The Whole Parent Podcast

Managing the Dreaded Transitions... #51

• Jon Fogel - WholeParent

Share episode

In this episode, Jon digs into the real reason transitions feel so “impossible” for kids — not because they’re being dramatic, but because shifting out of a moment they love can feel like a genuine shock to their system. Through stories, neuroscience, and deeply relatable parent questions, he explores why task-switching is so hard for developing brains and how a “satisfying end” can change everything. Listeners walk away with clarity, compassion, and concrete ways to support their child through the chaotic in-between moments without power struggles or guilt.

To support the Podcast, Subscribe on Substack

Send us a text

Support the show

Jon @WholeParent:

If you've ever tried to get your child out the door, off the playground, into the car, or just simply from point A to point B, only to be met with a tantrum or a shutdown or a full body. No, you're in the right place. Because today we are talking about something that almost every parent struggles with, why even the simplest transitions can feel impossible for kids. And why it's not about defiance or drama or knowing better. In this episode, we're talking about exactly what's happening inside your child's brain and body when you ask them to make that shift. We're going to be looking at real neuroscience of tasks switching, the emotional cost of leaving a moment that they love, and the hidden hurdles that transitions present for kids and honestly for us adults too. And by the end of today's conversation, you'll know exactly how to support your child through these chaotic in-between moments without power struggles, guilt, or giving in. Let's get into it. So I often start these episodes with kind of an anecdote for my life, and I could give you a million anecdotes with transitions. Actually, today I will give you one. I was trying to get all of my kids out the door to go out to dinner and to the library. This was only three hours ago now, when I'm recording this. And I can tell you that even that little act, I was like, man, I don't know how I'm going to do this because all of them had just been on screens. And so I knew that dysregulation was like a guaranteed. And so I was literally talking to my wife about this. Like, okay, do we just kind of like put their shoes on and their coats on when they're not paying attention and then just kind of usher them out the door? Or what do we do? Because I knew there's a very high chance that we're going to have a huge meltdown here. And luckily, I was thinking about this episode because I knew I was going to record it tonight, and I did one of the emotional regulation games. Um, we did Penguins Attention and it just kind of got them all into the mode of moving the right way. And then uh totally went off the rails because my kids found a plastic bag full of lollipops. And I don't know why it was where it was. Actually, I do know I know exactly why it was where it was. It was because I just left it there. It had come out of one of the cars during clean out. They had gotten them, I don't know, where, probably somewhere in the last couple of weeks as they do holiday stuff, and they had found these lollipops and then they were like, We want the lollipops, and all of the dysregulation came back on board. And I am not ashamed to say I definitely gave every single one of them a lollipop because it was way easier than fighting that power struggle in that moment with everything else that was going on. Boots were already on, coats were already on, and the only thing that I said was, Hey, uh, let's let's not make this ruin our dinner. Thankfully, it didn't. That's kind of a myth. One little lollipop's probably not going to totally destroy your life. And so if you need that permission today to not fight the battle, you have it from me. Do not fight the battle. But what I really wanted to start the episode with, actually, was this idea that every parent struggles with transitions. I have a quiz that I put out, I don't know, probably two and a half years now, maybe two years ago. And it's how to know if your kid is highly sensitive. And this is kind of relevant because it kind of directly ties into what I was talking about at the end of the last podcast episode with question number three. And that kid was, in my mind, displaying a lot of tendencies that were kind of typical high sensitivity things. Well, struggling with transitions is one of those things. And I marked on that quiz, anybody who filled out that quiz and put in their email, I marked how what percentage of those people answered that question. Does your child struggle with transitions? And you might be surprised, maybe you're not surprised. I was surprised that over 70% of the parents who filled out that questionnaire is your child highly sensitive. And this is thousands of parents, by the way. Over 70% of them, I think it was like 73% of them, marked that their child struggled with transitions. So if you feel like you're alone in this, I just want you to say, just want you to know that you're not alone. And in fact, one of my early questions about how to manage transitions came from none other than a parenting influencer on TikTok. I don't have that one as one of my questions today, but literally one of the early things that happened to me when I was first starting out on TikTok, when I was first giving parenting advice, is that another parenting influencer reached out