120: The Top 3 Mistakes Most Parents Make When Raising Their Children | Dr. Tom Cowan

Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan, and today I have back on my sole ally, friend, and colleague, Dr. Tom Cowan. Many of you may know him for his books on subjects ranging from anthroposophical medicine to water to cancer. And of course, he has really been sounding many an alarm over the past couple of years about germ theory and is essentially the person that I look to in my life for perspectives on reality that I can trust. He is such a special human and he has a new book out called Common Sense Child Rearing on the application of so many of the ways that he is freely thinking about many arenas of the human experience to the parent-child dynamic. So we do some pretty serious myth-busting together, and I have in my own journey come to very, very similar, if not the exact same perspectives that he has. And the humility that has been asked of me as a mother, as I have expanded into this deeper maturation over the past couple of years, is something that he is very familiar with, and I would say has masterful experience with. So we cover what government and parenting have in common and the most powerful shift in perspective on both of those things that allows you to see more clearly what the role of authority actually is. We cover how to react when your kid draws on the walls, doesn't eat his dinner or acts out in school, and also why you shouldn't play with your kids. So I hope that this is as heart opening and inspirational for you as it was for me. I had tears in my eyes by the end of this conversation. Hi, Tom. Welcome to the show. Hey, Kelly. Good to see you again, as always. As always. Just here to continue yapping about the nature of reality, biology, life, and... As best we know. As I was saying offline, yeah, you are one of the most practiced individuals I know in admitting when it is that you don't know. So the topic that we're going to address today, I think in some instances where folks have been following your work, your books, your trajectory, they might be surprised to imagine that you would put out a book on child rearing of all things. But I have personally experienced you as a template of a safe, attuned, emotionally available parental figure who provides me guidance and sometimes solicited, sometimes not, but always welcome on some deeper level advice. And I know that the wisdom that you've collected, because I do experience it as wisdom and the sort of place that you occupy in the collective. Am I allowed to call you like an elder? Is that OK? Is that offensive? This place that you occupy. I'm getting there. That's for sure. It's really like a bereft, like a cavernous realm. Nobody is standing in that place handing down wisdom. Right. Right. And so what has trickled through you over many decades has come through many avenues. Right. It's come through your own experience as a kid. It's come through your years as a clinician and also as a Waldorf school consultant and your time as a father and a grandfather. But I actually think it's your particular brand of heart-mind connection. It's your particular way of allowing your thoughts to be informed by a kind of sensibility. And that's why I love the name of your latest book, which is Common Sense Child Rearing. This idea that there is a sort of a sense to bring to bear. I actually think is what makes the advice and guidance that you provide so powerful. It's just part of your nature. It's part of how you process reality. And when you apply that to human relationships, and specifically what many of us would see as the most important relationships in our lives, which is our relationship to our own children, there is just a whole new world that opens up. You're also one of the best listeners I know. And when we talk about medical stuff, we talk about clinical stuff, I know that you often reference that being pretty much the only thing a clinician has to do is just learn how to actively listen. But when it comes to parent-child dynamics, I wonder if we could sort of, you know, zoom out really far before we get into some of the amazing stories that you describe in this book. And if you could talk about what you at this point in your own development think of the parent-child relationship as being about, right? Like, are we here as parents to teach our kids? Are we here to mold them? Do they come tabula rasa and we have to inform all the aspects of their being? Do they come as spiritual teachers for us? Like, how are you thinking about this dyad and sort of the context for everything else that we're going to talk about today when it comes to child rearing? You know, how is it that you're you're thinking about the nature of this relationship these days? So the process that I would answer that is, and I think the process that I maybe try to do everything is, I have an idea just like anybody else. And then I see what happens in reality. And then I see if my idea was right. And a lot of times I start with, you know, with everything now, debunking the negative. so here's one way to answer your question so what is the relationship between a parent and child what we're told the sort of usual reality is something like you're this grown-up mature wise person and you get these children and they're going to be savages and unless you steer them correctly with your wisdom, discipline, you know, advice, guidance, money, etc. It's their savages, homeless, drug addicts, and you can't let that happen. So that's the usual thing. And as a result of that, parents, including me, and I used to joke that if they gave the worst parent of the year award, I would be in the running for many years with my own children, which I think is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it's not out of line because I had that idea too. So therefore, when something, quote, bad happens, you freak out. Freaking out means yell at them, punish them, send