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Bridget Barrus: Welcome to the Be Solid Learning Podcast, where we help parents build the skills, confidence, and perspective to raise capable kids and strengthen our families. I'm Bridget Barris, and through the Solid Principles, we'll explore what our kids need to grow and what we as parents may need to learn, practice, or change right alongside them. With practical tools, real conversations, and a little courage, we can build more capable kids, more confident parents, and stronger families. Let's get started. I want to start out today by asking a question. If I asked you right now to describe the adult you hope your child becomes someday, what would you say? Now don't think about what they'll do. Don't think about where they'll go to school or what career they'll choose or whether they'll make the team or get the scholarship or have some impressive title. I want you to think about the person. And maybe you hope they'll be kind or responsible, confident, or humble. Maybe someone who can handle disappoint disappointment without falling apart completely. Someone who can make a mistake and say, that was me, I need to fix it. Someone who knows how to build and maintain healthy relationships or who can make a hard decision when you're not standing there telling them what to do. Someone who knows what matters to them and can do hard things, and ideally, someone who eventually calls their mom just because they want to talk, not because they need money. I mean, we're allowed to dream, right? But really think about your list. Because I'd be willing to bet that most of the things that matter on that list are not accomplishments. They're qualities and skills and character and ways of handling life. And that leads to a question I've spent a lot of time thinking about. How exactly do kids develop these things? Most of us have really great intentions for our children. We love them, we want good things for them, we want to raise capable, decent human beings. But good intentions aren't a developmental plan. And that is really where B-Solid Learning begins. I want to give credit to parents. I don't think most of us wake up thinking, you know what, today I'd really like to screw my child up. No, we're trying. Actually, sometimes I think we're trying ourselves into exhaustion. We read books and we listen to podcasts, we follow parenting accounts. We ask friends and goodness we Google things late at night that we probably would never admit to Googling during daylight hours. Is this normal? Why does my teenager hate me? How many times do you have to tell a child to put on their shoes? And apparently the answer to that question is infinitely. And there's so much parenting advice, so much noise. Connect more, but set better boundaries. Give them independence, but don't give them too much. Let them experience consequences, but make sure they know you're there for them. Validate feelings, but don't let feelings run the house. Don't rescue, but don't withdraw support. It's back and forth and back and forth. And honestly, a lot of that advice is good. But the problem is that parenting advice often sounds considerably easier at 9 30 at night when you're reading about it peacefully than it does at 7 12 the next morning. Because at 7 12, somebody can't find their shoe and someone else has just informed you that they need a poster board for class today. And another child is furious with another child because man, they looked at them wrong. And you're just trying to remember whether or not anybody fed the dog. And suddenly you're not asking yourself, geez, what developmental capacity am I hoping to strengthen in my child in this moment? No. You're yelling at everybody to get in the car. And that's real family life. And that's the family life I'm interested in talking about here. Now I've spent much of my professional life working with children and families. I've worked in social work and education and school counseling, and I care deeply about child development and research and understanding what actually helps people grow. And at my core, I'm also a mom and I've raised a very large family. So I have the professional version of child development, and then I have the version where I'm standing in my own kitchen thinking, well, that did not go the way I learned about it in graduate school. I've understood emotional regulation professionally and clinically, and still became dysregulated because somebody else was dysregulated, which is extremely helpful, right? Because now there are two dysregulated people. Great. And over the years, those two worlds, my professional practice and my actual family life, have convinced me of something. Families and parents don't need more information, nearly as much as they need help turning good information into real life skills. Because knowing something isn't the same as being able to live it, especially in real time. So think for a moment about how we intentionally approach academic development. We don't send a five-year-old to school and say, good luck with reading, hopefully you pick it up somewhere. No. We teach skills, we practice them, we build on them. And when a child struggles, we ask questions like what do they understand? What's missing? What support do they need? What do we teach next? Now Think about some of the other things kids need to learn. Like what do I feel? How am I feeling? What do I do when I'm overwhelmed? How do I focus when something isn't interesting? How do I make a good choice or even recognize a good choice from a bad choice? How do I repair something after I mess up? How do I communicate with someone who sees things differently? How do I keep going when something is uncomfortable or unfair? How do I recover when I fail or figure out what I value and what I'm becoming? Who I'm becoming. Now, those aren't bonus skills, those are human development skills. And with a lot of them, our plan is basically hopefully you figure it out. Because kids absolutely learn
