When people talk about equality in relationships, many assume they are starting from the same place. But as Alex Trippier points out, parenting has a way of exposing a very different reality.

Alex Trippier, podcast host, writer, teacher, and speaker, shared his thoughts on the most common mistakes couples make in relationships, especially after children enter the picture. What followed was an honest and nuanced conversation about mental load, resentment, conflict, praise, modern parenthood, and why so many couples struggle once they become parents.

Alex’s insight comes not from theory alone, but from lived experience. He explained that he got married young, had three children by the time he was 30, and truly loved being a dad.
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“I just loved it,” he said. “I loved having young children.”

He was deeply involved in daily parenting. He worked with children professionally, spent a lot of time with his own kids, and was convinced he was doing fatherhood well. “I felt like a great dad,” he said. “I felt like I was nailing it.” The world seemed to agree. He was praised by strangers, by friends, and by other people in his life. But at home, things felt very different.

“The only person who seemed to disagree with my top dad status was my wife, who was really underwhelmed by my kind of fathering.” That disconnect became painful. Their relationship suffered. They argued often, and those arguments had a deep physical and emotional effect on him. “I found those arguments incredibly painful,” Alex said. “They would sort of stay with me in my body for days. They made me feel sick.”

The breakthrough that changed how he saw his marriage

The turning point came when Alex and his wife tried a Gottman exercise focused on understanding each other’s perspectives. The task was not to agree, but to understand the other person well enough to say their perspective back in their own words.

For Alex, it was mind-opening. “It was just so illuminating to realize that A, that my wife saw the world completely different to me, but also that two people could be doing what they thought made them good parents and those be completely different things.”

That insight widened as more of his friends became parents. He began noticing that many of them were having the same arguments. “I basically looked around at all my mates having kids and realized that everyone was having identical arguments.”
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That realization led him to a deeper understanding. The issues were not just personal. They were cultural. They were about the very different expectations placed on mothers and fathers.

Discovering the language mothers already had

Alex described picking up The Motherhood Complex by Melissa Hogenboom and immediately realizing there was an entire conversation happening that many men never entered. “From the second I opened it, I was like, wow, there’s this kind of huge debate raging amongst mothers. There’s all these words, mental load, maternal gatekeeping, like all these things that describe the things that I can see going on around me. But no one expects dads to read these books.”
That was a major part of the problem. The information existed, but it was not assumed to be relevant to men. Alex was struck by how much of motherhood involved guilt, shame, and judgment in ways that simply did not apply to fathers.
“All of that stuff is just completely absent for men.”

Once he began to understand those patterns, it changed the way he responded. Instead of seeing the issue as personal criticism, he could see it as something much bigger than himself. “Because they weren’t about me, I didn’t have to be defensive about them. Because it was everyone,” said Alex. “It was just enormously freeing.”

What mental load actually looks like

One of the clearest parts of our conversation was Alex’s explanation of mental load. He was not absent. In fact, he was doing many of the visible parenting tasks. But he was not carrying the invisible planning behind them. “I was taking my kids to the doctor. I was taking my kids to school. I was going to parents’ evening. I was cooking dinner.”

But then he explained what he had missed.

“What I hadn’t done was book the doctor’s appointment. I didn’t know when the shots were for the kids. I hadn’t kind of ordered the food to make the dinner. I hadn’t been the one who’d done the research for the school.”

That distinction matters. A parent can look highly involved while still relying on the other parent to do the anticipating, planning, scheduling, and decision-making that keeps everything running. Alex summed it up plainly: “I was showing up, but only once everything else had been sorted out for me.”

And that led to the kind of misunderstanding that many women know well. One partner is stressed, overextended, and mentally carrying the whole operation. The other is confused because, from their point of view, family life looks manageable and even enjoyable.

“I was like, what’s your problem? Why are you so stressed? This whole thing is really, really fun. The problem is you and your attitude.”
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Then came the truth he had not been seeing. “My wife was working just as hard as me outside of the home and then twice as hard in it.”

Why do so many couples struggle after having kids? How can wives ask their spouses for help? Why is complaining about mental load and household chores often a really bad pitch for men, and how can you ask for help in a way that is constructive and more likely to be received positively? Why is there still a huge imbalance in societal expectations when it comes to parenting, and how can spouses support each other instead of fighting?