them to the room. And on the other hand, you keep doing things that will make them not be savages, like send them to the best schools. And you don't bother to look into the sort of nature of school or even this school, because obviously, if they don't go to harvard they're going to be savages and that puts you it puts the parent into a very hard situation because what happens is uh the children don't cooperate and in effect they start acting and i've never said it quite like this because never had the question quite like this But they start acting more like savages than they otherwise would. And particularly in front of your friends and family members and like teachers. And that's then comes, oh, my God, my child is a savage and I'm a horrible parent and I'm in trouble because not only am I a horrible parent, but like everybody around me can see it. And so I've got to do something about this. And at that point, you're off somewhere where you do not want to be. Now, I took that idea because that's the idea that I had from growing up and everything. And that's in the culture. That's what it means. And I applied that to my patients and see if it fit. and what i found is it didn't and what i found the answer to your question is it seemed to me that the children are there they come into the world as you know this whatever you call it sort of this spiritual being that comes into this body that's incredibly grateful to their parents for giving them life and giving them food and shelter and warmth and love and they expect this is going to be just great you know i'm with my parents and what they see is like these people are kind of nuts they have all this stuff going on in their head and not only that they poison me and give me crappy food and all kinds of stuff and i love them and i want to wake them up and so i try to alert them that this isn't the way it's supposed to be and i started seeing disease and quote bad behavior as a communication strategy from the children to try to help their parents see the world in a new and better way and once i got that lesson and saw it in practice so then the benefit that i had is i could think a new thought like this and then i could take an like an autistic child so-called autistic who was so off the wall you couldn't even be in the same room with him ripping my thing apart and saying he's just trying to tell you that the way you've been you know, vaccinating him and feeding him and all this, that he's never cooperated with the food and the way that you hate each other as parents, you know, that's not the way it's supposed to be. He doesn't actually have a problem. He's just trying. It's the only way he can think of, because what's a four year old going to do? He can't write you an essay on how everything is wrong and the problems with the vaccines and, you know, the food and everything. They can't do that. So they bang their head. At a certain point, some parents will say, I don't like this headbanging because it's like horrible to watch. I'm going to look into how to live differently. And it changes everything. And I saw that in particular in this one child who then got, quote, cured of autism in like six months, all because we convinced the situation that it wasn't his problem. And then, of course, he had issues, but he started eating whatever we gave them. And he even said, you should go ask Cowan what I should eat, you know. because he once the communication was acknowledged the reason for this is over and i got to the point with children because i started seeing disease as a as a kind of way that they were they were talking to their parents about what was wrong and I would have these children as patients and I would say to them, you don't have to act like this anymore. I'll tell the parents. And of course, they're three or six. They don't know what I'm talking about. But I would say it just so they would know. Or even if they were two months old, you don't have to cry all the time. I'll tell them to stop this because the crying all the time got them to stop. And if you don't want them to cry all the time, you got to listen. So in other words, the answer to your question, I think, is a child is the person who helps you see things that you couldn't you wouldn't see otherwise. I love that that could literally not be more true in my experience. And I'm struck. My experience, too. Yeah, I'm struck as you're talking, though, and I'm sure you thought of this for whatever reason. The parallel hasn't been as as crystal clear as it is for me right now. by the exact overlay onto our relationship to parentified authorities in government, right? That the default assumption is that people are fundamentally savages, are fundamentally bad and bad-natured and have these selfish impulses that need to be socioculturally regulated through you know legislation and mandates and so laws that atomize all of us into these totally separate entities that yeah do display and manifest that which was it the same as the allopathic consciousness right It like the anti that perpetuate exactly that which they purport to resolve. So it's this warfare, zero-sum game consciousness that is predicated on a belief that we are fundamentally bad-natured, sinful Right. And I know, you know, you caught me in it recently because I was telling you how, you know, sometimes I wish if government were to do anything. And obviously, for those who don't already know, we lean voluntarist, both of us in our in our perspectives on the role of, you know, authority in society. But I was saying to you, I was like, well, you know, if government's going to do anything, they should really regulate industrial chemicals, right? Because this would change everything overnight. Like if there was really a role for government, it should be to, you know, take plastics off the market and take chemicals out of the hands of these industrial moguls, whatever. And you came, you know, with the same perspective that you bring