What Toddlers Truly Remember About A Hard Holiday #58

In this episode, Jon slows the conversation down to sit with one parent’s deeply human question: what do our kids actually remember when we’re struggling? Responding to a mom navigating her first Christmas after separation, he unpacks why toddlers don’t store memories the way we fear—and why repair matters more than perfection. Parents will leave with relief, neuroscience-backed reassurance, and a clearer understanding of how safety, emotional honesty, and returning to connection shape a child far more than a tense moment ever could. 

Chapters

• 0:00 A Single Question Worth Slowing Down For
• 2:27 Vivian’s First Christmas Post‑Separation
• 5:45 Owning Imperfection And Snapping
• 9:36 What Toddlers Encode As Memory
• 14:45 Mood, Safety Cues, And The Brain
• 19:40 Preventive Supports: Help, Journaling, Sleep
• 29:48 Repair Beats Perfection In Attachment
• 35:16 Simple Repair Scripts That Work
• 39:01 One‑Breath Reset And Slowing Down
• 41:46 Closing Reflections And Holiday CTA

Transcript

Jon @WholeParent: 0:00

Welcome back to the Whole Parent Podcast. My name is John. Usually on this show, I take a few different questions, all circling around one specific topic: different families, different moments, but some sort of shared theme. It just keeps things moving, and then it takes us from kind of all of these different lenses of one issue so that we can see it from different angles. But today I'm doing something a little bit different. Today's episode only centers on one question because when I came to it, it was clear that this wasn't something that I could really answer quickly, or I couldn't stack this next to others. It touches on something pretty deep and something that many parents are probably carrying right now in some form or fashion. It felt like I wanted to give it the time and attention instead of just like a shorter post. The question came from a mom named Vivian, and this is going to be her first Christmas since separation. It's Christmas Eve, by the way, if you're listening, not listening to this on the day that it's posted. She's carrying a lot this season while trying to keep things feeling normal with her three-year-old, and she's noticing that she's snapping more than she wants to. What she's really asking about isn't the snapping or the yelling, it's about how kids absorb our emotional states, whether stress becomes a thing that shapes their memories, and what actually stays with kids when they're this little. So today we're going to slow down and we're going to stick on that question. We'll talk about how brains, specifically toddler brains, are really tracking and why the answer may be more about forgiving ourselves than actually what we do in the moment. This is going to be a slower episode, but might be a little shorter, but I think it's a really important one. If you found yourself wondering thing some similar things like this, if you're in the midst of a separation, or if you're in a season where you're snapping at your kids a lot, you're not alone. Let's get into it. And I want to jump right into the question. I'm not going to give a story because this isn't something that I've specifically gone through. I have had seasons where I'm not super there with my kids. I'm snapping, I'm exhausted. I was recently asked on a podcast, um, pretty big one, actually, one of the biggest ones I've ever done, how I hold everything together. And I think I answered in a way that I'm I'm I'm kind of not comfortable with now. I said, I said the reason the way that I hold everything together, two full-time jobs and four kids, and you know, two of them still toddlers, one of them not even two years old. The way that I hold it all together is by really prioritizing, like not doing things that I don't want to do and focusing on protecting the feeling passionate about the things that I'm doing. And the context of my answer was that this is a person, the person who I was on the podcast with, her podcast, who I talk to a lot about our shared experience of having ADHD and hyper-fixating on things and kind of leaning into that and seeing it as a strength and not a weakness. And so I was really in that moment with her and telling her like how I feel like we, she and I, can do this differently. But the real answer to the question of how do I do it all, how do I juggle all of these balls, which is what she asked, is I don't. Frequently I spend too much time on whole parent, and then I'm not as present as I could be with my kids. I spend too much energy and emotional energy in my job as a pastor, and then I'm not there and present with my kids. Or I spend so much time really focusing on my kids that things fall through the cracks on those other things, right? Like today, I'm putting out this episode. I also have a service tonight for Christmas Eve, and I have to have that prepared. And also it's Christmas Eve for my family. So how do I balance that? Like the truth is something gets lost. And oftentimes the way that that shows up in my life and in my family is that I start snapping at the people around me when things are bad and when things are hard, and especially when grief shows up in the midst of the holiday season or other times, and my mind is in another place, that's when I really it gets tricky. And so I want to jump into the question right away. It comes from, like I said, Vivian, and it was on Instagram, and she said it was one of several people who said, What do I do? You know, how how do you handle Christmas with your ex? Or how do you handle