Episode 214: Finding KIND: Meeting Ourselves with Grace and Compassion while Raising Complex Kids with Kari Baker
/In this week’s episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast, we dive into the journey of parenting neurodivergent kids while learning and growing alongside them. I'm joined by Kari Baker, author of Finding Kind and founder of Kind Families, to explore what kindness truly means in family life.
This conversation is raw, honest, and deeply compassionate.
Here are the key takeaways:
Challenges and complexities of raising a child with an invisible neurological difference
Shifting from concealing to embracing a neurodivergent child's identity
Embracing neurodivergent children’s strengths instead of seeing them as problems
Supporting neurodivergent individuals through recognition, representation, and societal inclusion
How neurodiversity and individuality challenge traditional success narratives and parenting approaches
Embracing neurodiversity and adapting parenting to support children's unique strengths
If you want to connect with Kari, visit her websites at kariabaker.com and kindfamilies.com. Follow her on Instagram @kariabaker, Facebook @kariabaker, and LinkedIn @kariabaker.
Join us this week as we dive into the journey of parenting neurodivergent kids, embracing their strengths, and adapting our parenting approaches.
A crucial part of being a parent of complex kiddos is finding community and support. If you are looking for an opportunity to connect with me IN PERSON, I’d love to invite you to my upcoming retreat for caregivers. I’ll send out more information soon, but you can check it out here if you’re interested! I’d love to get to spend a couple days really connecting with you and supporting you in this stage of your parenting journey! Head here to learn more! www.laurafroyen.com/retreat
TRANSCRIPT
Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.
Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!
Laura: Hello, everybody. This is Doctor Laura Froyen, and on this week's episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast, we're going to be diving in on the mental space of a parent who is learning alongside their child how to support their neurodiverse kid out. So to help me with this conversation, I'm bringing in Kari Baker. She's written a beautiful book called Finding Kind. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about what kind means to her and what a kind family is. But before we get in there, I just want to give the listener a heads up that the, we're two moms who are going to be talking, very vulnerably about our experiences with coming to understand ourselves and our families on a deeper level, coming to a place of unconditional love and affirmation, not even just acceptance, but affirmation. For our kiddos who are neurodivergent. And I just, I know that that can be a conversation that for those listeners who identify themselves as neurodivergent might find challenging at some point or another. So I just wanted to give you a heads up, just know that it is always okay to be kind and compassionate to yourself, giving yourself grace.
And if at any point in time, this conversation isn't serving you, it is okay to turn it off, and it's also okay to let me know. So am I, cause I always want all of my families that listen to this podcast to feel loved, seen, and supported here. And part of that is kind of grappling with our own internalized ableism and the stuff that comes up when we find out something new about our kids. So that's what we're gonna be grappling with today, and I'd love to have you along for the ride. So, Kari, welcome to the show. I'm so grateful to have you here with me.
Kari: Oh, thank you so much.
Laura: Yeah, yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do, and then we'll dive in.
Kari: Okay. Well, I'm actually in what I call version 2.0 of my adult life because I spent 30 years in the financial services business. I was a 401k consultant, so I helped people plan for retirement. I worked with the companies directly at managing their 401k plans, but I have my son Brady, who is 13 years old, going on 14. He constantly reminds me. And when he was 3, he was diagnosed with autism, and it kind of was a very slow burn in starting a shift in my Desire to help people in a different way. So, over the course of several years I just started feeling pulled away from the financial services world and I really felt drawn to help support families and, and kids who are what I call kind. A kid with invisible neurological differences. So a couple of years ago, I was very blessed.
I had the opportunity to sell my practice and really focus full time 100% on Kind Families, which is an organization that is just there to encourage and support and provide some scaffolding for parents that may be going through a new diagnosis with their kids and, kind of just share our experience so that families know that they're not alone. And that the feelings that they have when everything comes on them is okay. And just to let them know how we worked through that in our family and continue to work through that, especially as my son is in middle school and all the things that come along with that. So, it's just been a joy to really focus on the thing that's nearest and dearest to my heart, which is my son and, and celebrating who he is.