to the parenting arena, which is that regulation never works. So, you know, when it comes to punishment and even reward, I mean, I've certainly come to the same perspective in the parenting realm. But clearly I have a little bit of work to do resolving the parentification of regulatory agencies. Do you think it's fair to say that your perspective is that that kind of top-down regulation almost always breeds that which it, or encourages at least, that which it intends to minimize? You're right. It's exactly the same. They think we're savages who first chance we get are going to kill each other, even though that's whenever you look at the so-called private sector or how people do business together and unregulate, they don't kill each other. because that's stupid, right? And they say, well, who's going to clean the roads? And you say, well, I'll call Danny Mac and he is a road cleaning service and the 10 of us on our block will pay him and he'll clean the road. But as soon as you say, no, you give me the authority to tell you what you can put in your food or your land or whatever, and then I'm going to force people through threats of violence, right? if you don't cooperate and throw your ass in jail then you're in a war and you're going to lose because anyway everybody loses in a war so you're just in a fight and that's a little bit off subject but all that comes about when you do two things one is you have a system where you don't take personal responsibility like if you throw garbage on my place without an authority you would go to the person say don't do that and most people wouldn't do that if they knew they were going to be held responsible because it doesn't make any sense and the other thing that has to happen is the people get used to it's not their responsibility to do anything about anything bad the epa will decide kennedy will decide Somebody will decide what's good or bad. I don't have any responsibility. And that's a dictator. That's like a powerlessness. Yeah, you're accepting powerlessness. So when we are navigating our respective realities, part of the emotional immaturity that we bring to bear is the insistence that somebody else share our reality in order for us to feel okay. Right. And so when we grow into our role as parents, but we haven't progressed or matured that relationship to other people having different opinions, perspectives and experiences, then we impose on our kids the mandate that they have to conform to our perspective, to our experience. And sometimes this can be like very subtle and manipulative, especially, I would argue, in the like holistic world where there's like a zero tolerance policy for having any sort of like less informed perspective on like what healthy food is or what like the healthy way of being is. But certainly it also, you know, the way most of us grew up, there was the good bad dichotomy and there was like the way you get mommy and daddy's love, which is conforming to their reality. And the way that you get a withdrawal, you experience a withdrawal of love at best and, you know, violence and abuse at worst. So you talk about what it is to get on your kids team, right? Get on their side, stay there. And to resolve, this would be my language, like resolve the triangulation, right? Like resolve this, the zero sum game, resolve the I'm right, you're wrong. And, you know, I think about if that were and I'd love for you to talk more about that, but I think about if that were the one commitment that every parent made, even if it was the most uncomfortable practice. ask me how I know, that we would have the foundation for healthy romantic relationships later in our lives, right? Where you could actually be an ally with your partner, even through differences, even through projections, even through painful ruptures, right? Rather than really playing this game of two teams, one is right and one is wrong. So like, what does it look like to find your kid radically right in this way, you know, at all times? What does it look like to open yourself to their reality in a non-coercive, non-corrective comportment? Yeah. So it reminds me of one of the stories in the book, which I think is sort of what you're talking about so we have this a cultural right thought that tolerance and anti-bigotry and anti-prejudice is good and prejudice bigotry intolerance is bad right so you go you get uh And so school, which is a, you know, you have to go to school. I talk a lot about that in the book. If you don't go to school, you're going to end up not getting a job. I mean, now, even in New York City, you have to have a high school degree to be a sanitation engineer, otherwise known as a garbage collector, which is amazing because I don't know. I actually was a collected garbage for summer. And you don't need to know anything about Chaucer or anything to collect garbage. But anyway, so you have this coercive environment in a public school, right? And the Secretary of Education says our whole goal is to get everybody with a college degree because then you'll have a good work job and you'll not be homeless and a savage, right? That's the goal. Never mind that for all the 18-year-olds, there's approximately 47% of them, there's a space in college for them to go to, which means 53% are losers because there's no place to go to college, even if they all wanted to. But anyways, so that's the first problem. But the second problem is, okay, so you have this coercive environment that everybody has to go to, and you're high school, and they have a course on tolerance, right? Because everybody wants everybody to be tolerant. So they have a course on tolerance, and then you have to write a paper at the end describing what you've learned about tolerance. And your child writes a paper, and it says tolerance is bullshit, right? because that's what he thinks. And now you have a choice. This is the choice I think you're talking about. How can you say tolerance is bullshit? As a matter