh, here's something that's a perk. If you happen to have grown up organized religion, here's something to think about. So those are some of my basic thoughts.

58:03 John Dehlin So thank you. Natasha, before you answer, I'm going to read Krista's comment because it's really thoughtful. She says, after I left the church, the Mormon Church, I found a lot of comfort and validation reading Richard Rohr's Falling Upward. But it suggested something that left me questioning my decisions regarding my young family's relationship with religion. He basically suggested, or maybe I just understood, the kids need the structure and belief system that religion offers so that one day they have a system to kick against, to go through their own spiritual awakening. It got me thinking that without my upbringing in the church and all the cognitive dissonance I'd wrestled with my whole life, I might not have come to find my soul the way I have

58:41 John Dehlin through leaving the church.

58:43 John Dehlin Marty's laughing. Leaving the church. Let's see, I missed it. What if they need something to rebel against to come to their second journey? And if we were feeling like our family would continue with that religion. But I'm wondering if there might be wisdom here I may have overlooked. So, Natasha, what is your response to Krista's question about raising kids Mormon as non believers? What do you think?

59:11 Natasha Helfer Parker Well, I really like. I think what's at the bottom of Margi's statement, which is there's no need. There's no, there's nothing saying that you

59:22 Natasha Helfer Parker have to have a certain type of structure.

59:25 Natasha Helfer Parker The concept that people are going to

59:27 Natasha Helfer Parker at some point kick against whatever structure they are offered is somewhat developmentally. Correct. But again, these words that we kind of typically tend to think of as rebelling. You know, we think about rebelling being something super dramatic, like, I don't know, going against every single rule that the system presents, or there's lots of ways to kick against a system just by having critical thinking and thinking a little bit differently than something. It doesn't mean that you're going off and having huge behavioral issues or something along those lines. I do think that younger kids require structure, some level of structure, not rigid structure, hopefully flexible structure. Going back to the circumplex model. As kids hopefully go through the developmental stages, we become a little bit more flexible as they grow into teenagerhood.

1:00:23 Natasha Helfer Parker But that doesn't mean that they require religious structure and it doesn't necessarily mean

1:00:29 Natasha Helfer Parker that they require belief structure, that those things can be shifting and changing because kids also require flexibility. Right. In other words, they have to be able to understand that life is flexible and that things change and things of that nature.

1:00:44 Natasha Helfer Parker So I think that raising your kids in a system that you don't believe

1:00:49 Natasha Helfer Parker in just because it offers structure is a little bit missing the point. You want to hopefully give your kids structure that does fall in line with your values and your belief systems and things of that nature. That's what most of us do.

1:01:06 Natasha Helfer Parker And Mormonism isn't the only place that

1:01:08 Natasha Helfer Parker you can find community structure. You know, I mean, Mormonism does that well, but so do other communities and so do other non religious communities. So it's more about finding something that fits your particular aspect as an adult. And then, of course, being flexible with that as kids maybe come into their own systems that they want to be a part of. Now, when you're in a mixed faith relationship, which I know we're going to talk about later, or when you're in a nuanced space and you still want to engage in Mormonism, then I think, yes, you can glean from some of the benefits of Mormon structure.

1:01:48 Natasha Helfer Parker And you want to be intentional in

1:01:50 Natasha Helfer Parker making sure that you're also offering them lots of other ideas that do mirror your beliefs and your values as the parent, that you don't just allow for this system to take over and to downplay your authority. And so in mixed faith parenting, that can be a little bit of a challenge on knowing how to do that. But we have good strategies that we'll talk about at a later date on that.

1:02:20 Guest Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org

1:02:31 John Dehlin do you broken and

1:02:36 Guest we're bent One is a song by singer songwriter Mindy Gledhill off of her new album Rabbit Hole, an album chronicling the heartaches and rewarding discoveries of her Mormon faith crisis. You can purchase her album on itunes or by visiting mindygledhill. Com.

1:02:57 John Dehlin The same to me when we worship

1:03:01 Natasha Helfer Parker love

1:03:04 John Dehlin and though we may speak in different tones May our hearts be sewn together when our hearts feel so undone to our peace Jesus become. One life to live Mind the time while it takes we are here

1:03:49 Natasha Helfer Parker in

1:03:50 John Dehlin this moment let's unwrap it like it's the most beautiful.

0:01 John Dehlin One. Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under Support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

0:42 Natasha Helfer Parker One

0:45 Margi Dehlin Life to Live Mind the Time.

0:55 John Dehlin So both of you guys aren't loving the idea, it seems, of raising kids as kind of in a church as secular folkers, non believers. There's another question that was somewhat similar. This is from Lisa and Alan. Lisa writes, when we lost our belief in God, my nine year old daughter wants to attend a non denominational Christian church with her best friend. I am so torn. I don't want to influence her relationship with God. I want to teach her it's okay to learn about other faiths and to discover for herself what she wants to believe. I also don't want a preacher sucking her in. I don't want her indoctrinated at this tender age. How do you handle children who want to discover faith in God when after Mormonism and all the harm it caused leaves you feeling terrified to let them? And then one of our listeners, Emily, she wrote minor 6 and 2 primary is too brainwashy for the lack of a better word. The primary hymns are so black and white. Follow the Prophet. I hope they call me on a mission. I love to see the temple are already unnecessary plugs. For shame. What Margi is saying is what we have adopted loving, open discussions with respectful environments. My daughters are already thriving with this change. That's super helpful, Emily, but I just, I don't want to leave this too quickly because Natasha, if I can push back for a second, and Margi too, you know religion. Some would argue that religion's what got us to the ball. In other words, religion's what got us here as a society to the advanced state that we're in now in 2019 and we should not be careless about jettisoning it. And I'll just add, Natasha, aren't there millions of people that raise their kids in a religious tradition and they don't really believe it? I'm thinking about Catholics that are cultural, Jews that are cultural, you know, and lots of religions and lots of Mormons. Frankly, lots of Mormon awards have people who don't really believe in the truth claims, but they just really value the spiritual sustenance, the moral structure, the community, the friendships. You know, it seemed like neither of you guys wanted to even entertain that possibility. And I just want to understand. Seems like Natasha only in a faith

3:15 Natasha Helfer Parker marriage scenario, I guess I was pushing back against like just participating in a structure because you feel like that structure has something to offer your kids and you're not finding any value in it. Now, if you do find value in the community, if you find value in symbolic instead of literal meaning, you know, to some of the Mormon teachings, if you find value in attending and listening to the music, and then by all means, then you're finding value in it. Right. And you will. And that's what I mean by new. If you're a nuanced Mormon or whatever, those words we want to use where people still want to stay engaged as adult people, and therefore you want to raise your children in that, you can do that in a way that kind of introduces critical thinking, different ways of being. You know, this is how the Parker's Mormon, that's how the Smiths Mormon. And we do this anyway, right? I mean, I know people in my ward right now who do not take off their Sunday clothes on Sunday. Well, not all of us do that. Right. We morm in different ways. And so you can share with your kids that this is how we tend to do it. This is how dad and I do it. Whatever. So I'm not. I guess the way that you had posited it to begin with is that I no longer believe, I no longer find value in the community myself. Yeah, I'm going to continue to engage only for the benefit of my children, who I think might benefit from some of the structure. Then I'm like, oh, that's, that's pretty hard to stay involved in a community structure that you have not a lot of personal value for. But by all means, there are people that find a lot of value in cultural, symbolic relationships with their religions of origin.

5:04 Margi Dehlin Yes, we interpreted it similarly. And I feel very much the same with you, Natasha. And yes, like, I hold these things very loosely, but if you were gonna ask me, I do, I do have something come up with where this feels a little empty container ish to me. It's sort of like, well, now we don't have anything. So now I feel afraid because Richard Rohr is saying, better to have something to rebel against than nothing. And I would just argue life experience, loving living is spirituality. There is plenty of meat there. No one is just nothing. No one has nothing. And that's where I feel like some of those fears come in. And the depravity. And the truth is, is there are a lot of right ways, a lot of good ways to do things and to approach parenting and to approach spirituality and meaning and purpose.