and said, Okay, John, I'm supposed to be this like parenting guru, but I can't get my kid off of the playground. That's where that line off the park comes from. I cannot get my kid to leave the playground ever. And I walked her through a lot of the stuff I'm gonna talk about in this episode, and she was like, Man, this has totally changed changed my relationship with her. It has like completely reshaped my experience of going to the park with my daughter. I used to dread it because I knew the end would be so brutal. And now I'm like, it's no big deal because we can manage that transition together. So I want to jump into the questions and I want to kind of touch along things along the way. But the main thing for her, and I'll I remember this still, and I'll talk about it a little bit as we as we go, was that there had been a neural pathway built up for that child that every single time that we left the park, there was a meltdown. And that was just neurons that fire together, wire together. That's Heb's law. It's a basic neuroscience principle that uh basically we are conditionable as people, as human beings, that we can be can grow into patterns and habits of every single time we leave the park, I have a meltdown or whatever. So, with all that said, if you find yourself in really, really struggling with tradition with traditions, with transitions, as you can see, holidays are on the brain. If you're struggling with transitions, one, you're not alone. 70 plus percent of the people who have filled out my quiz where I ask about that have said, yes, my kid struggles with transitions. Two, even the parenting experts out there, the people who are giving advice, often don't know how to do this. And three, I'm guessing that probably in the midst of this episode, you might realize, oh, I have allowed, and this is not your fault. Again, this isn't this is just what it is, and we can work through it, but I have probably allowed for a pretty negative association with transitions to be built. So without do any further ado and no more gilding of the lily, let's go to the question from Maddie R from Instagram. It is a direct message that I was sent, and it says, Okay, John, I'm losing it over here. My four-year-old absolutely falls apart anytime we have to stop something. Like we left the playground yesterday, and she literally screamed the whole walk home saying, You ruined my game. Sounds exactly like that kid from a couple years ago. And I'm standing there just like, it's time to go. I don't get why leaving the park hits her like a truck, even though I gave her a five-minute warning. I feel like other kids don't freak like this. So, first and foremost, Maddie, what did I just say? I want to repeat this again. Other kids do freak like this. This is a totally normal developmental thing for a four-year-old to do. It's a normal developmental thing for a five-year-old to do, even a six-year-old to do. I also want to highlight here that you did the right thing in giving the five-minute warning. What I will say about that is just as we talked about yesterday in the episode that was about um just struggling with waiting, kids have a really warped sense of time. And so, five minutes to a kid, they're they're not actually internalizing that. So, what I prefer to do with kids is to say, okay, here's a 10-minute warning or a five-minute warning or whatever, and then here's a two-minute warning, and then here's a one-minute warning. You don't have to do the one-minute warning. You can do just five minutes and one minute, or five minutes and two minutes, you don't have to do all of them, but a more closer to the time to go. And then the last sentence is not okay, it's time to leave. It's okay, it's time to do our last thing on the way out. And I think this would have helped you remove that you ruining the game thing. And by the way, you didn't ruin the game. Games end on their own terms. Sometimes they end because people have to go home because the streetlights go on, or whatever, if it's you know, the 1990s, or it games end because somebody has to go home from the park, or somebody gets hurt, or somebody wants to stop playing. You didn't ruin the game. Don't internalize that. It was just time to go, and you were holding a boundary, and that's an okay boundary to hold. It's a good boundary to hold. So the only little tweak I would make to that whole thing is saying, okay, five-minute warning, add a second warning on top of that, at two minutes or one minute, or whatever. And then I would say, okay, we have to do one more thing. We have to finish what we're doing before we go. And this creates a literal in your child's brain, a conclusion. It's like it's a satisfying conclusion. Imagine watching an episode of a sitcom or maybe reading a book, and you don't get to see the ending. Like the ending stops. You're on an airplane. I had this experience not too long ago. I was on a f on a flight. It was an international flight. I guess it was a long time ago because it's been decades since I've flown internationally. But I was on a flight and we're uh was one of those where you can pick the movie that you want to watch on the screen in front of you. I don't even know if they still do that, or if they just like have you hook up to in-flight Wi-Fi now. But you could watch all these different movies, and and there was a lot of movies on there that I hadn't seen. And you could pick your own and you could start where you know your movie whenever you