of fact, Freddie, in this school, we do not tolerate an attitude like that. And we're going to flunk your sorry ass. And then you're going to end up not even be able to be a janitor. You'd be homeless shooting crack on the streets of Albany because you wrote tolerance is bullshit. And we do not tolerate that in this home, in this family, in this school, in this society. We are tolerant people. And, you know, you see that. And so when I would have these children, oh, what's the matter with Freddie? Freddie has oppositional defiant disorder. What did he do? He wrote in tolerance class, tolerance is bullshit. Don't you know about it? So I don't know that I ever actually did that because I was smart enough not to think that I. But that made no sense. So I said, Freddie, what's up? Yeah, you know, and so he would tell me the story of how he got to come to this conclusion. And it made perfect sense. Now, I didn't necessarily agree that he should be intolerant, right? But I was interested in what he had to say. And when I found out, it made perfect sense. As a matter of fact, the person he doesn't like who happens to be whatever did something really nasty to him and he doesn't like them. And I just heard it and said, I even mostly don't say anything. So, yeah, I can see why you wouldn't like, you know, Joe, because he's he was mean. And that's the end of it. And what I then heard was, you know what? I'll probably try to get along with him a little better. I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't presume to say, you know, you should stop being so intolerant. I just heard what he had to say. It made sense. and that's when the children would start to say hey you know what this guy's on my side because his parents said you know you're gonna be a savage and you're gonna end up on the street snorting cocaine and they would threaten him right that's what we do and not only that if you keep doing this we're gonna we're gonna drug your ass right i mean you know that world too a lot better than I do. If you're a seven-year-old and you won't sit still in tolerance class, they're going to drug you to make sure because we do not tolerate people who don't pay attention in tolerance class. And yet that seems to be how our children think. I mean, that's not how our children think. That seems to be the way we raise our children. It's just one threat and punishment or reward after another. And nobody says, how did you end up coming to that? Because he's doing stuff I don't like. And they almost always, if not always, had perfectly good reasons and had the whole thing thought out. And when I listened, I would say, yeah, that makes sense. That's what I would have done. When I think about like the exquisite vulnerability of allowing for, you know, someone that you deem to be, and this applies to pets too, right? That you deem to be more helpless, more dependent, and potentially more ignorant. The vulnerability that arises when you say, I will allow you free reign, right? Like I will allow you dominion over yourself. self. There's this whole paradigm shift from control-based interactions and transactional dynamics to, I don't know, trust and intimacy, right? Like whatever's on the other side. And I remember my own initiation to, you know, this first chapter in your book explores this concept we're talking about of getting on your kid's side. I remember my initiation to this was when, and I've talked about this a lot and written about it myself, so maybe this is redundant, but When I was inspired to ask my girls a few years ago, maybe four or five years ago, to ask them if there was anything that I had done that was still bothering them. right and my one daughter wrote me i guess it was like an email or a text i don't know what it was at the time she wrote me basically you know her perspective on what had gone down in our family the preceding years that brought us from you know the northeast to miami and this kind of cataclysmic, you know, unfoldment in my life where I experienced myself as the heroine, you know, like I am the one who is ending cycles of, you know, abuse in my mother line. And look at me, I'm so courageous doing it differently. And her story about me was that I was like selfish and that I had destroyed, you know, the family and particularly like how I had treated my own parents, right? And of course, my reflex was to correct her around the story. Like, oh, you just don't know the story. Wait till I tell you the story that features me as the heroine. Then you'll understand that you just don't have all the facts, right? But I had a night before I was going to talk to her. And what arose in that night was, I mean, some of the deepest shame I've probably ever felt where I was like quietly with the possibility that I was going to go down in history as a bad mom, right? Which I'd never considered before because I was so busy being what I thought would be would look I guess this was unconscious but would look like what a good mom does a good spiritual mom good new age mom right Like my kids have never eaten pizza birthday cake get a birthday party whatever And when I sat down with her I had of course, this luxury of like the whole night to prepare my adult self to show up to this interaction. And it was probably the most courageous thing I had done up until that point in my life, which was simply to sit there and say, look her in the eyes and say, tell me more. Yeah, that's it. I never want to this day. I have not aired my version of the story. And within literally 48 hours of that experience, there was more affection. Right. Like so she would like started like touching me and hugging me in ways that she hadn't before. It was an immediate reward for me. So I was like immediately conditioned to recognize that when I stay on my children's team, when we have different perspectives on things big and small, that it's actually it gets me closer to what it is that I want, which is connection. right? And