The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
Secrets, Promises, And Safe Homes #66
In this episode, Jon tackles one of the most anxiety-provoking parenting topics: kids and secrets—and why secrecy can feel so loaded for both children and parents. Centered on the idea that the most powerful word in a child’s world isn’t rule or consequence, but promise, he explains how secrecy hooks into loyalty, safety, and attachment long before kids have the brain development to navigate those tensions.
Parents will walk away with clarity on the difference between privacy, surprises, and secrets, insight into why “just tell me” often backfires, and a calmer, more protective framework for becoming the kind of adult their child wants to tell when something really matters.
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The most powerful word in a child's world is not rule or consequence. It's promise. When a child promises to keep a secret, they're not just being asked to remember something. They're also being asked to protect a relationship. Most of the time this shows up in small, harmless ways, planning a surprise, whispering during a playdate, or feeling chosen. But sometimes that same word coercively pulls a child into a bind that they don't have the brain development to untangle. Be loyal or stay safe. In this episode, we're talking about kids and secrets, the good, the bad, and let's face it, the scary. What actually is happening in a child's brain when secrecy enters the picture, and why just tell me often does not work. And how well-meaning parents can accidentally make silence feel like the safer option. We'll break down how secrecy hooks into attachment, stress, and belonging, and what it takes to build a home where telling the truth doesn't feel like breaking a promise. Let's get into it. Welcome back out to the porch. Oh man, it's a beautiful, beautiful day. If you're listening to this on the day that it came out, it's actually my birthday today. And the first thing I want to tell you is that I kind of have a birthday surprise for you, which is that tonight I'm going to be recording an episode with my wife, and we're just going to be talking about parenting and kind of going back and forth. It's the first ever episode that she's been on. So you can look out for that tomorrow. And I think it'll be episode number 67. 67. So check that out. It's going to be exciting. But today we're talking about secrets. We're talking about keeping secrets. We're talking about kind of all of the things related to kids and secrets. And if you, like me, grew up in the 90s, you probably heard about all of the stranger danger stuff, and grown-ups who ask you to teach keep secrets are not safe. And I want to just say that a lot of that is influencing the emails and the DMs that I got this week, or that I got not this week, but that we're putting together for uh this episode. I want to just affirm right out of the gate because I have had situations like this where my kids, similar to our uh the people who have emailed in and DM'd in, and the folks from the membership, have said something to the effect of, like, oh, I have this secret, and my mind jumps to the worst. The shark music turns on, I hear that bun, and I just get really worried. And I'm not gonna lie to you that there are definitely certain relationships, peer relationships, that I have kind of shied away from in my son's, my oldest son's life, because there was a lot of kind of forced secrecy as part of those. And so if you are worried or concerned about secrets, know that this is the episode for you. And I don't have a specific story today of a of a time that I can think about where my kids like were keeping a secret that they didn't want to tell me. I think part of that is because really a lot of the stuff that I'm sharing in this episode, we've been pretty clear about for the last nine years, the entire my son's entire life. My wife was really early to this, and she was like, Man, we don't do secrets. And I was like, Okay, I don't know what that means, but sure. The one thing that I can say is that I was very lucky that my son doesn't like keeping secrets to begin with. So this is a kid, we're just coming out of the holidays, who doesn't like not knowing like anything about the holiday magic. I won't go into more on that. There's a whole episode on Santa Claus that you can listen to where he will share. He actually is on that episode and he shares what he thinks about Santa Claus. But he also is the type of kid who doesn't like being told or uh not knowing what his presents are going to be. I mean, he's he's perfectly happy to wait. Waiting's hard for kids, but he can wait. It's just he does not like being surprised. He doesn't like uh the secrecy around present giving. If I say something in the car, and this is a typical oldest thing, but if I say something in the car and he overhears me saying something, he's like, Dad, what are you talking about? Dad, no, no, that's not just a grown-up thing. Dad, no, no, I want to know what you're talking about. And a lot of times I have to kind of hold my tongue. This is not something that I should share, I should even start to talk about in front of my wife, right? Uh or not in front of my wife, with my wife in front of my nine-year-old. I have to learn, I've had to learn to like kind of hold my tongue and and be slow to speak in front of him because he does not like secrets. He does not like when secrets are kept from him, and so he also does not like keeping secrets from others. And so for me, really, it's my whole experience with secrets has been outside of my home and working with other people who have had a different experience because in