Laura: So I love that. And I really love this. The way that your KIND acronym pulls out this invisible piece to it. And in the book that you have coming out, you talk a little bit about that, about how this visit, you know, this invisible aspect of these disabilities can add a layer of complexity, both for the kids' lives, and for the parents who are supporting the kiddos. I'm kind of curious if you can speak to some of that complexity for you and your own personal experience with, you know, raising a kid with one of these invisible neurological differences.
Kari: Right. Well, so there, there certainly is a practical aspect to it where, if we are in a grocery store or, you know, in a therapy office or something like that, my, my son looks just like every other kid out there on the, on the planet. I always throw in, I think he's a little bit better looking, but you know, that's just the mama's mama's bias there. But, so sometimes there's some dysregulation that's going on. And you're in a room full of strangers, and as a parent, um, we know why it's happening, especially once we have that diagnosis and we've gone all through the training, but there is this, feeling of, okay, everybody else doesn't know what's going on, so they just think I'm a bad mom because my, my son is, you know, having something stimulate him, overstimulate him or frighten him, or just send him into this fight or flight mode and nobody else understands what's going on.
So all of a sudden I'm thinking that the focus is on me instead of on somebody looking and saying, oh, that child must have some kind of neurodiversity that's, you know, most people are not going to think that. So, you know, for a long time with my son, my husband and I being completely ignorant about autism when we realized that was what he had. We were really fearful of sharing his diagnosis with other people. So even in school, we were able to have an aid in his preschool after he was diagnosed and through kindergarten, and other families would ask us, well, why does he have an aid in the classroom? And we would just say, oh, he just has developmental delays that we're working through. And it was, you know, there was a little bit of fear that the other families would hear autism. And not want their kid to play with our kid or not want their kid to sit at the table with, with my son in, in his kindergarten class, which actually did happen.
So some of our fears were actually realized by some parents that just didn't have a frame of reference like, like we did. So there's a difference for the child in that, you know, they're, they're walking along the street, but they're, they're experiencing the world in a completely different way than the rest of us do. And that that will show itself in ways that are sometimes surprising to other people. But then there's also a kind of an internal. Shame factor. And when I say shame, I want to be really careful that nobody thinks, I am not afraid. I'm not ashamed of my son in any way, shape or form. And I never was, even from the moment that I received the diagnosis. I was ashamed that I hadn't accomplished this pinnacle of motherhood that I thought I was. Going to achieve when I became pregnant, you know, my kid was gonna be smart and he was going to be athletic and he was going to be social, and he was going to be popular and he was going to be all of these things and he was going to be well behaved certainly because, you know, I was, raised to be a well behaved child and that's just what you do.
And so when I came upon a mothering experience that was so different from what I had planned, I felt ashamed in that I, the fact that I hadn't been able to pull it off, you know, I was a planner by nature. I had a certificate on my wall that said I was a certified planner, you know, I was, I was supposed to be the one that could set a plan out and have it come to fruition exactly the way I had said, and My parenting path was going to be very different from the very beginning. So, that, you know, the invisibility was also an enabler for us to kind of keep a lid on Brady's diagnosis to anybody who wasn't just in our very tight close family and friends circle, and you know, we had to learn over the course of several years that that was not the way. To address his neurodiversity and to give him the confidence that he was born exactly the way he was supposed to be born. And that he needed to have that foundation of identity that was not in a diagnosis, but in all the gifts and talents and challenges too that he was born with.
And so it was, you know, in some cases it was, I call it in the book, I call it the invisibility cloak if there's any Harry Potter fans out there. My son was a huge is, and is still a huge Harry Potter fan. But, you know, we used our invisibility cloak a lot because, you know, he looked just like every other kid. So if we could manage to get through the grocery store or go to a movie or something like that and not have him experience some of this dysregulation, we could just pretend like we were those parents that we had set out to be and planned to be.