of course, this is true in every relationship in all aspects of your life. But whatever that emotional courage is that at least in these initial cases seems to be required, I certainly wouldn't diminish how challenging and vulnerable it can be. But phrases like, tell me more, or that makes sense, right? Like you said that several times, that makes sense. To just say that makes sense instead of here's what I think the reflect to like insert and impose your potentially like radically or even slightly different perspective is so ingrained that interrupting that reflex. I think it helps to have these like little phrases because I couldn't agree more that this is how you experience your children and children in general. Right. And in such a different way. Right. They're not they're not yours to manage anymore. They're they're interesting. And they're, you know, sources of like very valuable perspectives that you like funny, curious perspectives that you wouldn't otherwise have any access to. And I know this is how you think that there's like these these like meaningful puzzles that are represented by every conflict or experience of adversity or so-called illness. that there's some kind of, you know, there's a puzzle and you can't possibly zoom out enough to see what the puzzle is actually depicting unless you have that kind of a comportment towards what's happening where you don't come in knowing better. So I want to talk a little bit about this concept of, because there were many parts of this book that even though I talk to you about this stuff all the time, I ask you parenting advice, you know, I'm familiar with how you think in this realm. There were still so many parts of it that really hit home for me. And one was around this concept of, you call it perseverance, and you tell a story about this guy, Willie, from your high school. And it's this idea that sometimes our kids need to go through, and maybe this is even more for sons, right? So I don't have sons, I don't know. But they need to go through experiences, challenges and even adversity and kind of be in it. Right. And even like forge their path through it without the meddling of a parent. And you talk about it from the perspective of challenges, but also from the perspective of play. Right. Like you talk about how you don't think that you should play with your kids, which is very refreshing. you know, for, for me to hear. So when it comes to sort of the benevolent side, right, the light side of meddling in your, in your kids' lives, either to help them, uh, with their, with their problems in this way, or even to just like make sure they're always entertained through constructive play. What do you see as being the potential for a parent to support a child, from the background? How does that look? And any stories that you want to share to support how you got to this perspective? Let me say something about the first thing you said, which I can't really summarize, but I got there because I ended up thinking my medicine changed when I saw every symptom and every experience that my patients and maybe even I was going through was because the wisdom of the body communicated. No exceptions, whether it's cancer, Alzheimer's, a splinter in your finger, whatever. And so I applied that same way of thinking to, say, children and discipline. That this, if you actually bother to listen to the story, you see that it makes sense and it's the wisdom of the body. So let me give the example I use in the book. I was with my, I think he was three or four-year-old grandson who was staying with us. And every morning he would come down and play with his farm animal blocks, et cetera. And one day I hear he's downstairs and I hear, Grandpa. And it was a funny way of saying it. And so I go down and look. And he had crayon all over the white walls. And again, this is like the sap, like only a savage would do that. And this is horrible because, you know, now we're going to have to paint the walls and blah, blah, blah, the whole thing. So he needs to be punished so he doesn't ever do this again. And interestingly, as soon as I come down, he points at the wall and says, yuck. so i got myself together and thought first of all he doesn't need to be told that this was a quote bad behavior because he already knew he called me down and told me to look at it so any sort of cognitive you know well ben this is the reason we don't crayon on the walls you know he already knew that and so i thought about how do i stay on his side and so even the wisdom of the body why would he do this because it's fun it's white walls he's got crayons he drew a picture like he didn't come with the rules that say you know well these white walls you don't draw etc and these you do he didn't know that but he had a sense obviously so there was no even saying anything about bad this is wrong i said why don't we just go get go to the store get some paints and we'll we'll spend today painting the wall and he had fun doing that and here's what's also important about that he never did that again whereas i can almost guarantee if i had of you're going to end up on a coat you know cocaine addict on the streets because you're you know if i was him i'd do it again just to see if you really mean it you know you're going to punish them. Now, when it comes to this perseverance and like the thing is, so I'm in this high school and it's 80% Jews and 20% blacks. And there's this big thing in our high school about the basketball team. And I was the only white kid on the basketball. I happen to be a very good basketball player. And there was somebody better on the team named Willie. And I was intruding in their space. And so I got punched and harassed and all kinds of stuff. But, you know, Willie recognized that I was helping the team. And he wanted to go to college on a basketball scholarship. And if I helped the team, he was going to keep me around because, you know, and so we became like friends and