wanted. So it was kind of an individualized media device on the seat in front of you. But when the plane started to land, when it started descending or whatever, going in, I don't even remember where exactly we were when this was happening, but when it starts to descend, they would shut the movie off. And I had this experience of like we're watching this movie, and like we got kicked out of it before the movie ended. You know what it was recently? Now that I'm remembering this, it was like we had got hooked up to the Wi-Fi and and we got kicked out. Anyway, I this is my tangent, but I'll tell you whatever that movie was that I was watching, uh it felt pretty infuriating to not have it come to a satisfying conclusion because I had been booted out of it right as the plane was coming down. And so remember that that's what it's like for your child who's kind of in these really beautiful play state. And play for kids is like flow state. It's it's where they do their most learning, it's where they do their most development. Uh, kids don't get nearly enough play already, not to seeing your child, Maddie, but all children don't get enough play because there's literally no limit to the amount of play a child should have. They should have more play. If you think you're giving your child enough play, just know that with more play, they do even better. And so, with that all being said, it can feel literally like a micro crisis in their brain. It can trigger the exact same neural response as they're like a threat to their system. It's it's like a mini emergency that they experience. And so when we then come in and say, it's no big deal, come on, like I told you a five-minute warning, or or you know, it's it's just the park, we're gonna come back tomorrow, whatever. That actually invalidates that experience and it kind of pours gasoline on that fire. So the better thing to do, first and foremost, is to say, okay, do one more thing, give that experience a bookend. And this is the same, by the way, if you're transitioning a kid off of a tablet or something like that, give that kid a bookend. That'll help them a lot. So that's the first piece. And then two, I would, you know, have given those additional warnings before that. Three, I would try and validate the experience that, yeah, I know it's frustrating when we have to leave the park. It just kind of gives voice and language to that experience that they're having. If we say it's not a big deal, stop being, you know, so whiny about it, which by the way, I have totally said that. I have totally been in that place. Uh, if we do that, then our kid is just gonna go, no, I don't think you understand how big of a deal it is. And then, you know, then we can start to move off of that like process and move into something else. But the last tip that I'll give you, and I think this is a good place to put this in the episode, there may be uh another, you know, time where this is important as well, and I'll reference it again. But this is a good place to use one of the emotional regulation games if that satisfying end doesn't land. I I'll tell you, for a lot of kids, like for example, this influencer mom two years ago, she I think it was maybe three years ago, I'm just thinking back on this. She actually said that simply telling her daughter, do that one last thing. Do you want to go down the slide as the last thing? She'd often give her a choice. Do you want to go to the slide for a last thing, or do you want to go on the merry-go-rend for the last thing or whatever? And whatever her daughter decided, then it felt like a satisfying end, and then she'd go running off to the car. What we don't want to do is kind of do the opposite thing, which is saying, All right, car's leaving. Like you've heard people do that as well. But that satisfying end can really solve the problem. But if it doesn't, you can use one of the emotional regulation games. And if you have not been following on social media on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, I've been putting out daily emotional regulation games for the 20 first 25 days of December. You can feel free to use any of those. You can also get my top five emotional regulation games in the show notes below. I link those to all of the podcast episodes. It's just a freebie, it's a PDF that you can download. Or you can buy my full emotional regulation game guide, which is uh 19 of my, or not 19, which is$19. It's 25 of my best games. And by the way, my wife illustrated that. She's an illustrator, and it's a really, really cool resource. And so if you want all of your my emotional regulation games in your pocket, you can get that as well. But I would pull out one of those emotional regulation games, even if it's just one of the free ones that you found on TikTok or whatever, or if it's one or Instagram, this was an Instagram DM, or if you download the free five, I would use one of those in those moments because that can be a real lifesaver. Okay, so that's what I have for that one, Maddie. I think that you can build some neural pathways. And I and I will say, kind of as we continue to move through this episode, I'm gonna keep saying this, you've probably built up at this point a um a conditioned response that your daughter may feel like melting down every time she leaves the park because maybe the transition wasn't good for a couple times in a row. And then now she kind of goes into that fight or flight state of like, oh, I know what this is like. When