Laura: There's a few, there's a few layers of this that I wanted to pull apart just for our listeners. And one of, like, one thing that came to mind just at the very end, as you were saying it, there's a certain privilege to having an invisible disability because you can pass, right? And there's a risk inherent with it, because when you can pass, then you do, and you try and you mass. And that's exhausting, and leads to burnout for our gorgeous autistic brains, you know, and even like for my ADHD brain, like I'm coming out of it like two year period of burnout, of kind of just lifelong masking, of just over-functioning, you know, in a world that's not set up for us. So there's that, like, there's this double-edged sword of, you know, privilege and, and risk, right? And then there's this other piece of it that is You know that that you were talking about here that I feel like I hear echoed in so many mothers' experiences of parenthood, whether they've got an art divergent kiddo or not, the, the piece of it that is, things are not going as we expected them to. I mean, from the moment of attempting to get pregnant and bring a child into the world, parents face that.
Reality check of like, we don't get to choose a lot about what happens. Like, we don't get to choose how the kid gets into our bodies or whether it can or not, you know, we don't get to choose how the, you know, the child comes into our families. We don't get to choose, you know, what that child, who that child is and what they've got going on. There's, there's just a lot of ways that things can go in an unexpected direction, and we all have to grapple, right, with It's just that unexpected shift, and with that comes needing to take a look at our assumptions, our assumptions about what's normal, normal, what and and the the kind of the the ableism that is this, you know, the soup of ableism that we're all swimming in, right? So we're all swimming in this soup of racism and prejudice in a variety of ways and a, you know, a variety of identities and ableism is one of them, right? And so, I don't, I don't know for you, but for me, I've had to do a lot of examining on that front. Unlike you, so my daughter, oh, and just for the listener to know, our children have given us permission to talk about, anything that we're talking about today, our children have given us permission to talk about, and we just aren't talking about the things that they haven't given us permission to talk about, right? So I had a, you know, so my daughter came to her diagnosis a little bit later.
She was 10, and luckily we had already been supporting her and her neurodivergence in a variety of ways that had exposed her to and and our family to the reality of living in just a neurodiverse setting. So we were already in a school that was supportive of her, she'd been going to OT for years, you know. Like, we were already doing those things. And so when we got this autism diagnosis, it, you know, she already had friends who were autistic. She already had friends who had ADHD. It was easy for her to just kind of be out and proud and loud with her autism. Like it is, it is just an aspect of her, her being that is, you know, and so we didn't have those layers to deconstruct because I think we'd already done a lot of that work, you know, kind of without knowing of the name. And I had done that work just professionally too. But I feel curious for you in the, in the years where it came, where you were coming to the kind of shifting from the, oh, this is something that I don't know we, we can talk about freely to now something that you've written a book about and are, are talking about freely. Can you tell me about the, that, that shift, away from maybe this is something we need to keep to ourselves versus this is something to be, to be talking about, you know?
Kari: Right. Well, I think, you know, identity and purpose finally started to shift my mindset. And it took several years. I mean, I, Brady was diagnosed at 3, and I didn't really start to become free and talking about it until we finally enrolled him in a school that was for kids who need some specialized learning environments when he was in 2nd grade. And so this wasn't an overnight, like I had a lightning bolt come. Down and hit me that, oh, he's made exactly the way he was supposed to be made. It was a long term shift, and a lot of it had to do with me really kind of starting to lean into faith that I hadn't leaned into for my entire life. And, and that helped me take the focus off of me. So what I realized was a lot of the pain and a lot of the frustration that I was feeling.
Because I was clinging on to this plan that was not, I had no business making the plan for my son's life in the first place. Like, who do I think I am that I am God and I can say, okay, my child will be this way because I so say it, you know, and wave my magic wand and So it, it's slowly through, you know, learning that the world isn't all about me, first of all. And, and starting to see all of these gifts and talents that that that started to emerge in my son, you know, he was, this kid is not afraid of a microphone and never has been since the day he was able to talk and You know, I think back to in 1st grade, they had a, a talent show and he decided he wanted to play the piano and he knew how to do, you know, 3 little, notes with it, with one hand, and he got up on stage in front of 100 people and played this little song, this little Ode to Joy song. And then when the MC tried to say, you know, thank you, Brady, he ran up and grabbed the microphone and took it from the MC and was like, for my second song, I will play, you know. They just, we were all stunned, but so he has this, this, this performance aspect to him that's amazing.