6:07 Natasha Helfer Parker And I'd like to hear your thoughts, John, on this. But, you know, even with the commenter who was like, well, I'm afraid to, you know, allow my daughter to be indoctrinated or to go to a different church or to be. Or even the brainwashing that happens in primary, and maybe this is why I giggle to begin with, is that I think that sometimes as parents, we think we have a lot more control than we do, and we only tend to use the words indoctrination and things like that when it's other people's ideas that differ from ours. So if I am telling my children, hey, I believe in world peace and being loving, I don't see that as indoctrinating. Right. I only see it as indoctrinating if somebody is giving an idea that I disagree with, I don't like. Exactly. Now, I'm not going to minimize that. There are obviously structures and different kids might relate to authority differently. And it is hard when we feel like either a mentor or a school teacher or a church person tends to have more authority or that our kids are respecting them more than they respect us. And I think that happens to all parents and all different kinds of scenarios, not just religious scenarios, because remember, again, part of the developmental process, especially in teenage land, is to kind of kick against what you know. And what better do you know than your own parents?

7:29 John Dehlin So.

7:30 Natasha Helfer Parker But I guess I would just encourage people to be more comfortable with ambiguity, flexibility that you can trust, that you can share your thoughts with. A daughter, for example, that's going with her friend to church and that, you know, she will hopefully have a good experience and be able to come back. And the more anxious you are or the more worried she realizes that it's not safe to talk about that which goes into this enmeshment category, then actually you're kind of creating more of what you hope won't be there. You're creating a higher risk that they'll lean in that direction because, you know, you're not safe to talk about those kinds of things or to have different experiences than what you're comfortable providing. So that's a real balancing act as parents that we all struggle with. At what point do I let my child do something that I'm not super Gung ho about at what point do I allow for flexibility on that kind of stuff and trust the process? That's really hard. And there's different ages where that becomes something people might think about differently.

8:35 Margi Dehlin Yeah. How would you approach that, honey?

8:38 John Dehlin Which part?

8:39 Margi Dehlin The question that we talked about about the child that wanted to try out a non denominational Christian church and she was feeling like a fear that she

8:48 John Dehlin would, you know, I'm. This is me just being vulnerable. I think, I love, I am astounded by how amazing our children are. So of course, probably lots of parents think their kids are amazing, but I look at our kids and I think they're amazing. Having said that, I'm trying to be self critical, realizing that, you know, realizing that there probably have been downsides or disadvantages to things that we've chosen, there probably have been positive and negative implications for what we've chosen. And I think partly I am really influenced by how idyllic I remember my Mormon upbringing being. So just all the dances, all the youth conferences, all the temple trips and dance festivals and, you know, caring youth leaders and the moral structure. And then just kind of how I, how I fared with all that, going to college and doing well and then going on to a successful career. Of course there were problems, but I have a hard time letting go of the fact that I feel like I'm very happy with how I perceive Mormonism's influence being on my life. And then I think about how hard sometimes it was on our kids once, you know, once we left, especially in Utah, how they lost friends, how they lost community, how we did our best to supplement with spirituality and morality and open, candid conversations in the home. But sometimes I felt like our kids and our family were isolated. Sometimes I felt like they struggled to find friends. Sometimes I felt like, I wonder, could we have taught them more about spirituality? And most importantly, could our kids have benefited from a tighter knit community of support of other adults that could mentor them, of other friends that would come just naturally by being part of the community. And I think it's a mixed bag. And again, it's easy for me to just want to wave the flag of post Mormonism or liberal Mormonism and say, everybody follow. But I want to be responsible about that and not just recklessly say that, you know, leaving is the best for everyone. And I know no one here is saying that as well. I'm gonna bring in a couple comments, Aaron writes, let's see, there are a couple good comments here. Aaron writes, let's see. Sorry it took a while to accept and embrace the idea that my kids can turn out just fine without religion. Then she writes, so many options out there now to meet the needs for community outside of organized religion. And I hear that too. Bike clubs or, you know, what are some of the. I'm curious to know what community options there are. I know that soccer can be a little community of sorts. You know, Ultimate Frisbee is a big thing here. I'm curious to hear options that people find for community. I know that there's Oasis here in Salt Lake City, which is a secular community. I know that oftentimes these groups like WCA or COCA here on the Wasatch front, or even some of these post Mormon communities can be community. But I think we should do a whole episode on finding community outside of Mormonism. Sam writes, John, a huge segment of the population in Europe has been living happily secular lives since the end of World War II. We can figure this out by looking at healthy secular cultures. And I would like to learn more about that.

12:39 Margi Dehlin This is why I love reading about places like Denmark or Hygge, right? Because it is something that is absolutely integrated into their culture and how the country is run, how they look at things. I'm fascinated as well.

12:55 John Dehlin So tell our listeners what the Hygge concept is really quick. And then I want to push back a little bit.

13:00 Margi Dehlin Well, the Hygge concept isn't connected necessarily to this community. Hygge is a feeling of safety, an idea. It's part of, you know, how I would say they approach everyday living. It's a value Hygge. But what they do secularly in Denmark that I find is really, really inspiring is, is in lieu of, like, religious institutions that are large and bulky and oftentimes can be less personal, is they tend to naturally couples, the average is like three to four couples naturally get together and they show up for each other and have dinner parties or dinner games or. And within those gatherings, the element of Hygge is something that is valued. And Hygge just means it's safe. It's personal. You don't really go into, like, politics if it's going to be divisive. It's just this. This. Well, it's very thoughtful and warm and comforting and connecting. And these are the communities that when someone gets. Or if things are happening, it's personal enough that they all know it, but the difference is they actually have this deeply connected relationship that rises up to meet the needs that way. And so that's a little bit of what I've read with regard to Denmark and the idea of community there. It's a smaller community. Think 8 to 10 to 12 people and kind of like what we're trying to create with our book club, honestly.

14:48 John Dehlin Yeah. And I'll just say that there's a part of me that just wonders how successful that that might be. Like, we share a book about Hygge with three other families and then we say, hey, hey, post Mormon friends in Salt Lake City, let's Hygge together like the Danes. And how long I'm all, I'm down on it.

15:12 Margi Dehlin I'm there.

15:13 John Dehlin I'm a little bit skeptical, and that's my skeptical self. I'm a little bit skeptical about whether that'll actually work out and how scalable it is as well. So this is just me being reflective. Kristin writes, I was really scared post faith crisis that my children didn't have a church community or youth group. I searched diligently to replace the church with another church. Over time, though, our church shopping experience, through our church shopping experience, I realized we were fine with our religion.

15:45 Margi Dehlin We did a little bit of that,

15:46 John Dehlin too, and that's how we were. Kristen so I'm not even saying, I guess I'm arguing against myself a little bit, but I'm just, I'm also trying to be open because a lot of listeners are asking this question. Sam continues, and he writes, john, one of the most fascinating things to consider about the relationship between secular and religious culture is that there's almost no focus on environmental sustainability in religious cultures. I studied sustainability for my doctoral research and learned that you almost have to be secular to be able to let go of the concept of heaven in order to be able to let go of the concepts in order to focus on living on a sustainable earth.

16:25 Margi Dehlin That is fascinating.

16:27 John Dehlin Yeah. There's no question that many religious values can be deeply problematic and that many religious values neglect completely many important secular values. So that's all true. I hope I haven't taken us down a rat hole, but this is just something that.