Christmas when they have to go to two different houses? Or how do you handle Christmas with a person who who abused you and and you are still somehow, you know, in that in their life in some form or fashion? This one was a little bit different, but I I just felt like it it kind of ties together so many different pieces. And so I wanted to focus on this one. Vivian says, This is our first Christmas since my separation, and I'm really trying hard to make it feel okay for my three-year-old daughter. I'm working more, money is tight, and everything feels heavier than I expected. I keep telling myself that it's just a season and that I can just push through. But lately I'm yelling at her way more than I thought I would. I feel rushed all the time. I'm snapping at my daughter about everything: shoes or not being on time, getting into her car seat, things that don't even really matter, and then I feel awful about it. I calm down after a few minutes, but then it feels like we just keep cycling through me being tense and her melting down constantly. I know she's only three, but I worry that she's picking up on more than I realize. Like if she can feel that I'm stressed even when I'm trying to make things magical. I'm scared that me being stressed and mad all the time is what she's going to remember about this year. Not decorations or cookies or Santa or anything like that. Just me being on edge. Vivian. I hear underneath this whole conversation and and and question that you're asking, some guy on the internet, something that I think we have to name first, which is that you really desperately want to be a great mom. And I think that that's the most important aspect. Like if I had to rate all of the things that matter in parenting, we're gonna talk about a couple of them today. Number one, far and away, is you you are willing to accept the places where you're done not doing it perfectly and you want to do better. There are so many people, like when people say, one of the things that I love to to reflect back to people when when they join my membership or when they join uh the course that I launch, and I'll be launching again probably in early January. And or or or anything, right? Like any, any they start listening to the podcast and they send me an email or a text message or whatever. One of the things that they'll say is like, Am I just like the worst parent for doing X, Y, and Z? And my thing always back to them is if you're trying to engage with whole parent, if you're trying if you're like investing your time and resources into some one of my coaching related programs, like I said, the membership of the course, if you're uh, but even just buying my book, right? Like I get a dollar when you buy my book or something like that. I'd say it's not it's not a massive amount of money, but but when I think even so, I think about it as like that's a lot of people's first step is like they just they got the book or they got the audiobook and they went, I want to become better, or you just you something totally free, you can just binge this podcast, right? Like whenever I hear somebody say, Well, am I just the worst? And they're doing all that stuff, I always say, No, it is impossible that you're the worst because you're trying. And truly bad parents, if there is such a thing, I think that there are people who are really, really rough parents, but the worst parents do not think that they're the worst parents. They are so caught up in their own junk that they don't even pause to question whether they're doing it the right or wrong way. And I think there's a lot of challenges that come with the age of the internet that we are all living in and the age of social media, feeling constantly criticized, feeling constantly like we're not doing enough because you go on Instagram and you see all of these influencers who seem like they have it all together. And by the way, none of us do, right? Like I just told you, I answered like I did, and and I don't. Not all the time, not even most of the time, do I have like, am I a great parent? Uh I just do my best. And not a single one of the influencers who I'm friends with, and these people have a lot more followers than me. Do not a single one of them know thinks that they're a perfect parent. In fact, most of them feel all of the same insecurities that you feel. Vivian and anybody else listening to this who go, Am I the worst? Right? Like, am I not doing enough? And so my first thing out of the gate is I can hear that you care. And that means that that we don't have to start from the place of saying, Do you even know the things that you're doing wrong? Do you even want to be better? Do you even want to stop yelling at your kids? Do you I mean, like there's so many parents who finding themselves in your situation would just be like, I don't know, they're lucky that I'm providing for them and they're lucky that I'm getting them Christmas presents, and they should just shut up and be grateful. And that is not what you wrote to me. You wrote to me that time is it's a hard time, it's a hard season. The money is tight. The relationship that you just got out of it it deeply affects us. There's there's something to mourn there, there's something to grieve there. I'm not saying that you didn't need it didn't need to end, but you know, it's it's a it's a thing that needs to be grieved, and and it's a thing that is was lost. Child care gets more complicated when you're on your own. Like, there's so many pieces of your life that are not feeling cheery and joyous and merry on December 24th, 