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Speaker 1: When the vision itself came to me was the culmination of an accumulation of learnings over my lifetime. You might say, at first, I thought, why am I being given this vision? Surely there are others more worthy of being burdened with the gift of child honoring as a philosophy. I'm Chris Garcia, and this is Finding Raffie, a ten part series from My Heart Radio and Fatherly in partnership with The Rococo Punch about the life, philosophy, and the work of Raffie, the man behind the music. One morning in Raphie says he woke up from a deep sleep with a vision two words suspended in mid air, char honoring. I knew in that luminous moment that I was being given something that would be the work of the rest of my life. I knew in that moment that it was a unique social change revolution that connects personal, culture and planet, an integrated philosophy for restoring communities and restoring the earth. Everything in Ralphie's mind seems to come down to child honoring. It came up over and over again in our conversations. Basically, it's his philosophy for saving the planet by putting children first. It eventually became a book and an online course, and Ralphie was selling it to me pretty hard and one way you can deepen your connection with the beautiful words that you might read and wonder how might I practice this in my own family, as you would take the online course in child hon ring that my Raffie Foundation offers for a very reasonable price. On my dad, I took the bait. Raphie's philosophy covers a lot. He asked us to consider so many different concepts with children in mind, from the way we grow our food to how we measure economic progress. He paints a picture of a utopian world full of farmers, markets, parents volunteering with their kids, and pesticide free parks. I found it hard to know where I'm supposed to step in, both as a person and as a parent. See and reading it, it made me think a lot about privilege, because it's there's so much pressure on parents to make sure they're doing everything just perfectly, reading the right books, having the right toys. But at the end of the day, it's about survival and love, and not everyone has the means to curate the perfect bubble for their child. There's no such thing as perfect parenting. So let's just put that out of our minds. All parents, in their various situations, sum are having a tough time month after month making ends meet. You know. Everybody's got different pressures, different challenges, and also different rewards, you know, but we're all doing our best. And the point of conscious parenting is to be conscious of how we are parenting, how we were parented, what that instilled in us that might be passed on to our children. So it's a call to conscious living. Raphae's child honoring vision might sound a little esoteric, but I have to give the guy credit. He knows when and who to ask for help. He called up the top thinkers and environmental health education, business, in psychology, you name it, to test his ideas and shape his philosophy. I would like to think that before I met Rafiel, I was doing child honoring work. This is Dr Sharna Olfman, a Canadian expat living in Pittsburgh. She co wrote Raphael's Child Honoring book and happens to be a leading expert in developmental psychology. One of the many reasons I'm excited to talk to you um today is because you're an expert in all of this and I am a sponge that wants to soak in all this knowledge with you. Well, I want to be really clear that the child honoring philosophy is Raphael's philosophy, but we're part of this community. The solutions require the work and the ideas of people in many, many different professions. In her book series called Childhood in America, Sharna writes about some controversial educational reforms that she believed were harming our children, and Raffie was all about it. What were you trying to communicate to the world at that time? There were kind of a confluence events that led to the creation of that book, So maybe it would help to unpack that a little bit. If you were in preschool in the nineties, you most likely spent your days playing with ghak and sitting on a carpet square singing Barney songs. It was pretty chill. Playtime was the popular curriculum. Then flash forwards two thousand and two, Former President George W. Bush had just passed the highly criticized No Child Left Behind Act, and suddenly schools became very test driven, meaning preschool kids spent more time sitting at their desk taking tests than they did outside learning how to play. As a clinical psychologist, I was aware of this very big up surge in the number of children who are being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and who are also being prescribed stimulants. So there were like one in ten kids being prescribed riddle in there are these kind of formal preschool settings, and also there was this uptick in play getting translated to screen time. At the time, my son had just lost a person that was very, very important to him, and it was a very very traumatic event for my son. So I'm looking at all of these different trends and I'm thinking about my child, and I'm thinking that these preschool settings don't feel right for him. This was how I felt as a parent, but it is also how I felt as a developmental psychologist. If you take a bunch of kids and you sit them at desks when they're meant to be playing creatively, and then you know they spend their leisure time in front of screens, it's going to create some developmental issues. I look back and I think about my childhood and I was a very energetic boy that sat in a desk in a Catholic school all day and then watched TV at night, and I think my teachers and then my parents thought that I was just a bad student or incapable