Lael Stone

So usually I start each episode with my humanness, what's been going on for me.

But this episode is actually going to be all about my humanness because today I am joined by two of my beautiful, extraordinary children who are here to have a conversation with me.

And I feel like this may be beautifully exposing of me and my humanness as we're going to talk about

parenting, being raised in the way that we have, and also just how they view the world.

There's a good reason why I wanted to do this podcast because for anybody who's a parent these days, more than likely you would have been raised in this behaviorism paradigm.

That was where we were brought up in environments where we were told we must be good all the time.

We were punished when

You know, we did something wrong.

Often our parents, you know, as well meaning as they were, used punishments and rewards to get us to do what we wanted.

And most adults that I work with these days were raised in that environment.

And then we get to this point and they have their own children.

And I think because we know a lot more now, we have a lot more information about, you know, emotional awareness, trauma, you know, attachment, connection, all those kind of things, people do want to do it differently.

And for me and my husband, Mike, we were very, very fortunate to have three children and have been really conscious in wanting to raise them in a different way, where we would make it safe for their feelings, where we encourage them to take risks, make mistakes.

We didn't use punishments and rewards.

You know, we wanted to connect and attach in the best ways possible.

And we now have three adult children and are at that other end of parenting.

But one of the biggest questions that I get asked all the time is, does this work?

A lot of the parents I work with have smaller children.

And when they're not punishing their kids or when they're using some of these other ways to create cooperation and connection, there's often a doubt that comes up of, is this going to work?

And are my kids then going to be successful humans in the world?