He writes stories. He would sit in the basement with my dad and narrate these creative writing stories to my dad. And so every holiday, you know, we're coming up on Thanksgiving, we're going to have a Thanksgiving story that Brady wrote with my dad and the, the, the more I learned that, this was not in my control, first of all. And once it was out of my control, I knew I couldn't change it. So I spent the first few years, I mean, I was different from you, Laura, in that I knew nothing about autism. I did not know anyone with autism. I didn't know anything about child development. I knew that there were some things that were a little bit different about Brady, but I didn't put it together until I read an article in a magazine that had a quiz at the bottom. I took the quiz and I got 15 out of 15 questions correct or wrong. I don't know how you want to look at it, and it got them correct and it said your child needs to be evaluated for autism spectrum disorder. And so, I was just completely ignorant, really, to what autism was, what it meant for his future. So that was part of the reason for holding it close to the vest because I just didn't understand it.
Laura: I needed time to educate, to learn and to come to a place of acceptance.
Kari: Well, and also I was so busy trying to fix it. So you know I felt that I felt the devastation of the realization that it was autism, not knowing anything about autism. And then it was like I hit the ground and said, okay, now what do we do? And my husband was just in lockstep with me. It's like, what do we do? And everything we read said you got to get as many services as you possibly can before they reach a certain age. And so we just started running and and, and we ran for years and just like you were saying. You know, the, you, we just, I had a point of burnout where I was like, okay, I'm doing everything that they're telling me to do. And I don't see autism going away, you know, it's not like we are helping him. He's certainly improving. We're getting the certain things that he's challenged with, the speech, the OT, the social communication, the physical therapy, like all those things that we can see in the reports that he's making progress, you know, but it's not going away. And so there was a realization that I couldn't fix it. And that if I was going to have any sort of joy in my life, I needed to start looking at all the things that he could do and do well. And he does. He's got all of these amazing creative gifts and talents that are way beyond what I could ever do.
And starting to focus on those and say, okay, how can we develop and nurture those things that he is good at? At the same time that we're trying to help him with the things that he's challenged with. And when I took the focus off of me and started placing it more on him and accepting who he was born to be with all of the wiring in his brain exactly the way it is, then that started to shift for me. And also finding community. I mean, that was another really big eye opener for me when we went to this school. It was the first time, you know, I had spent so long at this other small private Christian school that I was trying to hide Brady's autism. And then I got to the school and you know, we're standing in the pickup line and people are saying, oh, when did your son get diagnosed? And you know, what's, what are all his diagnoses or, you know, are you on medication? What are you doing? And it was this just startling realization that I'm like, people talk about this. It's not something to be ashamed of, right? It's something to keep in the dark.
No. And it was so incredibly freeing to be able to have those conversations and to be able to meet other parents that were going through very similar feelings and whose children were going through very similar stages and you know the things that I thought were just so that Brady must be the only kid on the planet who does. This, you know, whatever this is. And then meeting these other parents and they're laughing, going, Oh, gosh, Max has been doing that for years, you know. And so, you know, there is that community part kind of let me relax a little bit and, and then focus on, oh, wow, you know, here are the things that Brady can do. And do really well. And, you know, it's not to say that we don't still struggle with a lot and especially as a 13-year-old going on 14-year-old, you know, the all the challenges are shifting and we are having to, you know, kind of go with the flow and figure out how, how can we help him now, you know, in a way that is still letting him build independence and and give him confidence that he can do all these things.