my house, my kids just don't really like secrets, and their big brother has kind of led the way on that, and mom and dad have been kind of clear on that. And so I'm not saying that this makes us uh this is like a high and mighty thing at all, or this is a pride point. It's just kind of the hand that we were dealt where this is not something that's happened a lot. But I do have lots of thoughts about it because there is a lot in the literature about secrets and about exactly what I talked about in the intro, why it's important to hold space for kids to feel loyal without having to make those kind of secretive things uh be uh things that you hold away from mom and dad. Because a lot of times it's nothing, but occasionally it's something, and you want to know when the occasional times are. So my first email today came in the form of an email. I guess I gave that away from Bailey, and she said, This might be dumb, but my six-year-old keeps whispering with her cousin. And then when I ask what they're talking about, she says, It's a secret, and then looks at me like I'm being rude. It's usually nothing, like planning to scare grandpa or whatever. But my stomach drops because what if? I don't want to be the mom who freaks out and bans secrets, and then she really won't tell me stuff. But also, I don't love secret keeping vibes. I don't know where the line is, and I feel like I'm either overreacting or being naive, and I feel bad about both. Bailey, this is a really vulnerable and honest thing to say, and I get it, and I want to first affirm the instinct that the things that we ban from children often become the things that they do anyway. Um, this isn't to say that we should say yes to everything always because they'll just do it anyway. That's not necessarily true, but uh we have to keep age-appropriate boundaries, which means that we don't keep uh boundaries that are overly burdensome. And so it can feel like, oh, well, secrets, you know, maybe maybe secrets are something that is appropriate for a six-year-old to have secrets about scaring grandpa or playing practical jokes or whatever. And I hear that. I don't want you to feel like, you know, this is this is one of those places where we don't keep secrets in this family can become removing the door on your teenager's room because you know, you they don't have privacy. And so I want to say here, first and foremost, that privacy and secrecy are two separate things. And that there needs to be a degree of privacy that a six-year-old, or even the case of like my three-year-old, he turned four yesterday, or actually today. When I'm recording this episode right now, he it's he's already in bed, but he turned four today. He has his birthday the day before mine. And uh he is the kind of kid who like we were in a public restaurant today, public restaurant, all restaurants are public. We were in a restaurant today in a public restroom because he had to go to the bathroom while we were out to dinner for his birthday at his favorite place. Uh, shout out Cheesies. Cheesies is a grilled cheese place in uh in Chicagoland. And he wanted to go to Cheesies, but he had to go to the bathroom while he was there. Well, he does not like going to the bathroom with anybody in the room. Like, he does not like going to the bathroom if mom or dad are in the room, period. Or anyone, right? It's obviously it's much better with us than it is with like some stranger or something, or he doesn't go to the bathroom with strangers in the room. I don't know what I'm saying, but with somebody else, even like grandma or grandpa, he'd be rather me or my wife be there, but he'd really rather nobody be there. Today I had to say, no, I gotta be in the bathroom with you, like buddy, like it's it's kind of a public bathroom. He's like, Yeah, if you leave the lights could turn off. I was like, Yeah, sure, we can go with that. But that's privacy, that's not secrecy, right? So we have privacy and secrecy. Privacy is something that we want to instill in kids because we want them to have a sense or semblance of what is private and what is not private. Um, using the bathroom, obviously, bathing at a certain age, they're gonna feel like, hey, I want this to be private, uh, obviously getting dressed, things like that. And all of that is good healthy development. Feeling like they want some privacy is good healthy development. For different kids, this happens at different ages. Like I said, with my he was three yesterday, with my three-year-old, now four-year-old Liam, privacy is early. For other for my other kids, privacy has been a less significant piece, right? For my son Ollie, privacy is uh he he like never wants to be um he he's he's very conscious of people being in the house when he's changing. So he he might not have much of a sense of privacy with other people, but with or with uh with us, but with other people, he's like conscious of oh, somebody in the house, I should go to the bathroom to change. And so so you can see how like that's a positive thing. And I'm getting a lot off track here, and I don't want to like go too far down this, but we don't want to just ban like privacy and and or secrecy, and then also that becomes privacy. So that those things that we do try and ban, I mean try to get back on track here. The things that we do attempt to ban often backfire, right? That said, I think that we can reframe what's happening with your daughter and her cousin, still maintaining that we don't keep secrets or that you know we don't keep secrets from mom and dad, while also saying that we can do something else. So there is a difference between secrecy and privacy. There's also a difference in our family, the way that we use this