2025. And yet, here you are. You're doing, you're showing up, you're doing your best, you're asking questions. And so I just want to start by saying, like, good on you, and good on all the people listening to this, the single parents, the married parents, the the relationships that are more complicated than single or married, right? Like all of you, the blended families, whatever, like the adoptive parents, the foster parents, like like you're all here listening to this, which means that you're trying to do better. And I think that that's the most important piece. So let's kind of take this question apart. Like I said, we're gonna spend the next probably 20 minutes on this question alone. And I want to start by saying kind of part one the answer to your question about what she's going to remember. She was never going to remember the decorations or the cookies or what Santa got her or the first time that she sat on Santa's lobby, or like any of the things that we think that our kids are going to remember or be memorable. Our kids do not remember those things as explicit memories. Instead, most of toddlerhood is about implicit memories. They're about the feelings and the vibe of what is going on. And so, kind of the answer is like kids may not notice if they have one present under the tree or four presents under the tree, or if their cousin has a better present than them. At three years old, they don't really have that experience of like comparison or explicit cognitive thought about those things. They do notice our mood. And the reason for this is because when they're when they come out of the womb, our kids have a pretty robust emotional system built in. Like the factory default settings on a human being, uh, the emotions are kind of ready to go on day one. And this means that a kid can feel very deep emotions, they can sense uh the emotions of others, because these were adaptive survival instincts for kids. They they need to know when their parents are stressed so that they can react accordingly. Uh, one of the examples that I often use is that my son, who at the time was not even one year old, he was probably 11 months, 10 months. Uh, when we brought him upstairs, this is gonna get really dark on Christmas Eve. I'm sorry, guys, but like this is where my brain is right now. When we brought him upstairs to the bedroom where my father was dying, and he's not even a year old, he was like a chattery, you know, trying to walk, always trying to talk loud. Like just if you knew him today, you'd know. Like he is not a kid who gets quiet and slows down unless he's like really invested in a book or something. And he's nine now, so you know that makes more sense. But at one, he was never like that. When he walked or like was carried into that room for my dad to see him the last time, and there was all these grown-ups in the room, he felt the weight of that. I saw it on his face. He got quiet, he got still, he got focused. He could pick up on the room that it was not a room for shouting and laughing and giggling and running about and banging his favorite hammer that he carried everywhere with him on things. It was a place to be quiet, it was solace, it was memory, and he chilled out. And I remember looking over and going, like, having like this out-of-body experience, like, of course, I'm focused on my dad, but I'm like out-of-body experience of like him being like so calm and so chill, and he's like, Whoa, he really gets this. And that is actually probably accurate. He probably he did not cognitively understand what was going on. Of course, he didn't know the weight of a person, you know, on their deathbed, but he certainly knew how everybody else was responding to that. And it's not some kids respond to that by making a lot of noise or starting to cry. For him, he just got quiet. He's a brilliant kid, even to this day, especially now. But when he was young, he was he just he picked up on it. And toddlers, like, and this is where we get into kind of the nerdy neuroscience, but the the toddler's brain, the neocortex, which is the part of the brain that handles logic and reasoning. Generally we call it the pre- we talk about the prefrontal part of that neocortex, the the prefrontal cortex. When we think about the frontal, prefrontal cortex in a toddler, it's very underdeveloped. It's there, but it's very underdeveloped. It does not have the robust ability to do all these cognitive thought processes and and understanding things, obviously. Like we all know that. But the changes that happen to the interior of a child's brain, the limbic system and the amygdala, really we're looking for that to not really change as they grow up in many respects. Like if a child has a much larger amygdala when they're a teenager than than is proportional to their uh their toddler brain, what we know is that like that child has experienced trauma, or that child has experienced hostility, or that amygdala was activated more, and so it grew more. And that was not good for that child. That's not a good sign of things to come. There was a recent article about how the different political affiliations and different parties had different parts of their brain that were structured differently. And lots of the uh commentators on this that didn't understand it were like, oh yeah, you know, like all of the this group is the tough people, and that's why they have this big amygdala because they're sensing for danger and they care about protecting the innocent. And it was like, no, no, no, no, that's not it at all. People who have an uh an enlarged amygdala