For these insights and more, tune into Trust Me Mom Podcast, Episode 36 with Alex Trippier, available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

“You’ve rented space in your wife’s brain”

Alex has spoken online about the everyday ways men end up relying on women’s mental tracking systems. One of his most viral examples is simple but revealing.

He talked about asking his wife how many potatoes they had in the house. On the surface, it sounds trivial. But beneath it is the whole structure of mental load. “My wife is constantly stock keeping, right? She knows what’s in the cupboard in a way that I’m not.”

These are the kinds of tiny defaults that quietly push family management back onto mothers. And Alex emphasized that even with awareness, this takes ongoing effort.

“It’s constant work for both of us.” Why? Because the assumptions are deeply ingrained. “These assumptions that these things belong to mums, they’re incredibly powerful.”

He gave a concrete example involving their 17-year-old daughter’s trip abroad. When their daughter casually asked him for a ride to the airport, he suddenly realized how much his wife had already done without them ever discussing it. “She booked the tickets. She’d had all the conversations with all the other parents to make sure everything was safe. She’d ordered a shop for her to bring groceries, like just everything.”

Again, the visible task was easy. The invisible work behind it was enormous.

Why women’s anger is understandable, but not always persuasive

One of the most thought-provoking points Alex made was about the way the conversation around mental load is often presented to men.

He was very clear that women are often right. “Most of the time that is what is going on and that is absolutely what I was missing.” But he also explained why anger alone may not move men into action. As he put it, the message often becomes: “The mental load, the running of a household, the being in charge of all this stuff is terrible and painful and I want you to do it instead.”

Then he added, “Now that’s an appalling pitch.” He joked that this kind of pitch won’t “make it through the door” in a corporate environment.

His point was not that women should be less honest. It was that many men do not respond well to being handed something framed purely as misery. So what does work?

He offered one pitch that, in his experience, resonates with a lot of men: “Do you hate being told what to do all the time?” If the answer is yes, then the solution is clear. “If you don’t want to be told what to do all the time, then you’ve got to take charge of some of these areas.”

That means ownership, not passive help. It means taking over a task from start to finish, including the mistakes that come with learning.

Sometimes it is not weaponized incompetence

Alex also addressed a phrase that comes up often in these conversations: weaponized incompetence. He knows many listeners are quick to use it, but he made an important distinction.

“Sometimes it’s just incompetence, all right? Like sometimes it’s just not very good at stuff. No one’s ever told us we’re supposed to be good at it. We’ve never done it before.”

That does not excuse staying incompetent. But it does matter when couples are trying to change patterns. If a man is genuinely new to a task, there will likely be mistakes. The key is what happens next.

Alex shared a memorable story about packing for a family trip. He took responsibility, gathered all the children’s things, and even remembered the kite he was excited to bring. “I spent ages looking for the kite. I remembered the kite, but I forgot their socks.” All three children arrived without socks. What mattered was not that he forgot. What mattered was that he had to solve it. “Now I’m going to fix it.” He found a store that was open to buy the socks and even asked other parents for a spare pair.

That is the formula he keeps returning to. If a husband does the task and gets it wrong, he still has to be the one who carries the consequences and fixes the problem. Otherwise, the job has not really left his wife’s mental load.

Praise matters, but so does seeing the invisible work

We also talked about praise, and Alex was thoughtful about the complicated role it plays in fatherhood.

He acknowledged that men often receive a lot of praise for visible parenting. Dads get admired for things mothers do every day without comment. “There’s just something about dads playing with their kids that I think is lovely,” he said, describing the reaction many people have.

That praise can encourage involvement, but it can also reinforce a very low bar. “The universe thinks I’m a great dad, you’re clearly the problem because you can’t see that I’m a great dad.”

That mindset created real problems in his marriage. At the same time, he realized he was not seeing, and therefore not praising, the unseen labor his wife was carrying. “I wasn’t praising my wife for any of the invisible labor that she was doing because it was invisible and I had to train myself to see it.”

Once he did start seeing it, appreciation changed the atmosphere at home. He gave the example of finally noticing everything his wife had done to organize their daughter’s trip. “You’ve just organized this whole thing, haven’t you?” Then, just as importantly: “Wow, you’re amazing.”

He believes this matters deeply. “If you start noticing the thing your partner is doing, and I think this is men’s job, men should do this, if you start noticing, you will see it, you call it out, you will start getting it back.”