16:44 Natasha Helfer Parker Well, I think what you're saying is that there is something to many of us, and I think that many of us even listening today, could look back on our Mormon upbringing and find very dear memories about those kinds of community things, which is a lot of what you speak about. John I think we also want to make sure we include the stories where it wasn't so ideal. Right. So if you're raising a gay child, that's not going to be the same experience as what you had growing up, right, John, or even gender different. You know, sometimes women have different ideas about growing up Mormon versus boys or boys who don't necessarily fit the kind of gender model leadership and you know, things like that that they don't necessarily find a lot of enjoyment in. So some of this is individual. I mean, some people really did thrive in the many ways that the Mormon structure offered them and many people actually were harmed by that too. So there's no. Even if you're both believing Mormons, if you're in a mixed faith marriage, if you're post Mormon, if you're nuanced Mormon, that's still a reality, that your kids may or may not have a positive experience in any structured environment that you offer them. You know, the potential for bullying, the potential for groupthink, you know, the potential for influence indoctrination, if you want to call it that. And so at some level, I think it's good to be aware of that and to try to assess risk and benefit giving your family situations. I also think that it's important to have some level of acceptance that no matter what you offer, there's going to be problems. There's going to be, like you said, John's strengths and maybe challenges to whatever decisions you made as parents. And if we get caught in that what if trap or if you blame again, and this is why I giggle at us, why I tease ourselves, is that we tend to be very black and white thinkers. We tend to want equational approaches so that when and if your child struggles, let's say in college, it's very easy to go back and go, oh my gosh, that's because we didn't provide a structured environment and we left Mormonism. Right. Or oh my gosh, it's because we didn't leave Mormonism and we stayed involved. Right. And so I'm just saying life is much more complex than any one explanation. Your kids will struggle and thrive. And as long as you've got somewhat of a pulse on really extreme aspects of that and avoiding extreme bullying behaviors or, you know, taking your kids out of places where they're not going to thrive, I think, you know, in general, it's not as big of a deal as we're probably making it out to be.

19:33 Margi Dehlin Yes. And I think it's so interesting how quickly it can feel very like a desperate affair that the stakes are all of a sudden very, very high. And that's fear. There's a lot of fear in that. And one thing that has I just would invite to the conversation is also this idea of how our stories inform how we parent. And that's a bias of sorts, like any other bias. And you were kind of getting to this, Natasha. And the extent to which we can see our children as separate, separate entities with separate, you know, needs and you know, I don't know, I think that that is helpful because we do bring our own bias. And the truth is, is our children in the church never had the experience John had and they're wired differently and they weren't seeking the same things and they weren't in the same place in their life needing the same things. And so it can kind of get in our way. Oftentimes in parenting, what works better is to go to the child, to ask questions of the child, to allow even your child to lead, to not put your fear, your experiences, your wounds onto your child for them to carry. They don't have your story, you know, they will have their own.

20:55 Natasha Helfer Parker And we need to be aware of the story that's told within Mormonism. I'm sure a lot of people here have had some type of an experience where it's like, well, my in laws or my parents are, you know, as they're watching us leave, are saying things like, you're gonna ruin the children. What about the children? You know, and the story within Mormonism is very much about, you know, you're responsible for teaching the gospel to the children and if you don't do that, you have failed. And now those that responsibility lies on you. So some of this angst comes from the self fulfilling kind of prophecies or the narrative that Mormonism offers us. So I want to help us all take a Valium, but also like, like at the same time recognize that I know why this is very, this is a very tender subject. You know, this causes a lot of anxiety for good reasons because we love our kids, we want what's best for them. And when we're shifting in a way that affects us now, we realize it's also going to affect all these other people that are part of our system. And what does that mean?

22:03 Margi Dehlin Yeah, one mantra that has really helped me, which I hold mantras loosely as well, but is this idea of an abundance model, as opposed to a scarcity model, where we have to fight for everything. It's always desperate, you know, we never have what we need. Our kids are never, you know, to abundance. It's like we have all we need. Our children are naturally full. And this idea that life is wise, that there are many, many paths and there's wisdom in it all. And, you know, it's much more the meaning we create than trying to create this path that has just the right meaning.

22:42 John Dehlin Emily writes, I could use Valium.

22:48 Natasha Helfer Parker I love my Valium. Comments. And I was like, let's take a chill pill or a Valium.

22:52 Margi Dehlin That's right.

22:52 Natasha Helfer Parker That's my mantra all the way around.

22:55 John Dehlin Thanks for sharing.

22:56 Margi Dehlin Breathe, breathe.

22:58 John Dehlin Just to close this little discussion black hole that I took us down, I'm just gonna say that I still wonder. As skeptical as people are, as much as I agree with you guys that we're whole, as much as I agree with the principles we're all talking about, I wonder if there would be a way, you know, again, all the holes that develop when you leave a church, spirituality, identity, community, you know, friends, existential concerns, health code. Just think of all the things that a religion provides that you have to renegotiate and potentially lose. What if there could be like a secular handbook that sort of tells you best practices on spirituality? Secular Buddhism or Eckhart Tolle or whatever. It tells you best practices on parenting. It tells you best practices on finding secular community. It tells you how to deal with the God question and plugs those existential holes. It helps you find friends. It helps you learn the best practices of healthy marriages. It gives you a sense of meaning and purpose and helps you find best practice practices for meaning and purpose. It gives you a list of books to read and movies to watch and resources for living life after, you know, in a secular age. I just wonder if that package were available as an option for a newlywed couple or for a young couple that wants to get married, or for new parents, or for people who leave a religion where they could just sort of like instead of having to do all that work to piece it together, community approved resources that have been aggregated can be made available. I just wonder whether that would accelerate and simplify the process for many. And I'll end with this comment that Jimmy makes Jimmy Reichs and I think this is astute and it's a concern I've had as well. Jimmy writes off of John's recent comment on wanting to be responsible with progressive Mormon community and the following I just started wondering if the ability to transition or spiritually evolve to progressive theologies or spiritual frameworks is related to class or I would say privilege, not just how much money we have. I wonder if class, meaning socioeconomic status or social status, has more to do with this ability to think deeply and choose which moral framework we have and pass on to our children My own critique of the progressive Mormon community I am a part of and the support I provide to struggling Mormons comes from the consideration of other Mormons who are in a space where they can't choose. A low socioeconomic status single Mormon mom I know in my community with an abusive ex husband comes to mind. I am wondering how this consideration changes or likely builds the nuance of this important conversation. And a way that I would branch off of that is just to say, sure, Natasha, maybe you can piece together a wonderful post Mormon life. Sure, Margi, you can. What about families that aren't in the same intellectual, socioeconomic or financial situation of privilege to be able to piece something together? What about them? Could they use support? Because maybe they don't have time to listen to 50 hours of podcasts or read a bunch of books or go and find which books to read to then read them or search out all these different communities. Is that an important component? And I guess I'm going to leave that theoretical because I think you guys already feel like you've answered. Is that true?

26:55 Natasha Helfer Parker Yeah. And it's something that I think we've discussed in the past, not necessarily on this parenting one, but in faith transitions in general, to not assume, and I think we've encouraged people to not assume that the post Mormon route is the best route for everybody, or that again, what's working for us would automatically work for other people. That there are plenty of people, both within Mormonism, within other religious structures, and of course outside of religious structure, who are struggling to survive that have very complex issues. And the reality that I hear from many Mormon individuals in particular in situations just like Jimmy is describing here is that the Mormon Church is a lifesaver because it is structure, it is community, it is casserole bringing or financial kind of a safety net for some of these people. And so we want to be very careful as faith transitioners to not assume that, you know, oh, everybody in Mormonism is brainwashed and it hurts everybody. And again, these very black and white ways that I think sometimes those of us who are transitioning or post transitioning can make sweeping statements about an entire group of people. So we want to be very careful that just like we don't want to be generalized, that we're not generalizing people who stay within. And then I don't think we do a very good job of providing that outside of religious communities. Not always in general. In general. In general. That was a huge push in the Bush administration that I remember the government themselves saying, maybe we need to think about what faith communities are doing for the welfare of this nation and can we support those efforts instead of just having a government welfare system? Now, again, there are secular countries that I think do a much better job of welfare in general for their citizens and that aren't necessarily religiously focused at all, such as Denmark or some of these European countries. So none of these statements are black and white. I'm just saying they're all important things to be considering.

29:05 John Dehlin And I would say just as like Denmark developed hygge in a secular wave Post World War II, now is America's secular wave, it seems. And if that's true, I don't think whatever secular cultures emerge, happen on their own. I think it involves conscientious, privileged, if that makes sense. If that word makes sense. Secular people to form whatever cultures and communities will work here. No, because I don't think it just happens by chance. Okay, Natasha, you have a point about being a spiritual or existential leader in the home. A lot of people ask questions about that, about how do I provide family members spirituality outside of religion. Do you want to talk about that a bit? And then, Margi, I think you might have a few things to say about spirituality after a faith crisis with children.