term, and I've heard this used in other uh parenting circles, and I forget which book it's from, but we you can also differentiate between secrets and surprises. So uh get not knowing what you're going to get for Christmas, again, for my nine-year-old, that's a non-starter, but my five-year-old, my three-year-old, they don't the four-year-old, I keep saying it wrong, my four-year-old, my five-year-old, they don't know what they're gonna get for Christmas or for their birthday. And it's a surprise. It's not a secret, it's a surprise. That's a different thing. Uh, what sounds like your daughter is doing, scaring grandpa, is a surprise. It's not a secret, it's a surprise. And so you can say, we do surprises in this family, which is something that eventually will come to light, but we don't do secrets. We don't do things where we keep uh secrets indefinitely that are never going to come out. And that's a big difference between, you know, a secret and a surprise. And kids can feel the difference between a secret and a surprise in their body. One of the things that is very common when a kid gets put into one of these kind of binding situations where they feel like they are not allowed to tell. Again, this most often happens in totally innocuous situations, but it can happen. And it is one of the prerequisites for most abusive situations, is that the the abusive adult will perform some form of grooming to maintain that they are not going to be caught, that they can have a some semblance of secrecy with a child who they are planning on abusing. This is very dark and as a dark part of this episode, I probably should have put a trigger warning at the beginning. But um, understanding that kids, kids will feel the difference between secrets and surprises, and you can teach them to recognize that feeling of secrecy and say, we don't have to do that in our family. In fact, we don't do that in our family. So you can say, this is whatever exactly what I've written out in our family, we don't do secrets that make our tummy feel weird. This is a very common gut reaction. I could get into the neuroanatomy, yes, the neuroanatomy of the neurons in the gut that make us feel weird when we keep secrets. But there are neural pathways that go all the way down into our bowels, and that's why we get that funny feeling in the pit of our stomach when we're keeping a secret. We do surprises. So we don't do we don't really do secrets that make our tummy feel weird, or we just don't do secrets that make our tummy feel weird. We do surprises like birthday or silly plans or jokes that always get shared later. If something feels confusing or scary, like you might get in trouble if it's ever shared, or you might get in trouble for telling, that's something that you can always tell me right away. And this is a good moment to remind everyone on the call that the reason that I wrote punishment free parenting part one was because punishment is an ineffective tool for discipline. Second reason, equally important, if punishment was only an ineffective tool for discipline, then it would not be nearly as dangerous as I think punitive parenting is. The second reason why punitive parenting is so dangerous is not only because it's ineffective, but because it conditions children to hide things from their parents for fear of retribution or punishment. And so this is a good time to say, add on to the back of this, if you ever feel like you can't tell me something, you can, and you'll never be in trouble. But John, what if they are in trouble? No, this is what my point is. You can't ever get a child in trouble for telling you something that's going on with them because you set the stage that they will not tell you next time. Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, right? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, I don't remember. But the point is, your child will realize very quickly my my parent is not actually a safe person to bring things to because I get in trouble when I tell them things. And you bet your butt that that child predator is leveraging the punitive nature of most parents to say your parents will get you in trouble if you tell them this thing, or they will I will get in trouble if you tell them this thing. And oftentimes the kids then withhold those secrets. The fear that is underlying all of these secret questions is greatly increased when we have a child who is punished. A great example of this in my life, my nine-year-old, uh like he he had some problem at school with a teacher. And he goes to kind of a weird school, but neither here nor there. He came home and he said, Yeah, they threatened to call you if like I didn't start behaving, or you know, if I didn't get behind this line that I was supposed to be behind, or whatever. He was like violating a boundary and he was gonna get in trouble by calling his parents. And he was like, I would love if you'd call my mom. I yeah, please call my dad. He'll help us solve this problem together. Like it was not a threat to him at all because he was like, But my mom and dad are never gonna get me in trouble. Now it doesn't mean that there are no consequences, it doesn't mean there are no boundaries, it doesn't mean that you know everything is always hunky-dory and everything, but what the truth is is anything our kids ever tell us, they're never going to get in trouble for it because we don't want them to accidentally receive the message that they should keep secrets to protect themselves or others from us. So we can't be people who harm them or other people based on the things that they tell us, if that makes sense. Alright. Want to move on to number two, but before I do, I'm gonna take a quick break.