mom says it's time to leave, it's always terrible. And I always have a meltdown in a tantrum. And so then she starts to go down that path. Until you break that with the emotional regulation game, with the other tips that I've given you, you're going to keep seeing the meltdowns no matter what you do. And that's because they're just kind of it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They anticipate that they're going to, and this is all subconscious, but they anticipate that they're going to have a meltdown. And then, of course, they do have a meltdown because they're anticipating it. Okay, my next one comes from Adam. It was an email in, and he says, My son is doing this thing lately where he totally shuts down. It's not really a meltdown. It's like he turns into a statue. When I say something like, it's time to get ready for school, he stares at me and at the or at the floor, and I'm just like, hello. I get mad because it seems like we're always late. Why does that one sentence stop his whole system? It's not even a big thing. I swear he was fine two seconds ago playing with Legos or whatever, and then nothing. Okay. So I kind of took this one and I said that this one was a transition problem, but Adam didn't really flame frame it. I guess he sort of did as a transition problem. He was more framing it of like, what do you do when your kid doesn't want to go to school and just freezes? It was in response to one of my school emails. I actually think this is a transition problem. And this is because kids' brains, especially six years old, seven years old, five years old, preschool, four years old, transitions actually cause a lot of like a shock to the brain. And the reason why I say that they cause a shock to the brain is because conscious attention is something that children struggle to intentionally put in one place or another. Their attention is drawn by whatever is novel or whatever is interesting to them in that moment, or usually whatever they're actively doing at that time. And so when what we're asking them to do is to get ready for school or anything else, leave the park again is a great example, or whatever transition it looks like. When we're asking them to do something, we're actually asking them neurologically to do this like rapid task switching, where it's like you were doing this thing and now you're going to go do this thing. And that's actually cognitive flexibility that kids really struggle to have. What happens is they're in, they're they're they're in what's called the default mode network, which is this kind of inward system where they're just kind of you know, going about their day, they're in flow state, they're daydreaming, whatever. They're just thinking about thinking they're just having they're they're in their own world. And then all of a sudden you kind of focus them into the executive mode network where they're they're they're fo forcing themselves to be task-oriented and do like executive functioning, the the necessary steps to get ready to go. And that kind of shocked their system, especially neurodivergent kids. I'm not saying your kids are neurodivergent, Adam, but all kids kind of have certain uh qualities that make them seem a little bit neurodivergent because neurodivergent adults struggle with executive functioning as do most children. And so that rapid switch between you turning off the default mode network and swapping over to cog conscious executive function functioning can can feel startling. And kids need like a beat to understand that. And so I don't know, and I'm maybe I'm kind of stepping too far into this question of what I'm seeing going on. I would ask clarifying questions if I could. But if you are in group coaching, the first question that I would ask you is how long do you wait when he is in that frozen earth to kid, you know, state that before you start to physically either you know move him into the next thing or you know, repeat yourself, hey, I said we gotta go. Because in that moment, he probably needs like three to five seconds just to process your request. And if he's actively engaging in something like Legos, which is the example that you gave, which is a very high-intensity play-based activity, which is they're very much so in flow state, you may have to physically put your hand on them to get their attention before you even give that request. Because what he might be doing when he's freezing in those moments is going, Oh, I know something's being asked of me, but my brain couldn't switch over to listening mode fast enough to actually even hear this stuff. And so, a better like thing to do in this case would be to intervene with kind of a micro step of moving them more out of that default mode network because. Because what you're at risk of is actually a huge meltdown. Because being pulled away from something that they're doing that's that's in flow state is absolutely feels like a survival threat. This is why I said in the last one that being told to leave the park can feel like a, you know, an emergency situation or it can send your kid into fight or flight. Same thing being told to stop doing something that they feel is adaptive. And by the way, when kids are playing with Legos creatively, they're learning. So you're you're pulling them away from what their body is trying to do in order to learn. And ironically, we pull them away so that we can send them to a place where probably less learning actually functionally happens. But I'm not