are more anxious and depressed, and they're unable to reason effectively, and they're unable to make clear choices. Now, I'm not gonna get into that and the the politics around that, but I just thought it was really interesting to listen to these newscasters talk like they understood what they're talking about. They didn't. But what I said is still true. A child, a child, a baby, they have a developed amygdala, they have a developed neo um uh limbic system, not a neocortex. And so they can notice what's going on around them in a really profound sense. But they track the and so they're tracking us. But what they're tracking is our tone and our nonverbals and our vibe. They're not tracking meaning. And so toddl don't interpret stress as mom is failing or mom is stressed or mom is doing poorly right now. Their brain is just your your three-year-old's brain is just reading speed, volume, facial tension, and rhythm, and making an internal value validate um evaluation of whether they are safe. And so that internal narrative that you're experiencing, like, oh, I like I don't want her to feel like I'm just this. Yeah, I think that you're you're right on. You're worried about the right thing, which is that she is going to come to associate the holidays with a time of stress and anxiety. Now, it's not one time, it's not one year, but it is something to consider if you're in an extended season of this happening. We're all gonna have bad days. We don't have to always be perfect, and and we're not expected to be, and we're gonna get into that later. But they're just kind of taking the weather. It's the emotional weather, the emotional temperature of the room. They're just taking the emotional weather of the home at all times, just scanning. Their amygdala is scanning out in the world, threat detection, always looking. Is my caregiver available? And are they healthy? Are they able to take care of me? Are they stressed? Am I and here's the sad part is that kids, because they cognitively cannot go to a place of saying, well, there my mom is stressed because the budget is tight and because, like, you know, there's a relationship struggle or whatever. As she grows up, you don't want her to encode that into she's self-centered, right? So, so all toddlers are self-centered. And so you don't want them to encode that self-centeredness into their experience of that of you being stressed. Because what happens when you mix those two things? Well, the world revolves around them because that's they have a the just adapting theory of mind. They're they are knowingly self-centered, they're they're they're uh essentially self-centered. They have to be self-centered. Fundamentally, they must be self-centered at this age. If they're not, that's another problem. So they're self-centered, necessarily, we should say. And they're reading that the room is always tense around them. What what is that equation? What's on the other side of that equation? What's the sum of that? It's I am causing my mom to be stressed. And anxious. And so this is why it's really important to ask the questions that you're asking, because that's that's the fear, that's the worry, is that when we are overwhelmed, stressed, and not doing well, our kids are affected by that. This is why, by the way, what we know is that the uh greatest indicator of mental health for a child is not like the the greatest, I'm sorry, the greatest compounding factor on mental health as a child is the health and and care given to the mother. And so if you feel right now like you're not getting the care and and and resources that you need and you're stressed and anxious, and you're worried how that's affecting your child, I just want to say kudos to you for being aware. And also, that is the thing to worry about. That said, there's so much that we can do. So just as a summary, our kids are not encoding the holidays as explicit memories. This happened, this happened, this happened, the cookies, the gingerbread, this, this, the holiday magic that you're trying to, that you're trying to uh create for your kids, they don't encode, they they do not remember that. Not in any sort of like explicit way. What they remember is how you were in those places and spaces. What they remember is how the temperature in the room felt. So they're not their memory is not mature enough to store a memory like you can of, oh, what was Christmas 2025 like? Oh, what was that like? What no, what they're storing is emotional patterns, and so we have to do all that we can in our power to not be openly causing them to feel our stress. We want we can't bottle it, we we can't go unprocessed, but we need to do our own internal self-work. We need to do those positive things. And I'm gonna list off some here before I take a break, and I want to talk about what actually shapes your child long term, in spite of everything that I just said, right? I'm gonna I'm gonna say all this and then I'm gonna say we're gonna change gears for the second half of the episode or the last third of the episode. Okay. What are the things that I would do right now if I were you? Not part of part two yet, but but in the first half of this question. One, I'd be getting as much help as I could from other caregivers so that I could take care of myself. It may seem selfish, but it's not because the healthier you are, the better this is going to be for your child. Number two, I would be actively journaling. That it's it's one of the cheat codes of the world, of human psychology, is the ability to put down words onto paper. And you don't have