SPEAKER_00:Question number two is a dad from my membership.
Jon @WholeParent:Shout out Alex. He said, My son is eight, and he's very rule oriented, like extremely. He came home upset because a kid at school told him something like, Don't tell or you'll get in trouble. He didn't tell me what it was, he kept saying he promised. I told him that promises don't count if somebody's going to if something somebody's doing something wrong, but he just kept shutting down and getting super rigid and weird about it. I must, must, might have pushed him too hard because then he cried and wouldn't talk at all. Did I mess this up? Also, why do kids take stuff like this so literally? Okay. Two things very quickly. Three things, let's say. One, I probably should have held off and said the whole thing about uh not getting kids in trouble until I actually read this question live. I was like, I need to go and talk about this, but I forgot that I was about to talk about this in a minute. So that that that's on me. But one, I don't think that you did anything wrong. That said, I think that kids do receive the message from us and other people. If they are getting in trouble or if they are receiving consequences or punishments and retributive ways for things that happen, that they do need to keep silent and they do need to hide things from us. Again, this is the old analogy of you know the person who's speeding on the highway. Uh, if you get a ticket for speeding on that highway, you don't learn to slow down, you learn to look for cops. Right? The same thing is true for a kid. If they get in trouble at school or in a peer group or something, they don't learn to not do that thing, they learn to not get caught for that thing. And one of the ways in which they will not get caught is to just not tell, to not tattle. And that's exactly what this friend or peer is leveraging in this case, this idea that he is going to get in trouble. So I don't think you did anything wrong, but I will say that if you've been using, which I know we're we're past this point because you and I have gone back and forth in group coaching so many times, and we've it's a whole thing, right? But we've gone back and forth enough in group coaching to know that if you stop using punishments and this is Older question, this has been since resolved. But if you stop using punishments, then your child will stop thinking that they are going to be punished. And a lot of this stuff can be uh re-reframed in a more positive way, you won't run into this problem. The second question here was why do kids take things like this so literally? And that's just because kids' brains function very, very literally. If they get put into this is what we call a bind, right? Or a catch 22, where they feel like they have to choose between following their sense of loyalty to a friend, or their sense of safety, or their sense of loyalty to you, that puts them in a very high stress scenario. And their brains function in these black and white spaces. So the key for you is that you have to unpack and deconstruct that loyalty with the child so that they understand that that they're experiencing this dissonance or this tension or this stress. So instead of demanding disclosure and saying no, like be loyal to me, not to them, which is what parents often do. It's a it's an effect of power struggle, which is one of the last episodes I did. It's its own version of power struggle. Well, I'm the I'm the real authority here. So don't listen to a kid in class. Like I have the authority to really do something good or bad for you, so you should listen to me instead. And I am sorry to say that many parents do that. They they go to that. Instead, say, inname that conflict with that they're experiencing. It sounds to me like you're stuck between two jobs right now. You're stuck between being loyal and being safe. That's a really hard spot for a kid to be in. I wish you weren't, it didn't have to be in that place. My job is to keep you safe, not to get you in trouble. This resolves the loyalty