of learning. I ended up going to UC Berkeley, one of the best colleges in the world, but I stumbled out of the gates because I don't think I was meant to sit in a chair and then watch The Simpsons all night. Afterwards, in my own head, I almost saw myself as a bad student, even though I wasn't, because I just couldn't participate in that environment absolutely, And then those labels risks sort of becoming self fulfilling prophecies. You know. The the issue isn't that you can't get there from a lesson optimal beginning, but why make it so hard? Um? Should I be paying you for this session? And is this become a therapy session? Now? I feel like I feel so much. I'm like, you're right, and you know it wasn't my fault and if only that would have happened, I figured it out, But you know I shouldn't. I shouldn't have had to. Um. Can you tell me about the first time you met Raffie? So you know, Raffie heard about my work and Ralphie was kind enough to fly out to Pittsburgh and he uh met me at my home. At the time, Sharna's kids were six and nine years old, prime Raffie years. So when we finished our meeting, Raffie grabbed a banana from my kitchen, put it to his ear and his mouth like he was holding a banana phone from just like the cover art on his famous Banana Phone album, and he greeted the kids and he talked to them through the banana. It was just a really wonderful a first meeting, and my kids just were enthralled. Ring ring ring, ring, ring ring ring. Banana phone Ying Yang Yin Yang Yin Yang ying yan fool. It's a real live mama and Papa phone, a brother and sister and a doga phone, a grandpa phone, and a Granma phone to oh yeah, my cell learn Ralph he saw something in Sharna's work that he'd been trying to articulate for the last several years. How we treat our children is the key to building a sustainable world. A few months after their first meeting, Ralfie flies Sharna, her husband Dan, and their two young children out to his home on a small island off the coast of Vancouver, and I like to say we were living the child honoring life. You know, it really was a beautiful, idyllic two weeks. Main Island is this beautiful island off the coast of British Columbia, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean. We timed the visit to coincide with this amazing nature camp that was taking place that my kids were able to participate in. And it was such a magical camp, wooded, beautiful, and the kids spent all day every day in nature, tramping around the woods, splashing around in the ocean, collecting shells, and putting on little plays, et cetera. Evenings, he would often join us for dinner and we would spend hours talking about how how to make the world a better place for children. I think that Ralphie took me more deeply into my awareness of you know, issues like global warming and soil health, etcetera. Yeah, it was absolutely a pivotal experience for me, and it was just a wonderful way to kind of launch the work that we did together over the course of the next couple of years bringing the book to fruition. What would you say is was the vision or the goal for this book. So the Child Honoring Philosophy is both profound and elegant, I would say, in its simplicity. But I would say that probably the first impulse for Rafie in creating The Child Honoring Philosophy was his concern about the health the physical planet. You know, his concern about global warming, his concern about water, air, soil. You know, at the core, we're literally killing our children's home, We're killing their planet. And if we want to turn this ship around and we want to create a healthy planet and a healthy world, not in which children can survive, but in which they can fully thrive and fully self actualize, then all of us need to lead with the question is what I'm doing, what I'm saying, how I'm acting in the best interests of the young child. So I would like to say that the child Honoring Philosophy could also be thought of as a value. When we lead with that value, then we create a world that is fit for children. When we don't, we end up with the dying planet and kids who are eating junk food and getting sick and not thriving and feeling like they can't find a place for themselves in the world. It's putting kids first and their well being, and by doing that, everything will fall in place exactly. So sometimes we get like blinders even when we're working. Oh, it's all about the soil health, it's all about legislation, it's all about education, it's all about mental health. Now, it's all about all of these things because they all are integrated and they're all interdependent. And that's the child honoring philosophy, understanding that it's not just one issue, but it's all of the above. I mean it it's where, Yeah, I'm just taking a moment to absorb all this. It's a lot. If I sound hesitant, it's not that I disagree with the one aspect of this philosophy or what it hopes to do, but like, how am I supposed to meet a tiny humans most basic needs twenty four hours a day while also considering how my every action impacts the world she's inheriting. I mean, from my vantage point, it's a lot for a new parent to take in because you're talking about humongous systemic issues. Because I have to admit, doctor, I started when we knew we were having a child. I jumped in. I was I was reading so much and then you have a child, and you become a zombie for about three months, and then you crawl out. You you come out of the thaw, and then you no longer have time to read or understand anything. How do I take this in? Where do I step in? Help me out here? That's a really really good question. Ironically, in the effort to curate that perfect bubble, sometimes parents are moving their kids away from what they need most. We want children's create civity to come from within, like go on a