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through family life and school and friendships and sports and church and community experiences and all these things we put them in. But there's a difference between simply having experiences and learning to notice, understand, practice, and strengthen skills through those experiences. And that's the gap BeSolid is interested in. So let's take something ordinary, like your child lies. This has happened in my home. Our immediate reaction is understandably, how do I get this kid to stop lying? Because this is not okay, which is a fair question, because the behavior matters. But let's ask ourselves another question. What needs to develop here? Let's get curious. Maybe it's honesty. Maybe it's courage. Because telling the truth when you know you're going to face a consequence takes courage. Maybe it's accountability, or maybe it's the ability to tolerate disappointing someone. Maybe the child needs to learn I made this choice, it belongs to me, and I'm going to own what happens next. You see, now we've moved simply from eliminating a problem or troublesome behavior to developing a person. And perhaps underneath all of this is something else that matters. Understanding behavior does not mean excusing behavior. Compassion and accountability are not opposites. They can exist in the same space. So as a parent, I can understand why you did something and still expect you to own what you did. As a parent, I can recognize that you're overwhelmed and still expect respectful communication. I can understand that you're angry and still tell you that hitting is not okay. And I can recognize that something is hard without immediately removing the hard thing. Here's another thing nobody adequately warned me about. Our children develop us too. Sometimes quite aggressively, if we're being honest. Because if patience is an area where you need growth, don't worry, a child will be provided. And perhaps one who takes 18 minutes to put on socks or can't find their shoe at 7 12 in the morning, right? Now if control is your issue, congratulations. Adolescence is coming. And if emotional regulation is something you'd like to work on, well, eventually someone will roll their eyes at you while you're explaining. Emotional regulation. See, parenting has an incredible way of showing us ourselves, usually the things we like the least. And that's why Be Solid isn't built around this idea that the child is the project, because they're not. Children grow, parents grow, families grow. Now, adults still lead. We create structure and boundaries and expectations, but we also recognize we're developing too. And sometimes the question becomes, or isn't, how do I get my child to stop doing this? It's what's actually happening here, what skill is developing for them and for me, what belongs to them, what belongs to me. And maybe my child does need to stop and develop a skill. Or maybe I need to respond differently in this situation. Or maybe our family has fallen into a pattern that's reinforcing the problem. And it can be all three true at the same time. So over time I kept coming back to these five principles that I wanted my children to learn. And they became the basis of solid S-O-L-I-D. The first is to see clearly. Notice what's actually happening. Notice what's actually happening. inside of ourselves, inside of our relationships, around us before rushing to react. The second is to own our choices. Own our choices. Not everything happens, ⁓ not everything that happens belongs to us. ⁓ our choices do, but not everything else. The next is to live courageously. Try. Tell the truth. Face hard things, tolerate discomfort, keep going when something matters, be gritty and resilient. I is invest in relationships. Listen, communicate, show up, repair, recognize that other people matter too, and so do their experiences, and get off of your device. And the D is for daily growth because none of this happens once. We practice, we mess it up, we reflect, we repair, we try again. That's solid. Not perfect, but solid. There are several big areas developing in children as they grow. They're learning to understand. They're learning to develop self regulation and executive functioning skills. They're learning agency and responsibility. They're learning how to understand and relate to other people. They're building resilience and grit and competence, and they're developing character and values and a sense of purpose. And those things develop over years, and development is messy. Because kids can demonstrate a skill really beautifully on a Tuesday and apparently have never even heard of it by Thursday. Adults do that too. I have I'm guilty. But that's why I'm much more interested in growth over time than perfect performance in one moment. And that's what this podcast will be about. We're gonna talk about how all those things work together. Not the 17 reasons you're parenting wrong, because you can go find that on the internet. But instead, we're gonna have longer family conversations where we explore the interesting questions underneath family life. We'll have solid intent, which is we're gonna take one real life family problem, one useful perspective, and one practical thing you can try. We'll have Ask Be Solid, where we'll take real questions from parents and talk through what might be happening and what you can actually do. We'll bring in guests, we'll talk about research, sure, we'll talk about school and friendships and relationships and identity and responsibility and the weird things that happen when human beings try to live together as a family. And yes, this podcast is part of something larger called Be Solid Learning, but you do not need to participate in BeSolid Learning to get value here. This podcast should stand completely on its own. I want you to leave thinking every time you listen that we helped you see something differently. And maybe you'll also leave with one thing to try in your family, because that's enough. So I'm not ending with a giant assignment. I'm just gonna ask one more question. If your children learned how to live primarily by watching your family today, what would they learn? What would they learn about mistakes and emotions and responsibility and hard things and what matters and how people treat one another? Now don't use that question as a weapon against yourself. I know I have. But notice what's already good. Because I am confident that there are things your family already does beautifully. Notice those things. Celebrate those things. And then maybe there's one area where you think, yeah, we could grow there. Great. Let's start there. Not everywhere, but right there. You don't have to transform your entire family today. You just have to be willing to keep growing. Now remember, strong families aren't built in a day. They're built one choice, one conversation, one ordinary moment at a time. So stay grounded, keep growing, and be solid. Thanks for spending this time with me on the Be Solid Learning Podcast. Take what was helpful today and put it into practice. But remember, practice means progress, not perfection. And when it doesn't go the way you hoped, give yourself a little grace, learn from it, and try again. Here's to more capable kids, more confident parents, and stronger families. I'll see you next time.