going to get on my soapbox about that right now. And so instead, we have to figure out how we can give kind of like an intermediary step there because moving directly from this kind of high-intensity play, which I'm saying high intensity because of the neurological activity that's going on, not high intensity as in like active play. In some ways, active play is easier to transition away from than really, really rich default mode network, like you know, flow state play that can happen. So I would walk over and I would say, Hey, can you hold on to that Lego for me? And can you bring that Lego over here so that I can start to put your boots on or so that you can put the boots on, or to put your coat on, or to you know, get your can you bring your Lego over here? Because then it kind of brings together those activities. Like, oh, can we get your Lego character ready for school? Can we uh oh, can we put your Lego character in his home before we go to school? So now I'm I'm engaging with them at their place in their moment. And it's like that that you're you're kind of meeting them where they are and you're leading them out rather than kind of coming in with your own agenda and they have to kind of match your energy of where you're going. And this, by the way, is exactly the same hack that I say when we're transitioning a kid off of a tablet. I'm I'm I'm not here to say that kids should have tablets. I'm also here to say, like, I think no tablets is much better than any tablets, but I also am realistic in that most parents, their kid uses some sort of device, whether it's watching the TV or a tablet or even a phone, which I think is probably the worst of the of them because it's so mobile and they can kind of use it. And because they get used to using a parent's phone most likely when they're little, it just becomes a thing that we lean on more and more and more when we're out at dinner or whatever. And it doesn't become like a once-in-a-while thing, it becomes like a regular uh maladaptive coping mechanism for any emotional distress that our kid faces. But it when you're getting a kid off the tablet, the best thing you can do is sit down next to them and say, Oh, what are you doing? Show me what's going on. Oh, tell me what's going on in this show or show me what you're building in Minecraft or or whatever. Because just like that satisfying bookend, telling you what's going on actually snaps them out of their play state and they go into a different state of thinking and and reasoning, which is where they're explaining something to you. So when you're offering him that intermediary step of like moving with the Lego to the next place, you're meeting him where he is and you're leading him rather than you're just kind of barking orders and he's like a deer in the headlights because he's having trouble because his brain is underdeveloped with that rapid task switching from this to that. And I will say older kids tend to rapidly task switch more easily because they have a higher degree of anxiety for being late typically. They don't want to be late, and so they rapidly task switch as a coping mechanism, but that's not necessarily good either. So I would just say the more we can, and and also like I guess this is maybe a the more to go with that the morning episode that I did a while back, and that's why I was thinking about this question because I was gonna put it in that one. But that question when we were talking about mornings before, I said just leave yourself more time in the morning than you think you need. A lot of people can't do the micro step because they haven't left themselves enough time to do it. So that's what I would say. If you can leave yourself a little bit more time, you're gonna be a lot better off because then you can do the micro steps. You don't wind up freezing his system with you know a cortisol spike because you're telling him, hey, go do this right now. And he's like, Oh, I don't even know what you're saying. I just you just inter intervened with me, and I was in a completely different fantasy world. And so that that's that's how I would lead with that. And I got time for one more question, and so I'm gonna go to Alyssa. And this one came from uh the membership. I have it inside the membership. You can DM me. And so Alyssa said that I could share this one with you. She DM'd this one to me. I said, hey, she says, Hey, do you ever find that kids just uh sorry, do you ever feel like kids should just be more flexible? I swear my daughter loses it over the tiniest shift. I'm going like going from TV to dinner. Okay, so we just kind of talked about that a little bit. I'm sitting here thinking, life is full of transitions, kid. You're gonna have to learn this. But then I catch myself snapping when I'm answering work emails and someone asks me a question. So maybe I'm not exactly as good with the flow as I'd like to be either. LOL, it feels hypocritical, but also I genuinely don't know how to help her without just forcing it. Any thoughts on this at all? Uh Alyssa, my first thought is I am right with you. When somebody it interrupts me while I'm making one of my whole parent videos or responding to an email or recording the podcast, I snap all the time because I get into these modes of being in this flow state, of creating, of loving what I'm doing. And when you say you're not go with the flow, what I say, what I'm actually saying is you are in flow, right? It's not that you're not go with the flow, it's