to journal physically with a pen and paper. You can. I think it's the easiest because there's the fewest distractions, but you can do it as a voice note, you can do it as a video to yourself, whatever. You don't have to even save any of this stuff, you can delete it. But the whole point is you can burn the page after you're done. Burn the whole notebook when you're done, right? But journaling and putting words, uh putting emotions into words is one of the most positive processes that you can have. Number three, if you have the resources to do so, this is a good time to be in therapy. You don't have to be in therapy forever. People make it sound like therapy is this thing that, oh, once you start, you're going to go once every two weeks or once a month, or even maybe once a week for the rest of your life. Um, I don't know that there is a lot of good evidence and research out there to say that that type of maintenance therapy is like a necessary thing for people who are not struggling with specific reasons for doing that. Um, but definitely therapy is a helpful tool as you're processing these things. And your daughter could even be in play therapy, although I don't know that she necessarily needs to be. So those are those are three things. Four, I'd be I'd be working out if you can. And it doesn't have to be a lot. A little bit of strenuous exercise for two minutes a day, we know has massive positive mental health outcomes. So literally just getting your heart rate up for two minutes a day is so much better than nothing. I would guess that you have two minutes. And you know how you can do it? Play hard with your daughter. You're killing multiple birds with stones. Because you're playing hard with your daughter until you're working up, you're out of breath. Run around, pick her up, and fly around the whole room as hard as you can for a minute and a half. Work up, you know, get yourself out of breath is a massive, massive positive outcomes for you. So those are the things that I would be doing. And then obviously, the the maintenance stuff of eating well, uh, most important, sleep. Sleep has the single greatest impact on your mental health. We could keep going. Either gratitude exercises, find the things in your life that feel magical to you, even if it's nothing, even if you're naming one thing. Ah man, I like just liked how my coffee tasted this morning. That can do wonders. Okay, so I've just given you a bunch, but start with that, and then after the break, we're gonna talk about what we do when we're not ideal. All right, back for part two, the second, the last third of the episode. What actually shapes our kids long term? Research on attachment and stress regulation shows that security actually does not come exclusively from consistency or what we call attunement. So attunement is very important in attachment. It's one of the big words that we use. And attunement just looks like checking in, locking in with your kit. What we know is that attunement 100% of the time is not necessary for secure attachment. I've heard different numbers out there, numbers as low as 30%. You only have to do it 30% of the time, 40% attunement, 50% attunement is a Lisa Pressman's thing, or 51% attunement, just more times more often than not. What we know though is that actually there is something even more important than attunement, and it's something that many of us did not really receive as kids. This is something that many, if not most millennials that I work with really struggle with. In fact, I wrote an entire chapter on it in my book. It was the last chapter I wrote. Uh, I wrote the whole manuscript of the book, turned it in, and then realized that I needed this chapter, and I went back and wrote it. Like sometime it was like January, February of the year that my the year that my book came out, where I was writing furiously, or then the year before my book came out. It was like January, February of 2023. I was like writing furiously, trying to uh or 2024. Why am I messing up the years? January, February, 2024. I was like writing furiously about repair. And that's what we're talking about. What do we do when we mess up? Occasional stress does not damage attachment. In fact, occasional stress is necessary for secure attachment. Let me say that again. Occasional stress does not damage attachment. Occasional stress on the relationship. You screwing up, you making mistakes, you not being a perfect parent is necessary for attachment. Returning after attention builds resilience. This is why I talk in my book about the failure relationship paradox, that when we watch these holiday hallmark, sappy romantic comedy, whatever romantic Christmas movies, what always happens two-thirds of the way through the movie, the couple breaks up, the couple separates. You find out one one of the couple uh one of the people in the couple has been lying this whole time. But you know, they started this as a joke, but now it's for real. Or, you know, they find out that their family doesn't like me, and so I'm gonna go off and I'm gonna break things off, or the guy that I was dating was not actually the guy. That's like one of my favorite Christmas movies of recently. It was uh it was called uh Love Hard, I think, or something like that. But anyway, it was about uh like a guy who was catfishing uh people on the internet to try and get dates on an online dating site. Like a great holiday movie, what happens two-thirds of the way in, everything gets blown up. Everything gets blown up. And the truth is the reason why in all of these romantic movies, I