bind first by saying, you're stuck here. I understand, but if you're worried about me getting you in trouble, I'm not gonna get you in trouble. Instead of saying, you need to tell me what this is right now, you instead move towards I can hear that you're you're trying to be loyal. And that's really that's a good thing. Being loyal is a good thing. My job is to keep you safe, and that means and and and also I'm gonna help to keep your friend safe. So that means sometimes I need to know things. I need you to be loyal, I need you to be safe. Don't put them in a place where they have to choose. Put them in a place where you're explaining to them that the choice that they're really making is between is not between loyalty and safety, it's between uh getting help with this problem and not, right? And that's that like our kids always want to come to us for help. Again, as long as they don't feel like they're gonna be punished, because that's not helpful to them. But our kids always want us to be helpful. The problem is sometimes they get put in these positions by, in this case, it sounds like a well-meaning or or you know, just a peer who doesn't know good or bad. Sometimes they get put in these positions by uh maladaptive adults or even harmful adults. Our job is to say, I'm here to help you solve this problem. And imagine for a second that you are your kid, right? How much more powerful is it when you're experiencing a problem, when somebody comes up alongside you and says, here, I'm here to help you solve this problem, rather than I'm here to fix this for you, or uh, I'm here to cause you greater tension and strife and and and more struggle, right? We many of us get put into positions where we have to choose one thing or over another thing, where we have a commitment over here to work, and we have another commitment over here to family, or we have a commit, you know, a commitment over here to one person in our life, or and another commitment being asked of us to another in another part of our life. Uh when one of the people who's involved in that mess comes up and says, I'm just gonna help you make this decision, and I'm not gonna punish you for the results. That takes all of the stress out of it, and it allows for that loyalty bind to be alleviated so that whatever decision's made, and in this case, disclosure, which is the right thing for the child, doesn't feel like betrayal. It feels like, oh, you're gonna help me with my friend, okay, cool. Like I'm you're on my team no matter what. Okay, alright, cool. That's great. That's what I'm looking for. That's actually what I need anyway. And I think that that can go a long way. So rephrasing everything that I just said about not punishing your kids, I also think another big piece of this is moving kids out of those positions where they feel like they're put into a uh I won't be your friend anymore if you tell anybody situation. And sometimes as a parent, you're gonna need to then, you know, if they tell you something in confidence that's not a danger to them or or their friends or anybody else, you have to make a call. Like, do I do I then go and and tell the other you know, child's parent when it's just like something seemingly innocuous, right? My friend peed in his pants and he didn't tell anybody or something, but you know, they're older kids. And you like, do you want to call the parent and you say, well, just so you know, this hat like you have to make that call. This is again, this is an eight-year-old. Sometimes eight-year-olds have to you know make decisions. You may not want to disclose to the other parent if you as the adult go, oh, okay, my kid brought this to me, and this is not a big deal. But also, you may need to, and that will be another processing thing for you and your child. So, all of this to say, I think that's the way to help your kids in that specific scenario where they're being put under that pressure.
SPEAKER_00:All right, let me take one more break and come back with the last question. Our final question comes from Jenna.