30:07 Natasha Helfer Parker Yeah. And I'm going to start off with a comment we got from Emily Holyoak, who she says, let's see, I teach my daughters things that are facts. We own many, many earth science, physics and critical thinking books for their appropriate age. My husband and I teach on the morals of being human and leaving the earth and society better than how you found it. I know zero, spirituality isn't for everyone, but it works for us. So some of this is how we define even the word spirituality. For me, would I would, you know, when she's saying that she is teaching about morals and leaving the earth in a better space, to me that's in the umbrella of spirituality because I see any, you know, spirituality is kind of embodying those things that are kind of outside of our physical being and outside of our kind of ego realm. Right. So benefits of the community at large, the universe, things of that nature. Some people really don't like the word spiritual. So that's why I use existential or whatever word you want to use in there. But I think oftentimes the idea is that we get we black and white, we allow for religion and spirituality to only mean certain things and facts and science only mean certain things. And I think we need to really be both be a teacher of all these different things to our children and to not allow religion to co opt words like morality, spirituality, ethereal, you know, all these words that can, that can speak to those moments of enlightenment or things that tons of people describe whether they're religious or not. Right. So connection to something bigger than yourself, whatever those, those words mean and emotion is part of that and instinct and kind of, you know, gut sense for things. Those are important things to be honing into your kids. And sometimes I think post transition we're very historical and scientifically driven and we forget that there's a lot of,

32:14 Margi Dehlin I'm

32:14 Natasha Helfer Parker going to use the word spiritual components to life, relational components to life, emotional components to life that you can't necessarily measure that. You know, we do our best in the social sciences to come up with things that are scientifically, you know, in a scientific model, but even then it's largely an art. And so that you're making sure that you're, you're offering those things to your kids, not just facts.

32:39 John Dehlin And what do you mean give us some examples of being a spiritual leader in the home? Natasha?

32:45 Natasha Helfer Parker Well, I think like, and I'll just also bring in another thing that I think is part of this is for example, family home evening is not owned by religion. Right. And so what can we think about like for example, the ritual of family home evening from a perspective, if it's a time to gather around, share some ideas, maybe share some good teachings, a TED Talk, for example, or even things like scriptures. You know, scriptures are not owned by religion and by what I mean by scriptures, like really well thought out, interesting literature that leads to personal ideas. You can take some of Brene Brown's work for example, and I would say that's pretty close to scripture, you know, like, but it's not measured, it's not science. It's more just like here's a thought that helps us get out of our own, you know, our own physical standpoint. So it's something bigger than just historical scientific facts. And we as humans definitely have that type of outlook that we need something that feeds our quote unquote souls, if you will, spirits, if you will. These are the language that we use. But that language has been co opted by religion. I'm just saying it doesn't have to be. We can reclaim those words in ways that we are now teaching our children things like what is it like to feel, to have it, to be in a state of meditation? What is it like to feel your body respond to what you consider to be a truth for yourself? What is it like to experience an emotion and how you then use that emotion to have relational experiences in your life? What is it like to glean knowledge? Even scientific knowledge can have a physiological reaction. You can get goosebumps on your arms in the laboratory when you find a new cure to something. Right. I mean, that's a very spiritual moment. But are we using that kind of language instead of being very. No, matter of fact, kind of robotic about the ways that we present information to our children? So I just invite people to not let religion take that from us.

35:04 John Dehlin Okay, I like that concept. I like your idea of family, home, eating. Margi, what are some ways that we've tried to encourage a sense of spirituality in our home?

35:22 Margi Dehlin So kind of thinking back so I can kind of have a full perspective. One thing that I view as valuable is this idea of introducing ideas into your home and the way that I oftentimes sew for. Like when the children were middle childhood. So before they became teens, it was as easy as reading books together. I remember a couple books, Old Turtle and Old Turtle and the Broken Truth. But I would actually look for books to begin conversations, to start exploring with the kids what they thought about the book or what they liked about the book. And it really is about just exposing children to ideas. I remember we watched, oh, the documentary on Food, Food, Inc. And that had concert. Like, it had ecological ideas, treatment of animals, or it had a health component. It had. Or Girl Rising. At one point, we. So documentaries. Think about Mr. Rogers. What's the Mr. Rogers documentary talking about? Activism, the face of activism. What it can look like. What do you care about what you know? What is something that's important to you? It's this idea of creating exposure to ideas with emotion, with a story, where, you know, hopefully they get perspectives that are different from their own and they slowly go internal and learn kind of what their thoughts are. And you create discussions that are safe and that are productive and exploratory. So those are a couple. Remember the Material World book? When the kids were kind of 8 to 10, 6 to 10, I had these books by Peter Menzel where one was called Material World, one was called Women in the Material World. And what they did was they went around the world and they had people bring all of their valuables, all their belongings outside their homes. And you could see the difference in homes, the difference in belongings, what people had. And then they oftentimes would ask, what's your most valuable possession? And reading through Molly, like going to different places allowed, I feel like a perspective that they might not otherwise have. And so that's one way I think you can go about, you know, spirituality is creating conversations, creating sort of these opportunities to connect to ideas that they might otherwise not have. And that is something that I took seriously for many, many years. Was just gathering some things that I thought would be thought provoking.

38:23 John Dehlin I think about some of the things I remember us doing. We were really nervous for a while that Sundays didn't feel as holy other days. And it's just so easy to. Like you said, Natasha, to limit what we perceive the term spirituality to mean to be hymns singing or talks, sermons given over a pulpit or choirs or testimonies. Right.

38:52 Natasha Helfer Parker Or even to deal with God or deity. It doesn't have to be that either.

38:56 John Dehlin Yeah, yeah.

38:57 Margi Dehlin Or you have to be sitting. Sitting in a chair listening.

39:00 John Dehlin And so we. Yeah, yeah. And so we would. We would do Super Soul Sunday where each Sunday we would pull the kids together and watch a 30 minute interview of Oprah interviewing Brene Brown or Oprah interviewing Eckhart Tolle or Oprah interviewing, you know, who's the one things fall apart person.

39:18 Margi Dehlin Oh, Pima Chodra.

39:19 John Dehlin Pima Chodra, right. It had to be mystical or it had to be New Agey. I remember trying to introduce Eckhart Tolle to our kids and just how put off. They were just zero interested in learning about Eckhart Tolle.

39:33 Margi Dehlin But that was okay.

39:34 John Dehlin Then we were like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we would. Then we would always do a hike and we would sit and people like this, they call it hike church or nature church. Right. And we would. What's so funny? You're laughing.

39:45 Margi Dehlin Just that Winston recently was just like. It was like they're coming into themselves, both Winston and Clara, where they were just like, I want you to know, I never liked hiking. I don't like it. I don't want to do that on my side. It's like anti Sabbath to me to go on a hike.

40:01 Natasha Helfer Parker It's just funny.

40:02 John Dehlin And we're just like, oh, but it's nature connect. It's the wind and there's the.

40:08 Margi Dehlin We can do anything.

40:08 John Dehlin There's the rushing water and the sounds.

40:11 Natasha Helfer Parker See, and this comes full circle. You offered something they could rebel against, right?

40:16 Margi Dehlin That's right.

40:17 Natasha Helfer Parker They're rebelling against nature differences.

40:19 Margi Dehlin We welcomed it. We were like, okay, noted. All right.

40:23 John Dehlin It's less fun practically than it is philosophically. It sounds good philosophically. Unless the rebellion comes against us. And then all of a sudden it feels a lot less good. But what I hear, you guys and the family evening idea is also something we tried to do. And sometimes, honestly, when you don't have guilt and fear and shame and a prophet and concerns about the afterlife and this culture of expectation where you have to report back. Am I doing sort of the PPI culture where it's like, yes, I'm having my family home evening. Yes, I'm having worthiness interviews with my children. Yes, sometimes without accountability. I do think non religious people can have to confront their own motivations and maybe their own laziness or just comfort of not really acting. And anyway, it's definitely. I love what you guys are saying about being more creative about what spirituality means. I think art and creativity can be spiritual. I think that just connecting with good friends can be spiritual. Just having friends over for a barbecue.