played, you know, almost every day, one on one, you know, and he beat the hell out of me all the time. But I had certain things that I could help him. But in overall, it was a pretty rough experience. And I never told anybody. I never told my parents. I never complained to anybody. So apart from your child getting like really injured, that's different. That's like protective use of force. It's like you don't let your dog run out into the road and get hit by a car because that, you know, so you protect them against that. But apart from that, the way I saw it is like I learned a lot from that. And I actually saw him as one of the biggest teachers of my life. and I'm glad that nobody intervened and tried to, you know, figure out how to make it all work. You know, I just we just worked it out. And unless a child says I need to talk to somebody about this, which is fine, then you hear what they say or I need help with this or I'm scared about my well-being or my physical safety. That's different. But we have this thing now, like the cultural thing is no child is allowed to do is to be in any kind of challenging situation ever. I'm exaggerating a little bit. But that's the recipe for making people who can't deal with challenges. I mean, that's what you're teaching then. Just like in tolerance class, you're teaching how to be intolerant. And by punishing Ben, you're teaching a child how to, you know, try to submit to authority, even when in his world, he didn't do anything wrong. And you can see it. If you actually hear the story, I can see it being fun to draw a picture on a wall. I can see writing tolerances bullshit. I can see defending myself against somebody who's trying to harass me. I can see, you know, persevering in a team that I wanted to be on because I wanted to be on that team and I was going to figure out how to make it work. And I think it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. And the reason I say that is because if there's anybody I would want to hear from in from my high school, it's Willie. What did you think about what was happening? And I don't even know what he knows about it or thinks about it, but not, you know, Charles who went to medical school and God became a neurosurgeon and Ricky went to Harvard and the MIT people that I was hanging out with. I don't really care what they think. I want to know what Willie thought about what was happening with that team. And it's probably because, again, not knowing what it's like to grow up as a young man, the role of hierarchy and competition and respect is obliterated by this egalitarian concept of, right, like everybody gets, you know, the same opportunities and we all have to play nice and harmony is what we're prizing and nobody has a superior, you know, competence than anybody else. And what you were working out was probably much more aligned with the biological reality of what it is to be a man in the world. And I mean, I cried when I read this part of the book. It's just so moving to feel like you're such an amazing storyteller that is so easy to to feel like a fly on the wall of that experience of you as this teenage guy having this admiration and respect and sort of the complexity of also a little bit of intimidation. and figuring it all out on your own. I think this is particularly salient to the way that most parents are interacting with their sons today and how we are raising these lambs and then women the world over are like, where are all the wolves? It's quite problematic for the collective. Yeah, and the answer to the question, So this what's the attitude, the approach to to the children? It's funny that what comes to me is you should try to bore the crap out of. Yeah. So let's talk about playing, because that was the other. And actually, a term. Did you make up this term? I don't know. Plorking to reuse in the in the book to talk about like how you think about playing. playing, right? Because I know that so many of us, especially who are in these sort of modular family lives where it's like a mom alone with the kids or maybe the two parents in the living room, especially when you have, you know, this hand generationally transmitted experience of insecure attachment so that being with your own infant or your own child is like boring, right? I have a whole podcast about that. A lot of us, I would say, as mothers experience that. And we think, okay, well, a good mom plays with her kid, right? And so what are we going to play now? And I loved this discussion that you have in the book about play, how to relate to it, and what actually it could look like, which seems to be preceded by, as you're saying, a good dose of boredom. So yeah, how do you think about that? Yeah, your job as a parent is to provide the possibility of a, quote, natural environment as best you can. Trees and streams and birds and cats and monkeys and dogs and, you know, forts to build and blocks and crayons and everything else. that's particularly stuff that's real food to make gardens chickens you know goats everything and then you get out of the way and then you the child will so if you're not trying to tell them what to do or play with them or let's do that i mean you may have to do it a little bit but you go about doing your life you take care of the chickens you take care of the goats you make applesauce You plant the carrots whatever The child will inevitably the only reason they get bored and cantankerous is because you telling them what to do If you get rid of all that energy and just say, if you want to do nothing, fine. You don't have to say anything. You just, here we are. We're going to, I'm doing my life. They will literally 100% of the time say, can I help you plant carrots? And then you don't try to teach them how to plant carrots. You say, sure. And then you just plant carrots, say you want some, and they'll if they ask you, how do you do it? Or you might watch them and say, you do it like this, but they can figure