nature trail. It's free, there's nothing better, you know. But at the end of the day, what your child needs from you is your love and your time, and everything else is optional. I love allowing that space for leniency because so many of his philosophies are incredible in theory, but in practical application are they even possible? Right? So, I think the idea is they're aspirational, but we do what is healthiest for the family system. I don't know if we have a system. It's more of a putting out fires than saving the world kind of thing. Honestly, we're just trying to make it to bedtime. And my parents didn't have much of a system either. As I've said before, or they both had difficult upbringings, lived under an oppressive regime, and as immigrants moved to an unfamiliar country where they didn't speak the language or have much support. One of the unintended consequences that affected how they raised me was anxiety. For example, my parents food insecurity growing up poor in Cuba translated to over feeding me and rushing through meal times. I still eat like the secret police is going to take my plate away. And though I've been fortunate enough to not have to flee my homeland, I don't want to mirror my anxieties about the world directly onto Sunny. You know, while I have you here. Um I just something I think about a lot recently. I'm the first American born son of Cuban refugees, and um so one thing I think about a lot is inherited family trauma, generational trauma. As people talk about these days, how something that happened to, say, my great great grandpa, affects me today and how it may have affected my the rest of my family, either physically or emotionally or something like that. How do I avoid passing that trauma down to my daughter, to Sunny, I think a common mistake is for the pendulum to swing so far the other way, like, I'm not going to do it that way because that's you know, or I'm working from a place of fear, and so I'm going to do the diametric opposite, which is also not always the best way to go about it. So first is consciousness, so that we can think through our choices and how they affect us and what triggers us. And knowing that your daughter will carry less of that trauma and will have other opportunities because you are doing the work of trying to understand. Yeah, I don't know if anyone in my family's ever had almost the privilege to think about this. You know, they've they've just been trying to survive and then, um, you know these cycles they're vicious and they just almost automatically happen unless you take a moment to acknowledge it, become aware. Absolutely, I would agree with that. And you know, a conversation that Raphie and I had on more than one occasion was, you know the difference between being child centered and always putting child at the center of everything. You want to give your children to the best of your ability with the means at hand, living in this very imperfect world that we live in the best opportunity to meet their developmental needs. But at the same time, you don't want to raise a child who feels that they are at the center of the universe and only their needs matter. So part of being a child honoring parent is honoring yourself and honoring your needs and honoring your wellness so that children also grow up to understand that they are part of a family system. Well, dr, this has been so helpful. Um, should we just pencil in one of these for next week as well? And then uh, we could just make this a regular thing because it's just been so lovely and h yeah, thank you so much for talking to me today. You're very very welcome, and I can see with great clarity that you are a child honoring parent and that Sonny is very lucky to have you as a father. And it's been a pleasure. Um speaking with you. Has developing the child honoring philosophy been healing to you in a similar way, like do you feel like it allows you to kind of break the cycle of past traumas or hell part of you? Well, I imagine it has been that way for me. I think what child honoring has also given me is a window into the truth of how we live and how we become our true selves. It's like when you discover, you know, the foundational experience of what it feels to be human as being in those early years. Well, you want to shout it from the rooftops. You want to say, Hey, it's not just the university degree. In fact, more important, it's how we raise these impressionable, vulnerable, susceptible people. We just want to co create a world that doesn't inflict so much trauma. Honest children, that's what we want. We want to create a child honoring world, and that is my deepest passion. Next time, on Finding Raffie, we dive into how one family made sure their daughter was always seen and heard for who she really was. Their parenting journey is Raffie's philosophy come to life, radical, disruptive, and child rearing like few in the West have experienced. This is what child honoring really looks like. But does it work? My parents did this crazy thing. They sacrifice so much financially, emotionally, whatever, They made this amazing thing, and oh boy, I better turn out well I'm the one. As an example of look I turned out like this, so that means it works. Finding Raffie is a production of My Heart Radio and Fatherly in partnership with Rococo Punch. It's produced by Catherine Findalosa, Meredith Hanig, and James Trout. Production assistance from Charlotte Livingston. Alex French is our story consultant. Our senior producer is Andrea swahe Emily Forman is our editor. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Raphae's music is courtesy of Troubadour Music Special thanks to Kim Layton at Troubadour. Our executive producers are Jessica Albert and John parad at Rococo Punch, Ty Trimble, Mike Rothman and Jeff Eisenman at Fatherly and Me Chris Garcia thank you for listening.