that you are flowing. And it's hard to move out of flowing into the other parts of life, like going to dinner or doing something boring. And so the first thing that I would say is kind of everything that I've said thus far, and maybe I should have saved my book and make a satisfying end to the thing now, but it's much easier for all of us to break from that when we have a satisfying end to what we're doing. And so this is where the thing with the kids interrupting, we talked about this a couple days ago. With kids interrupting, one of the things that we can do as kids interrupt is we can say, I need to finish this and then I want to listen to you, right? Same thing with a kid in flow state. We actually should allow them to tell us, hey, I need to finish what I'm doing here and then I'll go. This is why giving a five-minute warning can be helpful, because maybe you give your child a five-minute warning, and if they're actually able to pull themselves out of it enough, which, you know, I don't know how old your daughter is. I don't remember. I think I DM'd you and asked you why or what the age was, and then we went back and forth a little bit. But when you have a child who's a little bit older who can hear that five-minute warning, they might respond back with, I'm gonna need more than five minutes. And then we can say, okay, well, what stopping point can you get to in the next five minutes? How can we make this have a satisfying conclusion? And I think that it's really helpful to identify that you yourself struggle with this because as soon as I realized how hard it was for me to switch off of the tasks that I was deeply engrossed in. And again, we can use fancy terms here like hyperfixation. What we really mean is just the person is deeply engrossed in what they're doing. If we once we realize that we too struggle with that, we can start to be the people who enter that space with a degree of empathy. And we can, you know, do a regulation or a grounding exercise ourselves and use that in those moments to practice for them. And so what I would do with your daughter to increase flexibility is number one, I'd have a conversation after the fact. Hey, when we had to do this shift, that was really hard for you. Life has a lot of transitions. What are some things that we can do to transition? And immediately I'd follow that up with empathy of saying, you know, I struggle with empathy too. I struggle with empathy too. And I struggle with empathy. I struggle with transitions too. That is empathy. And here are some of the times when I struggle the most. And you can start to identify some of the things, right? Is it surprising that your daughter snaps right before dinner because when she's hungry? Of course not. We are more likely to snap and and not be able to be flexible when our basic needs are not met, when we're hungry, when we're tired. We have chronic stress in this country. We have chronic sleep deprivation, we have c chronic overstimulation from devices. And I agree that I'm probably a hypocrite for saying that because I put out a lot of content for you to be consuming. But I hope that the content that I put out actually helps you to slow down your life more than speed it up. And so adults are modeling all of this to our kids that this is just how we're supposed to be. And if you are modeling that you snap when you go off, then you also have to model how you can process through those things more effectively. You have to model the regulation techniques. And so I would go back to that game guide again and I'd go, okay, what grounding exercise from this can I appropriate for myself? Can I use myself so that in those moments I can come to a satisfying conclusion? And if I can't come to a satisfying conclusion, I can take some deep breaths, or I can blow a big bubble, or I can find colors around the room, or I can uh feel the proprioceptive input of the clothes on my skin and on my body, or I can push against the wall, I can do some heavy work, I can just do my stomping or my breathing or my, you know, in for a count of four, out for a count of five, like any of those things, intentional activities that you can do, I would practice those things. And I wouldn't even necessarily go on and on teaching and and you know, preaching a sermon to your kid lecturing about how they need to use these tools. I would focus on fixing my tools, fixing me and fixing my stuff. And I'll tell you that in my personal experience, when I stopped snapping at my kids because I did the regulation work to not snap over that type of stuff, very quickly, I saw the response that my kids stopped snapping as much at me. And so all of this was a roundabout way of saying everything we've said so far in this episode, but also modeling. Also, if if you're coming from this place where you're snapping, have that empathy drive you to doing the work yourself. You cannot do, you cannot ask your kid to do something that you're unwilling to do yourself. Like that's just unfair, and they don't even have a developed brain, and you do. And so if you think it's too hard to regulate your emotions when you're answering emails, or when you're hungry or tired, or you know, when you don't want to stop doing an activity like making a video for Instagram, that's my problem all the time, right? If you think that it's too challenging for you, it's going to be too too challenging for them. But in the same way, if you learn how to make the old dog that is your brain do some