that stuff out. And what they'll figure out is what they're interested in. And one of them wants to sing, and one of them wants to read Dostoevsky, and one of them wants to plant carrots and feed the chickens and wash the goats and the other wants to build tree forts. And that's your job is to find out what they would want to do and help them do it. As soon as you try to intervene and say, this is good and this isn't good. And because we're new age parents, we do this. If I'm a child, I'm not doing it because I need to teach you that's not how you interact with people you interact with people you come together out of freedom and out of my choice is to do this and maybe even do it together like let's play a duet with recorders fine because you know that works and we both into it that's a kind of playing with them but most of the time you what you'll find is the children will then quote play and the reason I don't like play is play is defined, and you could quibble with this, as meaningless activity that a person does. Well, it's not meaningless at all. It's very meaningful to that person. They want to build a fort and see what happens if you build it this high and jump off the top. Do you break your leg or not? And when you don't say, oh, if you build it four feet high, you jump off, you're going to break your leg. No. They can figure that. They will figure that out. And it's like so many things. The only way I learned that you can stop a child from reading is to try to teach them to read. Every other child figures it out. And it's like all these things. So you don't need to do anything. And they will ask you if they want help with building the fort. and they will ask you if they need help with how to configure the chicken coop or something and then you can help them because they said how do you do this and then you just do it and that's not that different than how you treat a good friend right you don't say oh well i'm going to teach you how to do this and you better listen or you're going to be a savage you know you don't do that and not only that children don't do that to each other as soon as they do they don't like the one who's comes with the teaching bullying energy and they get rid of them or they don't want to have anything to do with them so they learn not to do that then everybody is much happier and so many of these fights and it's it's most a lot of parents it's hell raising their children if you really got if you really they were really honest about what they're experiencing they can't get their children to eat the food they can't get them to do anything they can't get them to go to bed they're worried about them all the time nothing is working and they're sick all the time and there is a way out of this that's my take and to learn what that is yeah open the pages you know just an example, like I tell people, I had 100% cure rate in food fights. Right. I was going to ask. And I don't know how many percentage, it was so high because I tell people what, you know, they got to eat good food and sometimes the gaps die. My children won't eat it. And every night it was food fights. And every night in our house, it was food fights. Every night. And I don't know, it's an extremely high percentage so that dinner time and mealtime is hell. I mean, I heard this from somebody else, but the food fights are about autonomy, the right to choose what you eat. And I want the right to choose what I eat. And I only eat food that I like, period. I don't like it. I don't eat it. And nobody's going to tell me what to eat. And so I gave that to my children. You can eat whatever you want. Now, once you give that to your children, the magic is they give you the right to give them the food because they don't actually care that much. So I cooked the food and I gave it to them and they either ate it or didn't. And if they didn't, it was fine. And if they did, it was fine. And they would say, I remember Joe says, aren't you going to punish me if I don't eat it? I said, like what? He said, well, you forced me to eat the broccoli. Like what? I'm going to stuff it down your throat. Well, the unnatural consequences get linked, right? No, then you can't go out. Yeah, you can't go out. And eventually he got the idea that I wasn't going to force him to eat it. Now, I wasn't going to give him hostess Twinkies either because he couldn't force me to give him what he didn't want that. But if he did, I could say, no, you want to get it. You go to get money and go to the store and buy it. So he either didn't eat. And then by day two, he's like, oh, fine, I'm going to eat because he didn't care that much. And I saw that when I was in Swaziland. You know, they would bring the food out, give it to the children, and they ate. One time, child says, I'm not eating. They ate his food. And if he had said, oh, I want, you know, millet instead of porridge, because I don't like porridge, they would have laughed and thought that was the funniest thing they ever heard because it's ridiculous this is that what we have and we're grateful for it and we're having a good time and if you don't want to eat it that's up to you and if you never want to eat you'll starve and not one child ever does that they just eat it that's the end of the food fights period because it's not about the food it's about autonomy choice sovereignty and i think that's what this whole thing is about. You're teaching them to be free. They have the choice. They are amazing, magnificent beings who come into the world with this incredible intelligence of what they want to do. And all you have to do is listen to them and get out of the way and don't tell them they're going to be savages. And they figure it out. And sometimes they'll need help, but they'll ask you and then you help them out. And what I hear you talking about is the restoration of natural consequences so that you can have experiences in your own, you know, uh, livescape as a kid that help inform how