Speaker 1: When the vision itself came to me was the culmination of an accumulation of learnings over my lifetime. You might say, at first, I thought, why am I being given this vision? Surely there are others more worthy of being burdened with the gift of child honoring as a philosophy. I'm Chris Garcia, and this is Finding Raffie, a ten part series from My Heart Radio and Fatherly in partnership with The Rococo Punch about the life, philosophy, and the work of Raffie, the man behind the music. One morning in Raphie says he woke up from a deep sleep with a vision two words suspended in mid air, char honoring. I knew in that luminous moment that I was being given something that would be the work of the rest of my life. I knew in that moment that it was a unique social change revolution that connects personal, culture and planet, an integrated philosophy for restoring communities and restoring the earth. Everything in Ralphie's mind seems to come down to child honoring. It came up over and over again in our conversations. Basically, it's his philosophy for saving the planet by putting children first. It eventually became a book and an online course, and Ralphie was selling it to me pretty hard and one way you can deepen your connection with the beautiful words that you might read and wonder how might I practice this in my own family, as you would take the online course in child hon ring that my Raffie Foundation offers for a very reasonable price. On my dad, I took the bait. Raphie's philosophy covers a lot. He asked us to consider so many different concepts with children in mind, from the way we grow our food to how we measure economic progress. He paints a picture of a utopian world full of farmers, markets, parents volunteering with their kids, and pesticide free parks. I found it hard to know where I'm supposed to step in, both as a person and as a parent. See and reading it, it made me think a lot about privilege, because it's there's so much pressure on parents to make sure they're doing everything just perfectly, reading the right books, having the right toys. But at the end of the day, it's about survival and love, and not everyone has the means to curate the perfect bubble for their child. There's no such thing as perfect parenting. So let's just put that out of our minds. All parents, in their various situations, sum are having a tough time month after month making ends meet. You know. Everybody's got different pressures, different challenges, and also different rewards, you know, but we're all doing our best. And the point of conscious parenting is to be conscious of how we are parenting, how we were parented, what that instilled in us that might be passed on to our children. So it's a call to conscious living. Raphae's child honoring vision might sound a little esoteric, but I have to give the guy credit. He knows when and who to ask for help. He called up the top thinkers and environmental health education, business, in psychology, you name it, to test his ideas and shape his philosophy. I would like to think that before I met Rafiel, I was doing child honoring work. This is Dr Sharna Olfman, a Canadian expat living in Pittsburgh. She co wrote Raphael's Child Honoring book and happens to be a leading expert in developmental psychology. One of the many reasons I'm excited to talk to you um today is because you're an expert in all of this and I am a sponge that wants to soak in all this knowledge with you. Well, I want to be really clear that the child honoring philosophy is Raphael's philosophy, but we're part of this community. The solutions require the work and the ideas of people in many, many different professions. In her book series called Childhood in America, Sharna writes about some controversial educational reforms that she believed were harming our children, and Raffie was all about it. What were you trying to communicate to the world at that time? There were kind of a confluence events that led to the creation of that book, So maybe it would help to unpack that a little bit. If you were in preschool in the nineties, you most likely spent your days playing with ghak and sitting on a carpet square singing Barney songs. It was pretty chill. Playtime was the popular curriculum. Then flash forwards two thousand and two, Former President George W. Bush had just passed the highly criticized No Child Left Behind Act, and suddenly schools became very test driven, meaning preschool kids spent more time sitting at their desk taking tests than they did outside learning how to play. As a clinical psychologist, I was aware of this very big up surge in the number of children who are being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and who are also being prescribed stimulants. So there were like one in ten kids being prescribed riddle in there are these kind of formal preschool settings, and also there was this uptick in play getting translated to screen time. At the time, my son had just lost a person that was very, very important to him, and it was a very very traumatic event for my son. So I'm looking at all of these different trends and I'm thinking about my child, and I'm thinking that these preschool settings don't feel right for him. This was how I felt as a parent, but it is also how I felt as a developmental psychologist. If you take a bunch of kids and you sit them at desks when they're meant to be playing creatively, and then you know they spend their leisure time in front of screens, it's going to create some developmental issues. I look back and I think about my childhood and I was a very energetic boy that sat in a desk in a Catholic school all day and then watched TV at night, and I think my teachers and then my parents thought that I was just a bad student or incapable of learning. I ended