41:39 Margi Dehlin You did that too?

41:40 John Dehlin Yeah, we.

41:41 Margi Dehlin Socrates Cafe.

41:43 John Dehlin Yeah, yeah. Over the time we've occasionally had friends over and just had barbecues and just lovely conversations that ensue. Why isn't that spirituality? Why does it have to be in a church with music and a sermon to count the spirituality?

41:59 Margi Dehlin And that's part of that process that you go through with transition is you actually renegotiate what spirit spirituality or whatever term you want to kind of give it to connecting with yourself or connecting with something larger. What that's going to look like and feel like for you.

42:20 John Dehlin Natasha, another bullet that you mentioned is keeping the rituals that work. We talked about family home evening as one ritual that works from our heritage. I'm curious if either of you have ideas of rituals that you've kept for Mormonism that work.

42:41 Natasha Helfer Parker Well, so much of what we know, as far as, you know, healthy coping mechanisms in the mental health field, for example, kind of mirror spiritual practice. So even the whole concept of mindfulness, it's so pop culture these days, right? Is similar to prayer practice or contemplative practice. We know that journaling can really be helpful from a mental health standpoint. Well, guess what tradition we were encouraged to do as Mormons. Or gratitude. We know that having gratitude and thinking through things that you're thankful for can be really helpful for mental health. Mormonism kind of presented some of these opportunities. Now granted, the problem with how Mormonism presented those opportunities is that it was often co opted by shame and guilt if you didn't do them. Like somehow it was tied to deity being pleased with you or not. It had a shame component to it, which is not healthy. But a lot of these things that we can take with us. There is something again through mental health research showing that ritual, ritual, something more than just oh yeah, I'd like to do this, but to really create a ritual, whether it's lighting a candle or creating a background or having a certain space or time or timing something or creating certain symbols can be very helpful in us integrating things that we want to for our own health and well being. So there's a lot of opportunity to take. I always talk about Carolyn Pearson's poetry about, as you're going through the wilderness as a pioneer, oftentimes you had to reload the cart and you could only take what was really super precious to you. So we don't have to throw out the baby with bathwater. We can take some of these things that became. And for some of us that are transitioning, I hear this a lot, like I miss scripture reading or I miss praying as a family. Well, why can't you create a ritual where you have a gratitude circle, right? And you hold hands instead of folding your arms and you know, having the classic Mormon prayer, you do a different type of prayer per se, or you have a journal time, or you create scriptures that are different than the standard works, right? So whether those are wonderful philosophers or ideas or Rumi or whomever that you create, you decide what your scripture is going to look like and you share that as a family. Or you do a yoga or breathing exercise instead of a traditional startup to a family home evening, for example. So reclaiming these things that never belonged to Mormonism anyway. Mormonism had a certain structure or certain idea of how to do those things, keeping what really benefits us, teaching our kids those things, creating family ritual around some of these traditions that can be very useful. Even when kids complain about them, like even the nature walks, even when they complain against them, they can still be useful. They can still be things that they look fondly back on. You know, as far as some of those things that parents prioritize, one ritual

45:55 John Dehlin that I think of is the Sunday being kind of a special day set apart from the others. I think in some ways we still do that. We try and limit our screen time on Sundays, we try and limit things that isolate, especially social media on Sunday. And we try and do a family movie or we try and have a dinner. Have dinner, we try. And if we can go on a hike, if anyone will go sometimes Winston and I will snowboard or Winston, Claire and I will snowboard on a Sunday. But we try and not just make it another workday. Were you going to say anything about rituals that you've kept or that you like the idea of keeping?

46:35 Margi Dehlin I was just going to say how much I loved Natasha's idea around substituting in and just a couple substitutions we've done is I love the idea of pausing before a dinner meal. I like the idea of just taking a moment before we just dive into food and dive into conversation to just have a moment of presence. And so one thing we did was we created a gratitude moment where we do go around the table and the kids share one thing they're grateful for, the scripture reading, you know, so we clearly don't scripture read anymore. But for many, many years, I instead would read with my kids before they went to bed. So where that might have, you know, once been a scripture time or prayer time, it was a we're gonna read Charlotte's Web, or we read the Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, or we. And so. And, you know, books that evoke a lot of meaning, books that, you know, I think also create, oh, emotional experience, journeying and, you know, conversations where we were. I was able to have really lovely conversations, I think, out of that. So those are a couple substitutions. Meditation for me every morning is definitely my way of trying to kind of create a bit of presence, a little bit of awareness with my own thoughts. And so anyway, I end are putting having our Sundays feel a little bit different than other days. And, you know, our teens, we have teens now, allowing our teens to have a say in what that means for them is really important. And, you know, whereas Winston was, you know, vocal about saying, I don't like to hike, that's not something I like to do, but I do really like to skateboard. And so we realized for him that we will oftentimes drive him for an hour or two to go to a skate park so that he gets that time of it centers him. It's a very flow experience for him, and that's something he wanted as part of his Sunday. So it's also integrating, particularly when your children get older, but even when they're younger, if your family wants to also have your children play a part in deciding what they would like for Sundays to feel like or what some components they would love as part of the mix, that can be a fun part of the process.

49:12 John Dehlin Natasha, another point you had listed is something you like to talk about is the importance of teaching critical thinking skills and the differentiation skills that are required. I often think about the. Maybe the biggest transition made from the first half of life to the second is moving from an extrinsic source of authority, which as parents, we kind of naturally are to at least some degree moving to an intrinsic source of authority. And of course, as progressive post Mormons, we think of that as sort of moving from the church being our authority or for the brethren or the church leaders being our authority, to being our own moral authority. And so I imagine there's a trick between being a parent but also nurturing in your kids their own sense of intrinsic moral authority, their own critical thinking skills. What do you like to say about that?

50:11 Natasha Helfer Parker Yeah, I do think that in our Mormon upbringings we really weren't offered this. We were offered more of this is how it is. And we sure hope that you come to this conclusion because it's right. Right. And this is how you do that. You know, you pray and you fast and you read scriptures and if you don't come to this conclusion, then there's really no room for the system to be wrong. You're doing something wrong, you know, in that process. So that's kind of a problematic way to come to any conclusion that's already foretold for you. So even while we were still very much attending church or anytime we go anywhere that might have some level of authority, like a different church or even a different experience like funerals or things of that nature, I really started this tradition of just asking, tell me something that you really liked about this experience or that you had an aha moment or that you felt the spirit or whatever language you want to use, and then tell me something that you didn't find very pleasing or that you were confused by, or that you actually didn't like or that you disagreed with. So it gave us all an opportunity, just by those two questions, to first of all give permission for difference of thought just by doing that, so that I could say, well, I really like sister so and so's talk, you know, where she's talking about the volunteer work she did, you know, at the soup kitchen. And that was awesome. And I really didn't like Brother so and so's talk that focused so much on Satan. It felt very fear based and shamey. And, you know, I just didn't get a good feeling when he was talking about those kinds of things. Well, now all of a sudden they're getting the clue that it's not just, oh, we're telling you what to think or believe. I actually get to say, have a say in what I think or believe or, you know, how I interpreted those kinds of situations. And I was surprised sometimes at what my kids came up with, things I wouldn't have considered, or things that I saw it sometimes as an opportunity for me to offer nuance. But I Was also surprised at what my kids came up with that I wouldn't have considered problematic or that I would have not thought of as something that would have been helpful. So that was a good clue into my kids. So do we have enough differentiation skills go along with this? Because then again, can we tolerate what our kids come up with? Well, we hated going on the nature walk. We thought it was lame. When you're like, no, this is really healthy, and this is really wonderful, and being on a walk is good for you, how can you tolerate that? They might have a different experience of that, but it also teaches them to be thinking about, do I have the permission to have my own thoughts? What is this like for me? I have a say. And then as they get older, I kind of talk about critical thinking skills even a little bit differently. Especially around. I think a really good time to do this is around advertising. So it's kind of like, who's behind this? Who's paying for it? What's the agenda? You know, what. What are they trying to sell you, if anything? Whether it's, you know, research or advertisements or messages or political parties, it's like, what information, what emotion are they trying to get us to feel? You know, so those are kind of interesting. Nothing. We do that every single time there's an ad. But every now and then, I try to have those kinds of conversations so they can again, be thinking that just because I'm feeling something or just because I'm brought into the moment doesn't necessarily mean that this is quote, unquote true or. And, you know, my husband and I have had plenty of opportunity to show them differentiation skills on this because, you know, we don't always agree on political or environmental or things of that nature. And so, you know, when we see something that I'm like, oh, yeah, pay attention to that. My husband's like, well, who's running this ad? And I'm like, don't ask that question when it's an ad.