The four horsemen of bad conflict

Alex also reflected on the Gottman Institute’s four horsemen: criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt. He described the conflict pattern he and his wife used to repeat again and again.

“Our row was my wife would criticize. I’d get incredibly defensive.” Then it escalated. “We would go back and forth until I said something nasty, like hurtful. And then she would stonewall.” For him, that silence was unbearable. Eventually he would apologize, but not because the issue was resolved. “I would apologize even though I didn’t really believe it. And then so nothing got sorted.”

That cycle is one many couples will recognize. For Alex, one of the most important shifts was learning how to begin difficult conversations without criticism. He knows that is especially hard when you are tired and overwhelmed, but he believes it changes everything.

Instead of starting with accusation, he recommends starting with something more honest and vulnerable: “I’m really hurt. I’m really upset when this happened.”

And then adding, “I know you’ve not done it to hurt me, but this is how it feels to me when this happened.” That kind of opening makes it much harder for the other person to become instantly defensive.

A fight about chairs was not really about chairs

One of the best examples Alex shared was a recurring fight about dining room chairs. Their chairs were too big for the table, and when he did homework or school projects with the children, he would leave them out because they were awkward to move. His wife would come in and loudly push them back under the table.

They fought about it repeatedly.

But when they did the Gottman exercise and listened carefully to each other’s perspective, they realized the chairs represented something much deeper. For Alex, sitting with his children to help with homework was emotionally significant. “It was this big deal for me that I was gonna sit and give my kids this thing that I never got.”

For his wife, neatness and order were closely tied to her sense of safety and what it meant to be a good mother. “For her neatness and order and everything being where it was supposed to be was her way of being a good mum.”

Then came the larger realization. “You’re not bad, I’m not bad. This is us doing the best that we can … really, really trying for our children. And we just see this thing differently.”

And yes, the practical outcome was simple. “I am now gonna put the chairs back.”

Why being home with young children is so exhausting

We also discussed modern motherhood and why caring for young children is often underestimated, especially by people who compare it to traditional masculine work.

Alex said that when he talks about motherhood, many men respond with a list of the difficult things they do, often jobs involving the car, DIY, drains, repairs, or finances. But he sees a major difference between those responsibilities and the work mothers are typically carrying.

“These masculine jobs tend to be completable. They have a start and a finish and they’ll come up sporadically.” By contrast, he said the work often falling to mothers is “daily grind.” “It’s just constant meal prep. It’s laundry. It’s not even the doing of the laundry, but it’s like, where do all the clothes live in the house?” That kind of work never really ends. It renews itself every day, every season, every stage of childhood.

He also made the important point that expectations around parenting have risen dramatically. The standard for what makes a good mother is far more intensive than it was decades ago. “The expectations on what motherhood is,” he said, “have just got harder and harder and harder.”

Then he offered a blunt conclusion that many women will immediately recognize as true: “Being a stay-at-home mum is actually much harder than it was in the 70s.”

The case for paternity leave

Alex also spoke powerfully about the importance of fathers having time alone in full charge of their children. Not time supported by systems their partner quietly set up, but true sole responsibility.

Reflecting on his own experience, he admitted that for a long time he only thought he understood what his wife was doing. “I was living off systems, I was living off things you put in place and finding it really easy.”

Only later, when he had to manage without those supports, did he fully grasp the strain. “I’m really quite stressed and not having, this isn’t just kind of a great party time with the kids. I’m really shattered.”

He connected this to paternity leave policies in places like Norway, where fathers spend dedicated time alone caring for their child. In his view, that kind of experience changes men profoundly because they are finally forced to understand what caregiving really requires.

Rethinking masculinity

Toward the end of our conversation, Alex challenged the idea that older, more authoritarian models of masculinity are the answer to modern relationship struggles.

He dislikes the phrase “traditional masculinity” because he does not believe the world has always looked the same. But he was clear that the old model, where men are obeyed, emotionally distant, and dominant, is not the solution. “That is the disease,” he said.

What has brought him closer to his children, his partner, and his friends is not emotional hardness. It is emotional courage. “Being vulnerable and going and talking to someone that you love about the things that aren’t going well in your life, the things that you think might be wrong with you, the things that you’re scared of, that has led to me having incredibly deep relationships.”

I his view, vulnerability is not weakness - it takes strength. “Those things I’m describing, being vulnerable, being emotional with people, that’s what they take, right? They take bravery and they take resilience. They take toughness.”