up going to UC Berkeley, one of the best colleges in the world, but I stumbled out of the gates because I don't think I was meant to sit in a chair and then watch The Simpsons all night. Afterwards, in my own head, I almost saw myself as a bad student, even though I wasn't, because I just couldn't participate in that environment absolutely, And then those labels risks sort of becoming self fulfilling prophecies. You know. The the issue isn't that you can't get there from a lesson optimal beginning, but why make it so hard? Um? Should I be paying you for this session? And is this become a therapy session? Now? I feel like I feel so much. I'm like, you're right, and you know it wasn't my fault and if only that would have happened, I figured it out, But you know I shouldn't. I shouldn't have had to. Um. Can you tell me about the first time you met Raffie? So you know, Raffie heard about my work and Ralphie was kind enough to fly out to Pittsburgh and he uh met me at my home. At the time, Sharna's kids were six and nine years old, prime Raffie years. So when we finished our meeting, Raffie grabbed a banana from my kitchen, put it to his ear and his mouth like he was holding a banana phone from just like the cover art on his famous Banana Phone album, and he greeted the kids and he talked to them through the banana. It was just a really wonderful a first meeting, and my kids just were enthralled. Ring ring ring, ring, ring ring ring. Banana phone Ying Yang Yin Yang Yin Yang ying yan fool. It's a real live mama and Papa phone, a brother and sister and a doga phone, a grandpa phone, and a Granma phone to oh yeah, my cell learn Ralph he saw something in Sharna's work that he'd been trying to articulate for the last several years. How we treat our children is the key to building a sustainable world. A few months after their first meeting, Ralfie flies Sharna, her husband Dan, and their two young children out to his home on a small island off the coast of Vancouver, and I like to say we were living the child honoring life. You know, it really was a beautiful, idyllic two weeks. Main Island is this beautiful island off the coast of British Columbia, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean. We timed the visit to coincide with this amazing nature camp that was taking place that my kids were able to participate in. And it was such a magical camp, wooded, beautiful, and the kids spent all day every day in nature, tramping around the woods, splashing around in the ocean, collecting shells, and putting on little plays, et cetera. Evenings, he would often join us for dinner and we would spend hours talking about how how to make the world a better place for children. I think that Ralphie took me more deeply into my awareness of you know, issues like global warming and soil health, etcetera. Yeah, it was absolutely a pivotal experience for me, and it was just a wonderful way to kind of launch the work that we did together over the course of the next couple of years bringing the book to fruition. What would you say is was the vision or the goal for this book. So the Child Honoring Philosophy is both profound and elegant, I would say, in its simplicity. But I would say that probably the first impulse for Rafie in creating The Child Honoring Philosophy was his concern about the health the physical planet. You know, his concern about global warming, his concern about water, air, soil. You know, at the core, we're literally killing our children's home, We're killing their planet. And if we want to turn this ship around and we want to create a healthy planet and a healthy world, not in which children can survive, but in which they can fully thrive and fully self actualize, then all of us need to lead with the question is what I'm doing, what I'm saying, how I'm acting in the best interests of the young child. So I would like to say that the child Honoring Philosophy could also be thought of as a value. When we lead with that value, then we create a world that is fit for children. When we don't, we end up with the dying planet and kids who are eating junk food and getting sick and not thriving and feeling like they can't find a place for themselves in the world. It's putting kids first and their well being, and by doing that, everything will fall in place exactly. So sometimes we get like blinders even when we're working. Oh, it's all about the soil health, it's all about legislation, it's all about education, it's all about mental health. Now, it's all about all of these things because they all are integrated and they're all interdependent. And that's the child honoring philosophy, understanding that it's not just one issue, but it's all of the above. I mean it it's where, Yeah, I'm just taking a moment to absorb all this. It's a lot. If I sound hesitant, it's not that I disagree with the one aspect of this philosophy or what it hopes to do, but like, how am I supposed to meet a tiny humans most basic needs twenty four hours a day while also considering how my every action impacts the world she's inheriting. I mean, from my vantage point, it's a lot for a new parent to take in because you're talking about humongous systemic issues. Because I have to admit, doctor, I started when we knew we were having a child. I jumped in. I was I was reading so much and then you have a child, and you become a zombie for about three months, and then you crawl out. You you come out of the thaw, and then you no longer have time to read or understand anything. How do I take this in? Where do I step in? Help me out here? That's a really really good question. Ironically, in the effort to curate that perfect bubble, sometimes parents are moving their kids away from what they need most. We want children's create civity to come from within, like go on a nature trail. It's free, there's