new tricks in regulating down before you snap, you're gonna see how that's immediately mirrored, not immediately, but within a very short period of time, begun to be mirrored by your kids. And this is so, so important to understand because that empathy piece is where a lot of this comes from. And a lot of people parents think of empathy as just like, oh, I just need to understand that my kids are doing the best that they can. And I think that that's good. I think that that's a good thing to think. But it goes beyond that. Understand that given if you were in their circumstance, you'd probably be doing the same stuff. And you can fix that because you're an adult now and you can do a lot of this work. And so that may be a challenge to you, but I if you're listening to this, I really hope that you can see this for what it is, which is an encouragement and an opportunity to grow in that way. And I think that as a on the whole, it will become much better. Okay, that's what I have for you in this episode about transitions. I hope that all of these different pieces, whether it's finding a satisfying conclusion or understanding what's going on in your child's brain when it comes to switching activities or modeling some healthy emotional regulation activities for you or your kids, or any of these things. I hope that all of this stuff has helped you to have some ideas of what you can do the next time that you're struggling with a transition. As always, check below for all of the notes and links to things that I mentioned in the episode. And yeah, that's what I got. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you next time. Thank you again for listening to this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast. If you are listening to this right now, yes, you in your car driving somewhere on a walk with your kids, perhaps your kids are melting down and you're listening to this on your headphones with the noise cancellation turned on. Whatever you're doing while you're listening, doing the dishes at night after your kids go to bed, I don't know. That would just be me if I was listening. Stop right now. I have three quick favors to ask you. I promise they're not going to take you very long. The first one, very, very easy. Go in to wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate it five stars. That's one, two, three, four, five stars. The more five star reviews that our podcast gets as we accumulate episodes, the more likely it is to be pushed out to more parents who are searching for parenting podcasts to solve their problems. Whatever you got out of this episode, whether it was something that to try with your kids, whether it was a new way to think about parenting, maybe this episode was not specifically about a problem that you're having, but you're somebody in your life who's having this problem. Go in and rate it five stars. And if you have an additional 30 seconds, that first one only takes you 10 seconds. If you have an additional 30 seconds, just type a few words for me to read. I'd love to read, I'd love to read the reviews. If there's something specific that's helped you, write it out. It helps me to know what we should keep doing here on the podcast, week in and week out. The second question that I have for you or request that I have for you, favor, let's call it, is to share this episode with somebody in your life who you think could use it. Uh, it might be a parent, another parent in your kid's class. It might be a sibling who has young kids, maybe it's your kid's teacher or a faith leader in your life, whomever it is that you think should have this episode of the podcast or any episode of the podcast, send it directly to them. I know it's vulnerable to share podcasts with people who you might not have that close of a relationship with, or even more vulnerable if you do have a close relationship with them. But I promise you, so many of the people who listen to this podcast listened not because they followed me on social media, but because they got a personal recommendation from somebody in their life who said, Hey, this guy has a way of talking about parenting that just works for me. You don't know if they listen to it or not, they might never reply, but maybe, just maybe, they'll love the episode so much that they become your new parenting partner out there in the world, doing things the same way that you are, and you might have just made your new parenting bestie. The last thing that you can do is definitely the biggest ask from me, but it is to go over to Substack. That link is down below in the bio, and to subscribe so that these episodes can keep coming to you. Paid subscriptions on Substack is the only way currently that I am being funded here on the Whole Parent Podcast. That is the only money that I receive. It is$5 a month. I think that this podcast is worth the price of a coffee for you. If it's not worth the price of a coffee for you, obviously don't do it. But if you're extra cheap like me, you can just subscribe annually. I know that you're gonna listen for the rest of the year. If you know that you're gonna listen for the rest of the year, just give me 50 bucks up front, and then you don't have to think about it coming out of your credit card every single month. Those are the ways that you can support me. And as always, I think that you're a great parent already. But I do hope this episode gave you something to make you a little bit better. Take care.

Head Shot

Jon Fogel

Host