understand we're talking about relationships, securely attached relationships between children, in this case a three-year-old and a mom, and not a couple, but the reason why that happens in all of these movies is not just because like that's the plot format. It's because we know encoded into our emotional relational memory, we are deeply relational people. Like humans are like primarily just relationships. People are like, oh, we're logic, we're emotions, we're this, we're stress, we're survival. I'm like, we're we're relationships. That like that is really what defines humanity. That's why humans survived were other humanoid, uh, you know, our ancestors, Neanderthals and Homo erectus. The reason that they didn't survive and we did is because we were better at relationships than them. We were better at getting into groups than them. It was not that we were smarter, it was not that we were stronger, it was not that we were more resilient to disease and infection, it was that we were better at doing relationship than them. And relationship can overcome all these other problems. And so, because it's so encoded into us, we know when we watch those movies that the only way that this relationship is going to last is if it can withstand a test, if it can withstand a hardship. And so, two is the case with our relationship with our kids. We know that the couple is stronger at the end of the movie after they've overcome that hardship. What I want you to hear, Vivian, what I want all of us to hear around the holidays is that when we snap at our kids, it's not the end of that relationship. It is not like, oh my gosh, I'm so terrible. I should never do this again. Of course, you shouldn't yell at your kids. Everybody knows that you shouldn't yell at your kids. Or if they don't, they should know that. Uh, you know, I of course you shouldn't be like unnecessarily stressed out around your kids. Of course, but you're going to be. But that doesn't matter. Because the relationship is going to get stronger. You don't have to be when you repair, you don't have to be perfect. In fact, it's better if you're not. Like again, I have another analogy in the book that I talk about is like this experience that I had on a United flight, a United Airlines flight, where they they like broke my stroller. They lost a piece of my stroller, but then they found it. And the and and they went through it, like the pilot of the thinking aircraft, like the guy who should not like getting paid probably, I don't know,$500,000 a year or some crazy number, was climbing around in the cargo bay looking for a piece of my stroller when I was in Orlando. And I talked about how like that experience changed my perspective on United because I was like, look at this guy was willing to like kind of lower himself to cry, climb around for in a cargo hold looking for a piece of a stroller for some guy, some random passenger. Like he must really care. But what I never thought of is that they shouldn't have lost this thinking piece of the stroller in the first place. The fact that I was standing there on the jet bridge waiting for this guy to find the stroller piece is evidence that they were being too rough with my stroller in the first place. Like, but I didn't care about that because the relationship had been repaired by the actions of the pilot. And so I want you to hear this. If you can repair well with your kids, they are not going to think of you as worse. They're going to think of you as a better parent than if you had never messed up in the first place. It teaches kids that stress is not supposed to be hidden. It removes and it gives them this opportunity for you to model to them how to do repair, which by the way is one of their most important life skills. And if parenting is primarily about modeling to our kids what we want them to do, how are they going to learn to apologize if we don't apologize to them? And yet, for many of us, we were never apologized to by our parents. How many of us have ever had a sit-down with our parents where they go, you know what? I really did some things that I should have done differently. I'm sorry. It's in it's unthinkable, it's unfathomable for many of us, but it's so important for our kids. So Vivian, if this holiday season you're snapping a little bit, if this holiday season you're a little bit on edge, if this holiday season you're not the perfect parent the whole time and you're not good at making the magic, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that you don't make all the magic. They're not gonna remember that part anyway. What they're gonna remember is number one, you apologizing when you make a mistake. And number two, they are going to remember that they could be safe with you because even if things go wrong, mom always repairs the relationship. And that's the most important thing, and that's the lesson that we're really trying to teach. Here are some simple repair scripts based on yours that I wrote down ahead of time so that I could read them off and know that I was giving you exactly what based on your question uh they were. Doesn't need to be a long conversation as a three-year-old. You don't need to like write them a sonnet about how a lament song about how terrible you were. In fact, it's worse. One sentence, knock it out of the park. That was a rushed moment. This is when you're trying to get her out of the door and you're caring about the being too late. That was a rush moment. I'm sorry, I'm here now. I just got pretty frustrated there. It's not because of you. I'm sorry about that. I