you're going to make decisions going forward. And they're not externalized through praise and reward linked to these Pavlovian type, you know, consequences. Like, you know, we were saying you don't get your iPad if you don't eat your broccoli, Or if you do eat your broccoli, you get to go out to the ice cream plate. Like none of those are actually natural consequences or rewards that would inform an intrinsically motivated decision making apparatus moving forward. So then we wonder, why are we so controllable as a populace? Why are we influenced by, you know, virtue signaling and inducing shame in each other over, you know, that social fabric of our decisions? And it's it's so common sense. I mean, it's exactly what you describe it. It makes sober sense to think about it this way. And my journey from conventional mindedness to holistic wellness mindedness to wherever it is that I've landed now, the humility that was asked of me, especially in this last leg of the journey over these past couple of years where I feel like I have really written a different story around a mother's experience of teenage daughters than I ever knew possible, certainly from my own experience. And you've been a powerful witness helping me to get out of my own way. The humility that I have been asked to experience is exactly what you're describing. This is how my daughters provide the medicine that I need. And I don't get to stand on any of those pedestals that I would really like to position for myself, you know, as a know-it-all when it comes to so many things. I don't get to if what I want is an experience of like the very particular soulfulness that they each bring to my life. And the peak joy, you know, as you know, that I experience in my life is through these girls. I mean, I could cry just talking about it. It's so, I feel so grateful that I came upon this kind of perspective that we're talking about today before they left the house. And, you know, you might say, well, but maybe you could experience it with your grandkids or whatever. But there's not, you know, you have these 18 years, let's say, and it's so different a task than so many of us who are in our control-based thinking and habits and reflexes imagine it is. Like, oh, we got to raise these kids like, you know, it's a utilitarian model so that they are good citizens and not savages, like you're saying. And it's such a different experience to just like relish them. Like, I don't know. It's short. It's temporary. Like, get your mind right. Get out of your own fucking way. And I think that's so much of what you are a master at is helping people to get out of their own way through, you know, your very matter of fact way of presenting, you know, a new perspective on what is an old way of being. But I also would say this is really your gift. The gift being you looked at this situation with your girls and for whatever reason, enough insight or emotional intelligence or something to say, no, that old model doesn't work. I am going to get off my pedestal and listen and see what happens. and it's like there's so many sort of bells and whistles that go off in us like people are going to think i'm a bad parent or i don't know what to do or what if they say something that hurts or i mean and that's why i think it's so inspirational that you did it and then you see that it works You see the magic of this and that you get exactly what you just described to have a glimpse into the the magical nature of human beings and our children. But if as a parent, you're trying to it's protecting yourself and you really protecting yourself from what? From feeling alive. That's what it is. And you chose. I'm going to feel alive. whatever that means. And I think that's why people are so inspired by it, because most of us are too afraid for whatever reason. Well, it's worth it. You know, it's worth it. And I don't know that I could have moved through, you know, the major shifts out of, you know, dogma. And I got to get you to see my perspective on reality in the world with my daughters. Had I not had your specific support as somebody who agrees with me about, you know, so many of these perspectives, right? To hear from you, like, you know, on so many occasions, how to reorient towards curiosity and permission. It's like, you know, just expanding the permission field for who they get to be while still being connected to my heart. And it's a reprioritization. And you've been so instrumental in that. So I really feel like you are anchoring very necessary wisdom that can really only come from somebody who has done it many wrong ways, right? And then done it many right ways and iterated the process over literal decades and generations. And you've put it all together in this book. It's funny because I was just interviewed in a podcast right before this. and offline, the interviewer asked me, said, you know, I have a two-year-old and I wonder if you have, I know you got to go, but I wonder if you have any like quick parenting advice for me. And I was like, I do indeed. It's called Common Sense Child Rearing by Dr. Tom Cowan. Look it up. It's, you know, it's a mic drop. So I'm so grateful that this is out there as a resource and also that it happens to echo exactly the perspective that I was en route to in my own weird and wild journey towards becoming a more sovereign adult, a more mature parent. And I'm not sure that there is a topic that is more important. And of course, the book is not about your many other areas of expertise. And it's all related, right? It's all related. So you touch on many of the subjects that, you know, are showcased in your other works. And so it's such a beautiful compendium. I'm so grateful that you, you know, that you took the leap and actually put it, you know, to send it to the presses, because I know it was kind of hanging out on your desk for a bunch of years. And I'm really grateful for the timing and grateful to you always, Tom. All right, Kelly.