The most important thing couples need to understand

As we wrapped up, Alex offered what may be the most important insight of the whole conversation. “You may come from a culture where you think that men and women are equal. But what becomes really apparent when you have children is that no culture at the moment feels that way about moms and dads.”

That is not about blame. It is about seeing reality clearly. “Once you can acknowledge that there is this real imbalance in what’s expected of your partner and that she is going to respond to those expectations,” he said, “then that becomes an external problem that you can both deal with together rather than it being this war that’s between you.”

That reframing is powerful. It shifts the conversation away from personal failure and toward shared responsibility. It gives couples a chance to stop fighting each other and start understanding the larger forces shaping their lives.
And that matters, because as Alex noted, the years of raising young children should be a season of shared purpose. Instead, they are often the period of greatest marital dissatisfaction.
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His message offers a better path. Awareness. Ownership. Appreciation. Vulnerability. Teamwork. Not perfection. But partnership.

Mike Draper did not take the traditional route to becoming a father who talks about parenting, relationships, and character-building online. He is a veteran, a former police officer (including SWAT), an entrepreneur, and a content creator. When you talk to him, his identity is crystal clear: “That's my favorite part. I never knew how much I would love being a dad until the moment I met Ellie.”

Mike shared with me how becoming a father transformed his priorities, why kids need structure more than perfection, and what he believes parents can do right now to raise resilient, thoughtful children. He also reminded me that humor matters, and he practices what he preaches, using it both in his content and in his everyday life as a dad.

From “Not a Great Student” to a Life Built Through Hard Things

Mike is candid about where he started. He was not the kid teachers would have bet on. “I was not a great student in high school. My freshman year, I failed nine out of 15 classes out of pure laziness.”

Sports helped him stay afloat academically, but what really changed his trajectory was the military. It started with something surprisingly simple: the cost of college. “I got a tuition bill from my local community college for I think it was like nine hundred and forty dollars for a fire science degree.” At that time, he thought it was, “Way too much money. I'm just going to join the military instead.”

He served in the Air Force for just over six years, living in multiple countries, then returned to Oregon, finished his bachelor’s degree while still serving, and became a police officer outside Portland. That career gave him a crash course in humanity. “Learned a lot, so much as a human, how humans interact, their motivations, their intentions, just a... super-fast life lesson… week one as a police officer.”

Later, he earned an MBA and ultimately moved into entrepreneurship and content creation. At first, it was to generate leads in a commission-based career. From there, it grew into teaching personal branding and sales systems to business owners.
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No matter how many professional “doors” he opened, Mike’s motivation stayed anchored in one thing: showing up for Ellie.

“I Will Let Nobody Hurt You”: The Moment Fatherhood Became Real

Mike describes a moment many parents recognize instantly: the shift from “I am going to have a child” to “this is a whole human being.”
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“And so the moment Ellie was born, and I lay eyes on her and hold her, I’m like, ‘I get it. I’m meeting Ellie for the first time,’ right? Which I don’t know if that’s a great way of explaining it, but it’s when I meet her — she’s her own individual person, her own being. And I’m like, ‘I will let nobody hurt you, little girl. You are mine to take care of,’ and just such a sense of responsibility and duty to take care of this little thing…”

That protective instinct becomes, in Mike’s view, a parenting philosophy. Your role is not to be liked. Your role is to prepare your child for life. “And it's when I tell my daughter that … I'm your dad first, and I'm your friend second.” He does not say this to create distance. He says it to create trust. Trust is built on consistency, guidance, and values. “I have a job here to make sure that you're taken care of and that I'm preparing you for life.”

The Reminder That Changes Everything: You Will Know Them Longer as Adults

One of Mike’s most powerful reflections is about time, and how quickly childhood passes, even when the days feel long. “Someone said for the majority of your life, you will know your children as adults. They're only small for a short while. This phase feels endless, but it's actually the shortest one.”

For Mike, this is not just a sentimental idea. It is a practical parenting mindset that helps him stay patient in the messy moments. “It’s just a reminder to zoom out and, and really recognize this isn't going to last for a long time. You're in the good old days.”

He even finds meaning in the little annoyances that pile up at home. “It's just a reminder that it's for a short while, but you're going to miss it. You're going to miss these things, even picking up. I'm thinking about my house here. I'm picking up some slime and some toys or whatever it is…”
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Mike’s message is clear: presence does not require perfection. It requires attention. “Cherish it, lean in, be super present, get off your phone, go play with your kids, go listen to their stories. I don't care how bad their stories are. Go listen to them.”