nothing better, you know. But at the end of the day, what your child needs from you is your love and your time, and everything else is optional. I love allowing that space for leniency because so many of his philosophies are incredible in theory, but in practical application are they even possible? Right? So, I think the idea is they're aspirational, but we do what is healthiest for the family system. I don't know if we have a system. It's more of a putting out fires than saving the world kind of thing. Honestly, we're just trying to make it to bedtime. And my parents didn't have much of a system either. As I've said before, or they both had difficult upbringings, lived under an oppressive regime, and as immigrants moved to an unfamiliar country where they didn't speak the language or have much support. One of the unintended consequences that affected how they raised me was anxiety. For example, my parents food insecurity growing up poor in Cuba translated to over feeding me and rushing through meal times. I still eat like the secret police is going to take my plate away. And though I've been fortunate enough to not have to flee my homeland, I don't want to mirror my anxieties about the world directly onto Sunny. You know, while I have you here. Um I just something I think about a lot recently. I'm the first American born son of Cuban refugees, and um so one thing I think about a lot is inherited family trauma, generational trauma. As people talk about these days, how something that happened to, say, my great great grandpa, affects me today and how it may have affected my the rest of my family, either physically or emotionally or something like that. How do I avoid passing that trauma down to my daughter, to Sunny, I think a common mistake is for the pendulum to swing so far the other way, like, I'm not going to do it that way because that's you know, or I'm working from a place of fear, and so I'm going to do the diametric opposite, which is also not always the best way to go about it. So first is consciousness, so that we can think through our choices and how they affect us and what triggers us. And knowing that your daughter will carry less of that trauma and will have other opportunities because you are doing the work of trying to understand. Yeah, I don't know if anyone in my family's ever had almost the privilege to think about this. You know, they've they've just been trying to survive and then, um, you know these cycles they're vicious and they just almost automatically happen unless you take a moment to acknowledge it, become aware. Absolutely, I would agree with that. And you know, a conversation that Raphie and I had on more than one occasion was, you know the difference between being child centered and always putting child at the center of everything. You want to give your children to the best of your ability with the means at hand, living in this very imperfect world that we live in the best opportunity to meet their developmental needs. But at the same time, you don't want to raise a child who feels that they are at the center of the universe and only their needs matter. So part of being a child honoring parent is honoring yourself and honoring your needs and honoring your wellness so that children also grow up to understand that they are part of a family system. Well, dr, this has been so helpful. Um, should we just pencil in one of these for next week as well? And then uh, we could just make this a regular thing because it's just been so lovely and h yeah, thank you so much for talking to me today. You're very very welcome, and I can see with great clarity that you are a child honoring parent and that Sonny is very lucky to have you as a father. And it's been a pleasure. Um speaking with you. Has developing the child honoring philosophy been healing to you in a similar way, like do you feel like it allows you to kind of break the cycle of past traumas or hell part of you? Well, I imagine it has been that way for me. I think what child honoring has also given me is a window into the truth of how we live and how we become our true selves. It's like when you discover, you know, the foundational experience of what it feels to be human as being in those early years. Well, you want to shout it from the rooftops. You want to say, Hey, it's not just the university degree. In fact, more important, it's how we raise these impressionable, vulnerable, susceptible people. We just want to co create a world that doesn't inflict so much trauma. Honest children, that's what we want. We want to create a child honoring world, and that is my deepest passion. Next time, on Finding Raffie, we dive into how one family made sure their daughter was always seen and heard for who she really was. Their parenting journey is Raffie's philosophy come to life, radical, disruptive, and child rearing like few in the West have experienced. This is what child honoring really looks like. But does it work? My parents did this crazy thing. They sacrifice so much financially, emotionally, whatever, They made this amazing thing, and oh boy, I better turn out well I'm the one. As an example of look I turned out like this, so that means it works. Finding Raffie is a production of My Heart Radio and Fatherly in partnership with Rococo Punch. It's produced by Catherine Findalosa, Meredith Hanig, and James Trout. Production assistance from Charlotte Livingston. Alex French is our story consultant. Our senior producer is Andrea swahe Emily Forman is our editor. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Raphae's music is courtesy of Troubadour Music Special thanks to Kim Layton at Troubadour. Our executive producers are Jessica Albert and John parad at Rococo Punch, Ty Trimble, Mike Rothman and Jeff Eisenman at Fatherly and Me Chris Garcia thank you for listening.