Jon @WholeParent:She says, My four-year-old told me today that she has a secret friend, and I immediately panicked. Thanks, internet. She says that I that it's just pretend, but then later she said something like, He told me not to tell you, and my brain just went straight to the worst case scenario. I asked a million questions and she got annoyed, and now I feel like I made it worse. I grew up in a house where you did not talk about things, like you kept stuff to yourself, you didn't bring your problems to adults unless it was really, really serious. So when my kid says something is secret, I don't know how to just be chill. I either want to shut it down completely or interrogate it to feel better. I don't want to mess this up or teach her the wrong thing. I also don't want to ignore any red flags. How do I handle this without overreacting and making her feel weird about telling me stuff? I think, Jenna, if I had a kid, my four-year-old, who came to me and said that exactly, I have a four-year-old now who said I have a secret friend, and she told me not to tell you, or he told me not to tell you, I think I would jump to the panic thing too. I'm not saying that that it's that it's warranted, but I am saying that I have been I have watched enough news and I have, you know, been sufficiently scared by enough of the stranger danger videos that I saw when I was growing up to for that to send off red flags for me. And I'll tell you exactly what I would do before I gathered any more information because I'm I'm assuming that your child is safe at home with you in that moment, and they're not going away from you uh in the next five minutes or even the next five hours, most likely. They're, you know, home after school or something like that, or preschool in the case of a four-year-old. I would focus first on regulating my emotions and body and easing the triggers and calming myself down to be calm and available, and instead of interrogating, getting curious. And I think that that's different, right? I think instead of being an interrogator who's like trying to break your child like it's some episode of Law and Order or something, I think what we really want here is to figure out how to be a person who your kid wants to talk about to. In some ways, the goal at the beginning is not even to figure out what the secret is in the immediate moments, it's to show her that you are the person who she should be bringing secrets to. And that's a hard difference to be. They will do that. Like they will identify that. And the thing is, for a four-year-old, they don't know that what they're saying is like the definition of like some horror movie. I, in fact, this is kind of like one of the subplots. And the if you've if you're watching the final season, or maybe you already watched, it's it's all done now. I'm not caught up yet. This is the joys of having so many kids that you sometimes lose track of them at the library. Um, I I promise I don't really lose track of them at the library. My library's too small. Um, but yeah, you have so many kids that you don't catch up on stranger things. But you know, one of the subplots in the in the final season is like kids who are talking to an who they believe to be an imaginary friend, or you know, this this figment of their imagination, but actually it's a deep demonic force that's trying to kidnap them. That's the subplot of the show because that is exactly what all of our minds freak out and go to. And so it feels relatable and believable. And so your kid, but your kid doesn't know that. Like they literally don't have any clue that what they're the signals that they're sending are like all of the red flags, all of the alarm bells. And so when you react so big, what happens is they go, oh, that is a big deal. And if it is truly an imaginary friend, which it happens at four years old, it can absolutely, kids it can have imaginary friends, they can talk to themselves, like it's it's totally developmentally normal. Um, the when that happened, if it is truly an imaginary friend, that actually intensifies the experience of keeping it from everybody else, because when I told somebody they freaked out about it. And so the key is in all aspects of parenting, regulate yourself before doing anything else, which includes regulate yourself before feeling the need to gather all of the information because you're gonna come off like you know, a detective interrogating, tell me about this secret friend, tell me who they are, don't what's their name, what do they look like? Give me a description, right? Like that's how you're gonna come off. Because you're panicking. And I'm not even saying that I wouldn't panic. Like, that's the important thing that I'm trying to say here, Jonathan. Like, I'm not saying that I would not panic. I'm saying that when I panicked, if I was smart, which I'm not even saying I would be, or emotionally available, which I'm not even saying I would be, like in that moment, but if I could be, if I could give myself advice, I would say, hey, go take a walk around the block, do whatever you need to do, do some grounding exercises, calm down, and regulate yourself so that you can be the type of person who she wants to bring things to. I want to just go all the way back to the beginning of your question to kind of highlight what I'm and this is maybe a bad assumption, but what I'm seeing. My four-year-old today told me that she has a secret friend, and I immediately panicked. She immediately then she says it's just pretend. But later she said, he says not to tell you. Of course, that freaks you out. Also, if it was truly an imaginary friend, she tells you that she has an imaginary friend and you panicked. So she said, I was just playing pretend. Later, she keeps playing pretend and goes, Yeah, my pretend friend says we're not playing pretend with mom because she freaks out. Of course, it could be the worst possible case scenario, and your brain is evolved to send you there. Your brain is evolved to act first, think and ask questions later. And that's what you're that's what you're doing. You're reacting like you have a tiger chasing