54:14 Margi Dehlin I like, the message is so clearly true.

54:19 Natasha Helfer Parker It's so clearly true. My kids have had definitely plenty of opportunity to see the back and forth of people with different ideas.

54:29 Margi Dehlin That's great stuff. Great stuff. I was gonna say what you just mentioned reminded me of a couple documentaries that as a family, they were really, really important to us. And that is misrepresentation. So that is. It takes on, you know, women in culture, how women are portrayed. And the second is the mask you live in, which is men.

54:55 John Dehlin So men and emotions about toxic masculinity in US Culture.

55:00 Margi Dehlin And both of those, watching them with our teen children was just very, very valuable. And I would say probably. What would you say? 14 and above, 15 and above, maybe so kind of old, mid, teenage kind of years. But those were two documentaries that, as you're talking about advertising. Sorry, that was in both documentaries.

55:25 John Dehlin So, yeah, yeah, those are valuable. I do think watching documentaries is a great way to develop critical thinking skills. Watching news with your kids, just using car rides to talk about things. Listening to podcasts together has been a phenomenal way. Some of our older kids have really gotten into podcasts and even younger kids or YouTube channels. There are a lot of good podcasts and YouTube channels out there that introduce really important topics that can get your kids thinking about different topics and can become really good fodder for developing critical thinking skills. And I think that's. I think that's really important. So I'm glad. I'm glad you talk about that, Natasha. And I do think that's one of the things that one of the greatest opportunities when we talk about the gift of a faith crisis is helping our kids become more skeptical. Here's what's hard, though. What happens when, you know, one of the things I love about patriarchy is how efficient it is. What happens when your kids get this self empowerment of critical thought and they don't want to obey and do everything you tell them and they want to question everything you want? That makes parenting more difficult if you control mindset. I'm just saying, like, do it because I said so is a lot more efficient. I'm being silly. Then let's talk about why you need to do this. Because we're helping you develop critical thinking skills.

57:12 Margi Dehlin I really love the process. It is harrowing. And it is not all. I would not say it's without stress, but I have really, really appreciated the process of seeing my children evolve and voice themselves and get to know themselves and be courageous and speak out even when it's against me. Winston will say, you are speaking to me in a rude way and I am leaving until you can pull it together. I love that. I'm like, look at you.

57:40 Natasha Helfer Parker And then I'm like, stop.

57:41 Margi Dehlin Look at that.

57:42 Natasha Helfer Parker Emotional.

57:43 Margi Dehlin You are so connected, son. Hey, son,

57:47 Natasha Helfer Parker go to your room. You're being disrespectful. But I really appreciate being called out.

57:53 Margi Dehlin Good call. True. I'm gonna calm down. Yeah, I'll be back in a minute.

58:02 John Dehlin Be aware that this causes you as a parent to have to slow down, connect with yourself. Yeah, and connect with yourself and connect with your kids. I agree with you, Margi. It has huge payoffs in the end because you want your kid guided by an internal moral compassion that's well reasoned and that's intrinsic to them. But that means you have to give them the freedom and the space to figure that out. And sometimes it's not going to be what you want. And sometimes your kids are going to go, I don't care if you want me to spend time with Grandma. I don't want to spend time with Grandma. And they don't want to.

58:37 Margi Dehlin You know, I was thinking of some more dire situations than that, but that is true.

58:43 John Dehlin Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes I want to smoke weed.

58:47 Natasha Helfer Parker What are you saying?

58:49 Margi Dehlin There's a lot out there.

58:50 John Dehlin Sometimes I want to have sex.

58:53 Natasha Helfer Parker And this is where I think, too. Again, looking at the Circumplex model is helpful because in our family, and I'm not saying that this has to be the case, but in our family, I would be comfortable saying, I appreciate your thoughts about not wanting to spend time with grandma. And yet this is kind of what we're doing today, you know, whether you want to do that or not. So I can tend to be a little bit more structural in my approach at times. Not all the time, but at times, because, you know, and I'll give reasoning and things like that. And we also, I remember, had a Incredibles moment, you know, the Incredibles family, where in the first movie, you know, the mom is flying the airplane and she's having to do a crash landing, and she's telling Violet, you know, do this thing. And Violet's like, having a philosophical conversation with herself, you know, about whether or not she should do this thing that needed to be done in the moment because it was an emergency. And we had a situation like that where one of our kids had, like, an allergic reaction at a basketball game. And we very quickly, you know, we were dealing with hives and passing out, and we had, you know, so we were just trying to gather everybody and come on, we've got to go. We've got to go now. And we had kind of a similar reaction, like Violet, but you said that we could do that. And you, you know, you don't have time for your philosophical arguments about your needs right now.

1:00:15 Margi Dehlin Yes.

1:00:17 Natasha Helfer Parker So that gave us an opportunity to say that at times, not a lot of the time, but when mom and dad are in kind of a mode of anxiety and panic, you have to just kind of obey in those moments because there's an emergency. There's an emergency situation. So again, this is not black or white. This is not all or nothing. It's not that kids always get their way or that parents always get their way or that it's more about. And I think what you're saying with the slowing down process is that if you're going to take some of these strategies to heart, it does take more time to be an intentional parent than to be a dictatorial parent. It does take more conversation to talk about reasons versus just do it because I said so. You know, so in general, I lean in that direction. And at the same time I'm just making room that there are things that some parents may do differently than others. And it doesn't mean that you're outside of that primary circle of correct ways of having a system.

1:01:21 John Dehlin Margi, you in your reading with Shefali Saberry, you know, a lot of our we're talking about the parents way or the kids way. We're talking about, you know, critical thought. You know, one of the things that really is a powerful part of conscious parenting that is also really tricky is how do you do discipline and rules with kids now that you don't have the words of a prophet and commandments in scripture necessarily, and the church imposing what some have perceived to be guilt and shame and fear to get your kids to follow rules and obey? How do you enforce enlightened boundaries and, or rules and what's the role of punishment in parenting without kind of a religious structure?

1:02:20 Margi Dehlin Okay, well, that, it, there's a lot, there's a lot to this. But what I would, what I would say is, you know, it is a common, I feel like a misconception that with conscious parenting it's just whatever the child, whatever the child feels, whatever the, you know, it's very just in the moment and that just isn't the case. So if I had to kind of speak to some basic differences or how an enlightened boundary is different than a rule. Right. I would say it tends to be basic needs around a child, so the child is considered and it is thoughtfully, you get, you get to an enlightened boundary very thoughtfully as a need arises. So that's one thing as far as, and that's in contrast to like blanket rules that just a parent, you know, does because it's convenient or. So there's a difference between kind of unconscious rules and conscious. So that's the first thing with an enlightened boundary. It's conscious. You're taking each child into account. So it may look different for each child. And then it, it kind of, it answers a basic need sleep or health or. And this is going to look very different for young kids than it will for, say, a teenager. The second thing I'd say, so you're

1:03:45 John Dehlin saying rules aren't arbitrary. They're rooted in grounded family values.