Laura: Can do all of the things that teenagers are supposed to be doing? Finding themselves, exploring different identities and personalities. And I wanted to, can I pull out one thing that you said? So I wanted to just kind of highlight for the listener that there were, there's a couple pieces here. There's one coming to terms with the idea that you don't have control over this. And being able to kind of let go of that control, right? So I, I always say like, I think parenting for everyone is a constant lesson in the art of letting go. It's just that your kids are constantly teaching you how to let go. The other, I really love that you mentioned that you had to turn the focus off of you. When we are thinking about things like, oh gosh, are parents judging me or what are they thinking about me? Yeah, I mean, and this comes up in a variety of ways. Like, I think about this, like, I'm thinking about my kids' bedroom right now and how messy it is.
And, oh my God, I hope that like another parent doesn't like to see how messy my kid's bedroom is, you know, but that's about me, right? Like that's about me. And so really honing in on what, when we are faced with conflicts or when we're rubbing up against something that feels uncomfortable with our kiddos. What part of it is about me that I'm putting on them, right? That I can take off and put where it belongs, and maybe unburden myself with it too. Like, does it really matter that my voracious reader child who will read 5 or 6 books a day, has piles of books all over her room, like, And that they never make it back to the bookshelf. Like, is that really a problem? Because she's reading all the time.
Kari: Like, I know. Oh, your daughter sounds so much like my son. It's the same way.
Laura: You know, she has so many books she's written with her grandma. They sit down and she dictates the books too. I like them, they do sound very similar. Yeah, and then the other piece too that I was, I was hearing you talk about that I feel like all parents can identify with too, is that kind of that shift from looking from from lack to abundance, right? shifting from that scarcity, like what we're lacking, what we're missing to what we do have, and that shift from my child is a problem to be fixed, right? You know, and that I can fix it, right? So I think it would be very uncomfortable, you know, for I mean, so for me, that's how my ADHD was treated all the time as a child, that I was a problem to be fixed, that I was lazy, careless, you know. Just smart but not, you know, but not organized, you know, just all of the like messy and like, just all of the things, and that that was a problem with me that I needed to fix through being more like other people who could keep things organized, right?
And a big part of my work as an adult grappling with this adult diagnosis is unlearning all of those things about myself. And I think when we can do that work as parents, To unlearn that, like, I'm going to fix this thing that's not broken, right? Like your kid is not broken, right? Our kids are fully whole and wonderful just as they are. If we can do that shifting now, then maybe we won't hand that to them to have to undo later. You know what I'm saying?
Kari: Right? It's so much seems like so much better now, even than when Brady was first diagnosed too, that there is an emphasis in schools and in culture and you know, just even with the shows that are out now, the TV shows and things like that, where the people are embracing it and understanding it so much better. I mean, it's still, we're still on the very bottom of the hill that we're climbing with it, but it has been really neat over the last 10 years that I've been on this journey to see the shift from I don't know anybody like the, I, I wrote this book because I couldn't find a book that that was a family story of this is how it was for us. And I looked for it and I found a lot of medical journals, I found a lot of therapy, you know, guides and all that kind of stuff. Stuff. And now there's this um plethora, there's you know, there wasn't a podcast, there might have been podcasts 10 years ago, but I didn't know about them. But there's, you know, there's this information and connection point for families that are going through this now and Just from the sheer demographics of it, you know, the world's got to get used to neurodiversity because, you know, and from the different types of diagnosis that I talked, talk about in kind, it's gonna be like 1 in 5 kids right now that have some kind of neurodiversity.
So, you know, it's, it's the world's gotta, gotta get used to it. My son once asked me if he could have a quote unquote normal job. When he was older. And I said, well, first of all, I don't think you'd want a normal job because you'd be bored to death with it, but You know, I, I really kind of see it as, you know, as it used to be maybe in 1950 with women being in the workplace that, you know, at the, at the time, there weren't a lot of women in in managerial roles and, and those kinds of things, and men weren't weren't quite sure what to do with it. Well, now, you know, we're in this position where the demographic of neurodiversity is just growing and they have skills and they have all of these, these, These features that they could offer an organization to make that organization better. and companies are starting to realize that now.