you because that's what it feels like. But you don't. In that moment, your real job is to become the person who they want to talk to. And so if you do that, and if you regulate, and if you become calm and available, and the person who they want to bring hard, scary things to, then you get to go back with something like, hey, earlier I asked a lot of questions, right? Repair first. I'm not mad, I can handle whatever you want to tell me today or whenever. If you start with that regulation, you get to say, hey, so earlier you said something about a secret friend. Can you tell me more about that? I'm interested. I want to know about stuff going on with you. Another plug here, by the way, to care about the stuff that your kids care about, even at four years old. I was really impressed today that my wife went on eBay and found my four-year-old is into this random Netflix show that he likes. Um, but it's like old, not like super old, like five years old or something. And they're they don't sell the toys from this show anymore. And we don't give our kids a lot of like a ton of toys, but it's his birthday, so you're gonna get him something. And she went on eBay and she found like a toy from this show that he likes and a uh ready reader book of like the you know, level one ready reader book of this show that he likes. And that took awareness and consciousness in the life of a three-year-old to say, this is the thing that you're into, and I'm gonna be into it with you. But if you're that type of parent, they want to tell you about their imaginary friends too, because you're interested in the things that interest them. And so that's another that's another beautiful piece, right? You don't have to be crazy about it or anything, but just signal through your tone, through your timing, not through urgency, because kids are gonna freak out if the adult nervous system is going crazy, the kids are gonna panic too. But signal to them through your calm, confident presence that you're safe and that you are the person who they want to bring these things to, and that you care about the things that they care about. And all of a sudden, the secret friend that probably isn't really what we're talking about, most likely, comes out or all of your worst fears are realized. And that is a possibility, right? It's a possibility that all your worst fears are realized, but if all of your first worst fears are realized, you want your child still to bring that to whom? You so signal safety through how you respond to secrets. Going all the way back to the beginning of the episode, you can you can say, hey, you can have privacy, you can do surprises, but we don't keep things secret forever in our family. We don't hold things like that. Mom and dad won't do that, you don't do that, everybody, we're gonna put things out on the in the open, out on the table. You can do all of that, you can have that home. But two, if you want your kids to bring things to you, you can't punish them and and um uh uh get them in trouble for doing so. And three, when your kids bring things to you, if you res react with these huge oversized reactions, they're gonna feel that that's an unsafe place to bring things, and they're gonna stop bringing things to you even if you don't get them in trouble. If it just seems to really stress you out. And none of those things are what we want. We want to be the people. And and I want to just say here at the very end of the episode, this is all I have for you today. We're we're at the end. I just want to say, we're we're threading very, very fine needles here. This is impossibly hard stuff to be like, oh, I want to be I want to be available, but I want to give space, I want to have boundaries, but I want to give autonomy and freedom. I want to, and there's so many challenges in parenting, you're gonna screw up so many times, but some of the stuff that we're talking about is just so massively important. And yes, we're talking about four-year-olds and eight-year-olds and six-year-olds in this episode. Everything that I'm saying here matters a lot for 14-year-olds and 18-year-olds and 16-year-olds because you still don't want them keeping secrets about the big stuff later on. And if we can do a good job now, then when those big, actually life-altering, shifting things, those huge secrets, the friend who you know is considering taking their own life, or the pregnancy scare, or the uh I don't have a designated driver, and I'm drunk at this party that I'm not even supposed to be at. All of those really big things later, or I'm talking to this guy online and he seems great, and I'm gonna go meet up with him next weekend, but I've never seen him, right? All of those really dangerous situations that our teenagers are gonna find themselves in, they're gonna remember. When I was four, not explicitly, but implicitly, they're gonna remember in their nervous system when I was four and I had a secret and I brought it to mom, she was there. She didn't punish me. She didn't freak out. And that is the person that they'll want to call. Alright. See you tomorrow. It's gonna be a really fun episode with my wife. 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 if 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. You can share that with someone else too. And so I encourage you, just go over, shoot them a quick text, share this episode with them, or share another episode that you feel like is particularly relevant to them. The last thing you can do is go down to the link show notes at the bottom, and like I said in the mid-roll, you can subscribe on Substack. It's$5 a month or$50 a year. Uh I don't have that many people doing it, and yet the people who are doing it have made this possible. And so if you like this episode, if you like all of the episodes, if you want them to continue, the only way that I can keep making them is through donor support, free will donations to the podcast. Please, please, please, please, as you're thinking about the end of this year, as you're thinking about your charitable giving. I know I'm not a 501c3. 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.