needed a second. Thank you for waiting for me. These statements do three things neurologically. Number one, they lower your child's threat response because you bring the temperature down and they match you. Number two, they re-establish safety without shame. And remember, the real fear here is that your child's going to internalize the message that all this is their fault. And so naming that very clearly, this is not your fault. Many parents think that their kid must know that it's not their fault. They don't. They're self-centered, little tiny like new humans. They don't know it's not their fault unless you say it. And three, and it teaches that emotions are manageable. Whatever is mentionable, according to Fred Rogers, my patron saint. Whatever is mentionable is manageable. And so if you can say to your child, I was this, I was frustrated, I got tense, I did not need to do that, you are making those things seem less stressful and less anxious and anxiety-producing because you're naming them. So I I just want to really focus on this. Instead of kids saying, Are my kids gonna remember all this bad stuff that I did? I want you to ask the question, are my kids going to experience me returning to the connection when I make mistakes? That's gonna make an implicit, not an explicit, but an implicit memory that is going to last for a lifetime. So I'm glad that we can do some things to manage extress, and I'm gonna give you one more here in a moment. Outside of all those other ones, journaling and gratitude and all that other stuff, and exercise and sleep. Give you one more. There's important work to do on the front end. There is more important work to do on the back end. Okay. Last neuroscience hack for you right now. When you feel yourself rushing, which sounds like the number one place, I want you to pause for one breath. One breath. You can have you have time. One breath. One full deep inhale into your chest, into your belly, drop your shoulders, really feel yourself expand. Don't say anything until you do that. Then when you speak, just speak 10% slower and 10% quieter. Just say quieter and slower than you meant to. The only way you're gonna do that is if you take that big breath. Drop your shoulders. This literally activates your parasympathetic nervous system in your brain, turns off your stress signals, it's gonna calm you down, it's gonna bring both of the brains back online so that you can connect rather than explode in that moment. So, where do we leave all this? How do we end? I want you to hear this. Your kids do not need a perfect emotional climate. They just need a livable one. Where stress exists, yes. Where mom's working on doing better, yes. Where repair follows the times when mom doesn't get it right, or dad, or anyone in their life. And connection wins out more often than not. Don't go internal and hide from your kid because you're bad. That's the worst piece of advice that I could give you. Instead, lean in. And again, the fact that you're worried about this, where I started the whole episode, tells us something that's way more important than anything, any example of this environment that you're worried that you're creating. Merry Christmas, everybody. Thank you for your time listening to the whole parent podcast today. I hope you got something out of it. I have a couple quick favors to ask of you as we end the episode. The first one is to jump over on whatever podcast platform that you are listening to right now and rate this show five stars. You'll notice there are a lot of five-star ratings on this show, whether that's on Spotify or Apple Music or Apple Podcasts. We have a ton of five-star ratings, and it helps our podcast get out to more people than almost any other parenting podcast out there. And so it's a really quick thing that you can do if you have 15 or 20 seconds. And if you have an additional 30 seconds, I'd love to read a review from you. I read all the reviews that come through. If some of you particularly like one part of the podcast or you like when I talk about something or whatever, imagine that you're writing that review directly to me. The second thing that you can do is go and send this episode to somebody in your life who you think could use it. Think about all the parents in your life. Think about your friends, your family members who could use a little bit of help parenting. It's vulnerable to share an episode of a parenting podcast with them. I get it. But imagine how much better your life is as a result of listening to this podcast, of following me on social media, of getting the emails that I send out. 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You can't write it off on your taxes, but if you'd like to give me a little gift to just say thank you for what you've done this year, the best way to do that is over on Substack. Again,$5 a month,$50 a year. It's not going to break the bank. It's probably less than you spend on coffee every week. Definitely less than you spend on coffee every week. Maybe uh less than you spend on almost anything, right? Five bucks a month is very, very small, but it goes a long way when it's multiplied by all of the different people who listen to the podcast and sending that over to me. I get all of that money. It's just my way of being able to produce the podcast. Spend money on equipment, spend money on subscription fees, hosting fees for the podcast, all of that stuff. Email server fees, all that. So if you're willing to do that, I would love it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and I'll see you next time.