Laura: And I think too like they've always been there, right? So neurodivergent people have always been there for forever. But with more recognition, more people, more people actually getting a diagnosis and being able to, you know, learn how to advocate for themselves young for accommodations, the workplace will be, I think, will become more More accommodating, more, supportive, and allow for those folks to have their, their gifts flourish, right? as opposed to just having to mask and make it through and have it be exhausting being out in that world versus, you know, cause the world. Traditionally it is not made for us, right? And so the I'm having them having the world making those shifts is so, I agree, so wonderful, and I also think having you know, so there's lots of parts of social media that are not great, but one of the best parts of it, in my opinion, is, is the kind of the actually autistic community and getting to learn from them. I value that so much when it comes to Learning about the future that's possible for my daughter, learning about what, you know, her experience of even just the things that I say that I think are good, that might actually not be good, might be harmful. You know, just being able to really vulnerable learn from folks who are Actually experiencing the world as my daughter is likely going to experience it. Super helpful.
Kari: It is. I love that too. I remember the first time I met an autistic adult. He was a teacher at my son's school that I sent him to in 2nd grade. And Brady had come, he'd been talking about this guy for, you know, several weeks and about how much he loved him. And I think I went for a Thanksgiving, lunch, luncheon one time at the school and I met him, and he asked me, he said, is, is Brady on the spectrum? And I said, Well, yes, he is. I kind of figured everybody knew that because of the school that he was at. And he said, so am I. And it was this just like wake up moment for me, like, oh my gosh, this guy, he's a teacher, he's married, he's got kids, he's, you know, and of course, me being me, I reach in to hug him and he's like, oh, I'm not a hugger. And I'm like, okay, sorry about that. You know, I should have thought about it, you know, but I was just, um, I was so Just so honored to meet somebody that Brady could look up to. And I think there was just that connection for him too. Like, here's this guy that I love spending time with and he's got a brain that works like mine. And it was so cool for him to have that, you know, to have that relativity. And, and so yeah, I love that.
Laura: Yeah, my daughter loves seeing autistic kids represented on TV shows too, even if they are, they're kind of portrayed as autistic, but maybe it's not formally announced. Like one of her favorite shows is Investigators. Have you heard of that show?
Kari: Yes, we used to watch that show, yes.
Laura: And one of the girls,I think is kind of coded as autistic in there, and she loves her, loves that character. You know, so yeah, I mean, absolutely. Representation is important. I think I do think it's important to acknowledge that probably that man was not the first autistic person you met in your life, right? Probably not. Like, my guess is in the work that you did with you know, 401ks and big companies. My guess is you met a lot of people. They maybe didn't even know it themselves though. Do you know what? I mean.
Kari: Absolutely. And when you have a child, then when you're kind of in that world, you start to see it everywhere. It's kind of like when you buy a car and then you see that car everywhere out on the road. That's, that's kind of how it is for me too, that now I'm, I'm in this world. And even with, you know, people who I'm close to that might not have been diagnosed at any point in time, but, you know, I mean, what's important to you, I mean, people.
Laura: I don't love this saying, but like some some folks will say like, at least everyone a little bit autistic, and I think that they mean well when they say that it's not a great thing to say, but I think what, what it does help me remember is that autistic traits or ADHD traits are human traits, and they've been a part of humanity for forever. Some individuals just have more of them than others. But our brains are diverse. They are made to be flexible and, and plastic, and work in different ways and unique ways that serve our communities and keep our species healthy and alive and vibrant. And I, it's good to know that we're, we don't have to stay stuck in a modality of that there's just one way to be successful, right? There's just one way to work or to think about things. I feel very fortunate that my kid is coming of age in a time where there is just more acknowledgement, more awareness, more affirmation, right?
Kari: Well, and even just in a basic parenting mode, I mean, I, I always had kind of the creative bug, you know, I would, I like to sing in front of my mirror with the microphone, or with the hairbrushes a microphone and I, I love to, I used to love to write and but I kind of went into the business side of things because that's what you're supposed to do, you know, that's, that's how you become successful. That's, you know, nobody ever got an English major and you know, became, you know, became successful or whatever. And so, and I had that drilled in my head and so I'm very aware of that now when I'm When I'm looking at my son, who is not a fan of science, not a fan of math, you know, and I am not going to be, you know, pushing him into some spreadsheet job where he's going to be sitting at a computer, you know, doing those kinds of things. And so, You know, even at 13-14, I'm trying to think like where could we go? He loves movies, so he wants to be a movie director more than anything in the world, and he will dissect them to the granular level that you could not believe.