In this episode of Trust Me Mom (Season 2, Episode 35) available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, Mike Draper, a veteran, former police officer, entrepreneur, and influencer with more than 2.3 million followers, shared the lessons he has learned while raising his daughter, Ellie. Mike told me how becoming a father reshaped his priorities, why kids need structure and high expectations paired with strong support, and why parents must model the values they hope their children will develop. From his early struggles in school to the military, policing, and entrepreneurship, Mike’s journey showed how growth often comes from doing hard things.
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We also explored practical parenting ideas families can apply right away: why childhood passes faster than we realize, how to stay present in everyday moments, and how to help kids build confidence through effort and resilience. Mike emphasized that parents do not need perfect routines or complicated systems to raise strong kids. What matters most is showing up with consistency, honesty, humor, and the willingness to grow alongside them.

High Standards, High Support, and Why Parents Have to Go First

Mike and I discussed a parenting framework research often points to: high expectations paired with high support. Mike does not label it “gentle” or “strict.” He calls it structure, and he calls it growth. “I do believe that humans are either growing or they're declining, right? There is no neutral.”

He believes kids want structure because people want to improve. It feels good to win in your own life. “Humans like structure. They like to be needed; they like to grow. It feels good to expand what you’re good at and to improve what you’re weak at. It feels good. That’s winning, right?”

Then he brings it down to real parenting examples. He is not saying “be disciplined” in theory. He is saying: train for something hard and meaningful and show your child what consistency looks like. “She got her splits down in under 30 days… And then the next huge milestone was a pull-up. She had to have at least one strict pull-up, unassisted, from a dead-arm hang to chin above the bar, a full pull-up. And she got it. It took her six months to get it…”

He remembers what happened next, and every parent wants to witness it: earned confidence. “And her face, her body, and her reactions — and her confidence level across everything else she did besides pull-ups — were sky-high for so long afterwards.”

Mike is also blunt about the cost. You cannot hold your child to standards you refuse to live yourself. “If you're going to hold your kids to a high standard, it requires you to be on the same level.”

The Most Practical “Time” Advice: Check Your Screen Time

Parents often ask how to find time for it all: work, health, kids, marriage, life. Mike’s answer starts with honesty: “You have to do a self-audit. You’ve got to find the holes in your bucket. You have to relentlessly say no and cut other things out.”

Then he gives an action step that is simple and uncomfortable. “Whoever’s watching this right now, pull your phone out and open your settings. I want you to look at your screen time. How many hours are you spending on your phone? Just write it down. I'm not asking you to change it. Just write it down and see if it changes your life.”

The point is not shame. The point is awareness.

The Non-Negotiable That Keeps Everything Else Standing: Sleep

When families feel stretched thin, sleep is usually the first sacrifice. Mike thinks that is the biggest mistake. “Sleep should not go. If something is breaking apart in someone's life and one of the burners is burning down, I see sleep is kind of the first one to go. And that is literally the one thing you should not let go.”

For him, this is not motivational talk. It is biology. “It is the only spot that your body and your brain repairs itself from the rigors and stressors of life.”

Growth Comes From the Hard Things, and the Doors You Choose

When I asked Mike where he believes he grew the most, his answer was not tied to one job or one milestone. It was tied to discomfort. “The first thing that comes to mind is doing hard things.” He shared a metaphor that captures how parenting, careers, and big life changes really work. You do not see the full path until you start moving. “You gotta pick a door… You gotta go through door number one before you can look at door number 10. You just gotta start taking action.”

Parenting and Relationships: Do Not Tell Kids What to Do, Help Them Think

When we talked about dating, media, and the messages kids absorb, Mike pointed out something many parents struggle with. If you lecture, kids tune out. If you help them build discernment, they learn. “If you tell them the answer, it's not going to hit home if they think of it themselves as much right?”

Instead of “Do not date that guy,” he recommends a better approach, one that builds critical thinking. While watching movies with questionable character behavior, Mike recommends casually analyzing that behavior with your kids. “Just ask. Here's one idea is ask your daughter or son. If someone was doing that, what would you do or how would you feel? What do think they're going to do next?”