1:03:50 Margi Dehlin The other thing I'd say is children, particularly as they get older. So let's say middle childhood to teens are part of the conversation around enlightened boundaries. So they can speak their mind about it, they can share their feelings about it, and from there you can connect around it. That doesn't mean that you're going to change the boundary. That means that the process of having a boundary feels different. They're part of it. They're part of the conversation. They feel heard and validated in the process. So that's. The next part, is that they play a part and there's a process difference to it. The third, I would say is how it's held. So a rule, you know, the way you kind of think about a rule as you broke the rule, sorry for you. Punishment, the way an enlightened boundary is held in is as important as the boundary itself. And so what you ideally would not see is a lot of emotion around the boundary, not a lot of personalization and personal disrupt on behalf of the parent. It is a reminder, an actual reminder that there is a boundary here and that the expectation is that the. And that you hold it and you hold it in an energy that it's interesting. So I'm going to ask you to consider something. Have you ever said no to your child about something or communicated a boundary but not really meant it? And you get this pushback from them. It's like they can tell you're ambivalent. They can tell you're not fully invested. And so holding the boundary, you're 100% in energy invested. It's like we've got this boundary. Yep. But we, you know, at this point, we actually have to have you get ready or. And I'll give you an example. Should I give an example of an enlightened boundary or how it's held? So let's just say a child is chronically late for school. Okay. So the child is old enough to get ready, old enough to kind of take accountability for getting ready for school, and. And is constantly late and misses the bus. Right. So you're. You. You are constantly having to drive this child to school. So, you know, a punishment would be like, arbitrary. Give me your phone. You don't. It's not tied to the behavior at all. Right. Punishment is very. It's like in the moment. Knee jerk. What can I do to hurt you? Make this expensive for you so that you never do this thing again because it's very inconvenient to me. Right. But in kind of contrast, an enlightened boundary would be tied to the behavior. You really, really are thoughtful. It's rarely you give the consequence or the enlightened bound in the moment. You usually are going to kind of think it through. You talk to the child about the problem, right? Here's what's happening. Here's why it's not working out. Mom and dad have work. We're beginning late. You know, we're late for work because we're driving you to school. So the next time that you are late, now that it's a problem, the next time you're late, we're gonna ask you, you know, I'm just gonna say if we had this problem in our family, which we are close enough for that child to walk to school, that child, it's walkable and it's safe enough that I would feel comfortable. So. And they're late, right? So it's this idea that the child takes responsibility for and oftentimes it's not as satisfying as a parent because what you would. A lot of those other aspects of being a parent come out, it's like, well, then they're great. They're going to have not a very good grade because then they're going to be tardy and maybe I should excuse, but it's actually getting out of the way of all of that and allowing for the inconvenience of a walk to school to. And so this is why it has to be. Your response is thoughtful. It's conscious. If your child doesn't care or would really enjoy a walk to school, it may not work. You may have to come up with, you know, something that's a little bit different or. But that's the idea is how it's held, how you create one. The process of it is the child. You try to actually have the child be involved. The child feels validated. And sometimes the child actually very much will affect the process of things or change a boundary or alter a boundary, I would say.

1:08:33 John Dehlin Nice.

1:08:33 Margi Dehlin So that's just an overview of the difference between enlightened boundaries and punishments or rules. Hopefully that's helpful.

1:08:48 John Dehlin Love it. Natasha, you like to. You mentioned the beauty of being willing to say I don't know and the importance of modeling the ability to deal with ambiguity as kids. Now this is something that can make people feel really nervous. Especially when we come from a tradition that's got all the answers. Why do you feel like the ability to say, I don't know and modeling ambiguity and uncertainty can be a healthy thing?

1:09:17 Natasha Helfer Parker Well, this goes back to kind of the balance between offering structure in your home and offering flexibility in your home. You know, it shouldn't be all or nothing. It's just more about can we role model things that they're going to come across in life. And I think a lot of times Mormonism has definitely role modeled and other aspects of parenting have role modeled that we're always supposed to have an answer, that we're always supposed to, to be available. We're always supposed to kind of be the safety net. And I think it is good to model things like, I don't know or I'll get back to you, I don't have to know everything as your parent, because guess what, they're going to be a parent and they're not going to know everything. So you don't want to set up false expectations. Right. Like, one of the things that I actually get most nervous about when people come in for marriage therapy is when they tell me things like, I never saw my parents fight. I'm like, you didn't? Not that I want to, you know, want you to have too much experience with that. Either like my parents fought all the time or there was domestic violence obviously, or anything like that. But you weren't able to see and have role model to you, discussions and conflict and resolution to that conflict. And that leaves you without a lot of skills for your own adult relationships. So in a lot of ways, it's not that we're protecting children from childhood. We're teaching children how to be effective adults. When you think about life projection, our people, our children are going to spend much more time in adulthood than they ever will in childhood. We have 18 years with our kids and they don't even remember consciously three or four of those years. So that's 14 years out of hopefully an 80 to 90 year time frame where we get our kids in this state of childhood development. Right. So modeling what you hope they can do as adults. And a lot of times I hear this pushback like, well, but if you don't have answers or if you don't have like a super big structure that it's going to lead to confusion or kids being confused or insecurities. And I think actually the research on helicopter parenting is kind of challenging that, you know, that actually good for kids to not have everything figured out, to have kids have slight anxiety. We want them to practice slight anxieties before they face really big anxieties. And having your parents say something like, good question, I don't know, might actually be a good slight anxiety for your child to experience in a fairly safe environment. So that I think is positing realistic expectations for the future and also encouraging them to have some level of ambiguity in their current time frame of being a kiddo.

1:12:13 John Dehlin But Natasha, what do you do if you do know everything,

1:12:17 Natasha Helfer Parker then you go in for an assessment on narcissistic personality disorder. And see how effective that is for you.

1:12:30 Margi Dehlin I really love that and I really, for some reason it brings up a little bit around, I think sometimes as parents, we want to protect our children from experiences of loss or grief. So in my case when my dad died, I had this thought of trying to grieve away from my kids or where they would never see it to sort of protect them from. And then I had the realization of they will literally lose me someday and lose other. And I actually wanted them to have a memory of what that looked like that they could actually, you know, recall and see. Oh, I remember actually when my mom lost her dad and that it was hard for her and you know, even recall a bit of what that looked like. And so that reminds me a little bit of what you're saying of, you know, that I don't know, or the messiness sometimes and the unknown things of even being able to say, I don't know where he is. I wish I did. I wish I knew what, you know, and adding just sort of kind of, you know, age dependent, mind you, you know, that type of response. But, you know, modeling some of those things too, particularly to our, you know, middle to older age children.

1:13:56 Natasha Helfer Parker It's the same with modeling. I'm sorry, you know, it's the same with modeling things like I was wrong. It's like all of these things, if you take a super authoritative approach, it doesn't allow for you to make mistakes. And we want to role model mistake making and repairing from mistakes so that our kids know how to do that when they're older.

1:14:19 Margi Dehlin Yeah. And I think ironically, all that talk about respect and of the authoritative authoritarian model, I just, you know, the times that I have, you know, really talked with my children around my own humanness and mistakes I've made or things that I can connect with that might be hard about them living with me or experiencing me, you know, one of just the best moments is when they really connect to that and you feel the respect from that for Your owning that. And even I loved on a Mother's day card. You know, here's my 15 year old son and he listed a few things he really loved about me. And one of those things was, you know, on a level, I love how you're willing to see your own mistakes and to work on them and grow. I mean that's pretty awesome. That's a pretty. And not saying that I'm awesome. I'm saying I feel like our kids really value realness. They sense. And that's actually ironically where respect comes is when they sense you're being real with them. You're being honest about yourself and you're being willing to admit that you're growing too.

1:15:38 Natasha Helfer Parker When you think about all the ways that we get to ticked off at the church for not being forthcoming. Right. Or not being honest or not being able to admit when it makes mistakes, we lose respect. You know, when we don't see people being able to take responsibility to own their own weaknesses. You see this shift a little bit in some of the politicians.

1:16:04 Margi Dehlin Right.

1:16:04 Natasha Helfer Parker Like it used to be that, you know, 30 years ago politicians would just, you know, again, never show a weakness or. And now they realize like that's even more of it. If I've made a mistake and I don't own it and apologize or take some type of ownership people are gonna. Then it's a real deal killer. Yeah, we're shifting in the cultural ideas of this. Whereas before saying I was wrong was considered a weakness or you might lose respect. We're actually finding the more you can be real and honest and show that you're self aware as to what you should take responsibility for, the more respect. And that's the, that's the culture your kids are in. They, I always call kids, you know, the hypocrisy police. They are very good at picking up on when you're not, you know, when you're kind of full of it.