And so I'm trying to figure out how can you know I. Instead of being in the Christmas pageant at school, I want him to film it. I want him to get behind the camera at church. I want him to start really developing some of those things so that he doesn't have to wait 30 years. You know, this kind family thing for me is, I, I just, I can't believe the difference in doing something. That really relies on the gifts and talents that we were born with versus doing something that, you know, gets you by and makes you a good living and stuff like that, and I want him to experience that. Right away and not wait 30 years to figure out, oh, I want to write a book, or, oh, I want to direct a movie or something like that. You know, because the difference in my own satisfaction with everything that we're doing with kind families is just, it's like night and day.
Laura: So I, I mean, gosh, I agree. I think that, you know, the way the world tells us we have to be, to be successful is limiting to everyone. And there are certain kids, you know, who come into our families and demand something different from us. Whether they're neurodivergent or simply spirited, you know, there's, so I teach respectful and conscious parenting. And there are some kids who you can get by parenting in a very mainstream way. They, they, they, they will. Adhere to charts and rewards and punishments. They will, they will do those things. And then there are some kids who demand change. They demand something different. Both of my kids are those kids, one neurodivergent, one not, you know. But in our house, we have to figure out different, more collaborative and respectful ways to handle things because There is no alternative. And I think that it's so lovely having a more, I don't know, global conversation about this, so that we can all benefit from that, because we all are limited by, by something telling us what we can be. By a broader culture. We are all limited and impacted and kept in boxes that are, that chafe and aren't really good for us, you know? And I just feel so fortunate to have these kids in my family who are demanding growth from me, demanding change, demanding new perspectives. It's wonderful.
Kari: Well, and I, I think about it with my own career trajectory. Here I was, you know, with Brady's early on, just rejecting, trying to grasp onto this plan that of a parenting path that I, you know, was not what I wanted to, you know, I didn't have what I planned, and that frustrated me. And I wanted to hold on to this, this vision. And when I let go of that and I started to embrace him, I didn't just figure out his purpose, I figured out mine. Like I, it shifted me from a career that I thought I would spend the rest of my life in and I loved being in the financial services world for a long, long time. And, when I finally found that passion behind what I was doing, it shifted. Everything's just, just changed. And so my son's neurodiversity, I need to help him find his purpose because he helped me find mine. So this, this is, this is kind of the beauty of when you do let go and and you find what, what makes you passionate. You find what breaks your heart. You find what you want to help others doing and focus on helping others who have been on a path that you have are a little further down the road on, and it just makes all the difference. It really does.
Laura: I, well, gosh, Kari, thank you so much for your time. I wanna make sure, speaking of that community, I wanna make sure that my community can find yours. I would love to, especially for folks who resonate with the idea of having a spiritual connection. In helping navigate this process, figuring out who you are and where you are and how to support your kiddos. Can you let them know where to find you and connect with you?
Kari: Sure. So the easiest is kindfamilies.com. The website and through that you can get to my personal website where I go into more of the faith-based, speaking and writing that I do. So, and then the Kind Families podcast. So on Apple and Spotify, we have a variety of conversations that, sometimes are very focused on Kind and some. Sometimes they are just for fun, because sometimes we just need for fun.
Laura: Definitely, for sure. Well, Kari, thank you so much for being here with us and for what you're putting out into the world. And, a big thank you to your son for allowing you to share. I think it takes, you know, a lot of bravery to see your parents sharing things like this. So I appreciate him and you so much.
Kari: Well, thank you so much for having me. I loved the conversation, Laura.
Laura: Me too.
Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review that really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.
And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out um and definitely go follow me on Instagram. I'm @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes. Look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family and plus I share a lot of other, really great resources there too.
All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just to remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this!