1:17:00 Margi Dehlin That's right.

1:17:03 John Dehlin As we kind of wrap up this session and this multi hour, at least four, maybe five hour session marathon on parenting, the last point that I wanted to bring up that really does come from Shefali Savery. But it also ties back into kind of how we began when we talked about how sometimes people internalize the Christianity model and as being a model of brokenness or even addressing this idea that a parent's job is to fill a kid. And what we end up doing is projecting all of our insecurities and anxieties and over securities or accomplishments onto them. And I think we all Have a sense as parents for how kids just don't want to be the soccer star if we were the soccer star. They don't want to be the ballerina, if mom was the ballerina. That, that there's just something natural about a reaction in the opposite direction of any way a parent's wanting to push a kid. It kind of ties back to the question of what is our role as a parent. And Shefali Saberry makes the argument that our job as a parent is to provide, you know, our kids with the structure and the support and the environment of safety for them to become exactly who they're supposed to be. They're not supposed to become mini Me's. They're not supposed to become the fulfillment of our desires. They're not supposed to be come the fulfillment, the antidote to our insecurities, to all the things. You know, I didn't get my eagle, so you need to get your eagle. You know, I was. I had awful parents. So I'm in a helicopter you and be overprotective, over enmeshed parents. Our job as parents is to create a cultivated environment. You're smiling at me.

1:18:54 Margi Dehlin Oh, no, I'm loving it.

1:18:55 John Dehlin Is the cultivated environment where our kids can become who they're meant to be inside. Now, is that too new agey and frilly or is that Margi's beaming? So why are you beaming?

1:19:09 Margi Dehlin I love that.

1:19:10 John Dehlin Is that true?

1:19:12 Margi Dehlin I. I feel like it's. I don't like belief or saying things are true anymore. What I would say is that really resonates with me and that's definitely something that I'm choosing to focus on with our kids. Knowing that we're human and everything is kind of fallible. But to me, it's the best strategy. I know now it's worth my time and effort and consideration.

1:19:40 John Dehlin Natasha, what do you think? Do you think that's an okay guiding philosophy?

1:19:46 Natasha Helfer Parker I love the philosophy and I think I've shared in the past where for me, when I really started thinking about even the Mormon invitation of becoming a peer with God and realizing that here in evangelical Kansas, part of why a lot of people didn't think we were Christian. One of the reasons. There's many reasons, but one of the reasons is because we see ourselves as potential peers with God and becoming like God so that we're not in this continual authoritarian relationship with God. So this is the first time I started thinking about this years ago, you know, when I was much more of a believer and I really found some beauty in that conception that if I'm going to have a relationship with like the perfect parent, that, that Mormonism would offer this peer invitation instead of this ongoing, you know, stay in your place type of thing. And so my thoughts about parenting kind of evolved from actually this Mormon space into, you know, philosophers and educators and psychologists that also see that as a very viable way of parenting and that it has a lot of fruits because again, I'm trying to remember that, yes, part of my job, especially when they're little, is keeping them safe, offering guiding principles, being somewhat of a boundary setter and a limit setter. Eventually I want to spend 30 to 40 years with this kiddo in a peer relationship where maybe I will still be a mentor in some way, shape or form. And yet I want to learn from them. They have lots to teach me. I want to feel like we can have rich dialogue where I can model a lot of ability to self soothe so that I can really take in this other person that I've helped create. And yet that really is their own entity. So I think there's a lot of beauty in all of those ideas.

1:21:46 Margi Dehlin Love that.

1:21:48 John Dehlin All right, well, this brings to close our marathon on parenting. I'm so grateful, Natasha, for your wisdom, Margi, your wisdom. Thankful to all our listeners who have tuned in. I do want to ask our listeners really quickly for a favor. We're just trying to figure out how to share whatever we have to offer on the gift of Mormon faith crisis. You know, as I'm thinking about five hours on parenting, I'm thinking, is this too much? Is this too heavy? Is this useless? Is this too vague? Is it too general? Is it too specific? Should we break these up into smaller chunks? Are we even picking the right topics? Do you guys care about this kind of stuff? Why are you laughing?

1:22:30 Margi Dehlin There's a lot of anxiety around what we're doing.

1:22:34 John Dehlin I just want to make sure what we're doing is useful. So we would love feedback from those of you who are regular listeners who are joining us for the first time, please email us at mormonfaithcrisis.com Please give us your feedback and let us know if you like this. If you don't, if you would like us to do other things, if there are topics you want us to cover, if there are other formats you would enjoy. We just want to know that what we're doing is helpful or if we should just go away. If you think that we should just end this podcast, stop it completely and go away. We want to know that, don't we? Do you want to wait. Do you want to spend your time doing this if it's not useful?

1:23:13 Margi Dehlin I do not.

1:23:14 John Dehlin Do you, Natasha?

1:23:16 Natasha Helfer Parker No. Well, and one of the things, too, that is always a little bit, I guess, of a touchy subject is that at some level, we, you know, we only know if this is valuable, if there's some type of financial, you know, kind of. I want to say reward, I think, because I'm thinking of rewards and punishments we're talking about. About the compensation. Right. And so we could, you know, take more of an approach of offering webinars for, you know, a cost or things of that nature. We've always kind of, throughout our relationship at least, we've always kind of geared more towards sharing the content we have and then, you know, hopefully get donations and at the same time, valuable products and resources have, you know, the value can be measured in some ways, shapes or forms by money. Not that it's all about that either, obviously, but it is some of it. And we have to be reimbursed for our time doing these things. So if you find value in this, that's one way that you can support us is by offering a donation or giving us other ideas of products you'd be willing to purchase or ways that we could conceptualize our information in ways that would. That you would be willing to be a consumer of. So I think that's just an important part of this discussion to make it viable, to make it sustainable for us to provide these kinds of services.

1:24:46 John Dehlin So if your heart tugs at your strings, your finger strings, your keyboard strings, please consider going to MormonFaithCrisis.com and making a monthly donation, signing up for 10, 15, 20, 50, 100 bucks a month, whatever you can afford that will go directly towards keeping this podcast alive. And again, not just for yourself, but for others in the future who are in the panic of a faith crisis. Many of you have kind of worked through a lot of the hard stuff, but there's people over the next 5, 10, 20 years who are going to really be in the thick of it and will really want and need support. And if you can support this and help us put together a really solid library of content, it can be something that people all over the world benefit from. As we know, more and more people are leaving orthodox Mormonism and need support in that process. So please support us if you can. And there are other ways to support us as well. Whether it's liking us on Facebook, whether it's giving us positive reviews on Facebook or on itunes, sharing this with other people, commenting reaching out to us for coaching services. There are lots of ways you can support what we are doing, so please support us. Right?

1:26:04 Margi Dehlin Well said.

1:26:05 John Dehlin All right, well, that concludes today and we want to thank everyone again for joining us. And we have lots of cool topics ahead on the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis. So please stay tuned and we look forward to bringing you guys more cool episodes in the weeks, months and years ahead.

1:26:24 Margi Dehlin Thank you for joining us.

1:26:25 John Dehlin Thanks, Margi.

1:26:26 Natasha Helfer Parker Take care, everybody. Have a good one.

1:26:28 John Dehlin You're awesome.

1:26:30 Natasha Helfer Parker You're awesome too, guys.

1:26:31 John Dehlin All right, talk soon. Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber at Mormon Stories. One is a song by singer songwriter Mindy Gledhill off of her new album Rabbit Hole, an album chronicling the heartaches and rewarding discoveries of her Mormon faith crisis. You can purchase her album on itunes or by visiting mindygledhill.com

1:27:14 Margi Dehlin but they're all the same to me when we worship

1:27:19 Natasha Helfer Parker love

1:27:22 Margi Dehlin and though we may speak in different tones May our hearts be sewn together when our hearts feel so untouched to our pieces

1:27:43 Natasha Helfer Parker become.

1:27:47 John Dehlin One

1:27:51 Margi Dehlin life to live Mind the time while it takes we are here

1:28:07 Natasha Helfer Parker in

1:28:08 Margi Dehlin this moment let's unwrap it like it's the most beautiful.