In Mike’s view, kids are not fragile. They are inexperienced, and they need reps. “Kids are just adults who haven't learned how to articulate their feelings as well, because they have fewer reps.”

The Parenting Win That Matters Most: Teach in the Moment

Some of the best parenting moments are small, and they happen right when something goes wrong. Mike shared a story about Ellie running through a parking lot to gymnastics. “She bolted from the car in the parking lot to the sidewalk, going through the parking lot.”

He did not wait until bedtime. He stopped everything. “No, we’re going to stay here all night until we have this quick conversation. That’s going to last 30 seconds, 20 seconds.”

Then he explained why it mattered, right when the lesson could stick. “It’ll save her life one day.”

He believes timing matters because emotion creates memory. “Your brain will attach memories to emotions. And good, bad, scary, this, that, whatever the emotion is, those are the things you remember.”

What I Am Taking From This Conversation

Mike Draper does not preach parenting as a performance. He lives it as a responsibility, with joy, intensity, and a deep respect for who his daughter is becoming.

His approach is a reminder that parents do not need perfect routines or elaborate systems to be better parents. We need standards, support, and presence.

We have all seen the memes about moms waiting for AI to take over their jobs. The mental load of motherhood has become a cultural shorthand for the invisible labor women carry every day. Doctor’s appointments. School schedules. Birthday parties. Grocery lists. Work deadlines. And the constant question humming in the background: Am I doing enough?
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For Sarah Dooley, founder of AI-Empowered Mom, that question became deeply personal. What began as survival mode with three children under 18 months turned into a mission to help parents use AI as a partner in managing modern family life.

​When “Having It All Under Control” Falls Apart

When Sarah and I first met years ago, she was a business executive who later became a technology consultant, traveling for work. No children. Structured life. Systems in place. “When we first met, I thought I had it all under control,” she told me. “I didn’t have any kids. I think I was married maybe at that time, traveling as a technology consultant. But life seemed pretty well controlled.”

Then motherhood arrived. In 2018, after multiple miscarriages, she welcomed her first daughter. Eighteen months later, she found out she was pregnant with twins. “Imagine having a nine-month-old and then finding out that twins were on the way,” she said.

Suddenly she had three children under 18 months and a demanding consulting career. The control she once felt disappeared overnight. “With three kids under 18 months, plus a career in technology consulting, I no longer had anything under control. Life was crazy from day to day. And just one sick person. One change in schedule. One delayed flight could throw everything off balance.”

Sarah and I chuckled when she recalled, “I used to make my own dog food. I would cook everything from scratch, even cook for my dog. And I guess I thought that maybe, if that’s the kind of dog mom I was, that’s what kind of human mom I would be. But absolutely not. I’m an Amazon mom. I’m a make-it-happen-in-whatever-way-makes-the-most-sense-for-this-family mom. I am not cooking from scratch for any dogs or hardly any humans anymore.”

It was not the physical exhaustion that hit hardest. “It wasn’t the physical load of motherhood that was so hard,” she explained. “It was all of the things that I was carrying in my mind for work and for life and for my children.”
The mental checklist never ended. “All the little day-to-day things that I needed to remember: the doctor’s appointments, who needs their nails cut, who’s due for their vaccinations, when am I going to get my gray roots dyed, are we saving enough for college, am I making the right decisions about the kids’ futures?”
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That invisible labor became overwhelming. “It was the mental load of parenting that was so hard for me.”

From Automation at Home to AI at Scale

Sarah did what many high performing women do when overwhelmed. She built systems.

She automated lights, sound machines, bedtime routines, grocery deliveries. Anything she could take off her mental list. “I automated a ton of systems around the house. Anything I could get off of my list.”

But the true breakthrough came when generative AI became widely available. At the time, Sarah was working at Visa in a dedicated AI role, leading strategy and operations for teams rolling out tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. “I was spending a lot of time at work helping employees be more productive,” she said. “And I thought, if this can help people so much at work, it can help people who are doing the most important work, which is caring for others.”

That realization became AI-Empowered Mom. “It started with me, one overwhelmed mom with three kids under 18 months,” she said. “And now it has grown into a business that I love.”

Her mission is simple. “My passion is helping parents use AI and automation to improve their lives, make things a little bit easier, and specifically take all of that stuff that we’re carrying in our heads as moms and get a partner to help us manage it.”

Removing the Barriers

Sarah did not initially set out to build a product. She started by teaching AI classes in her living room, then corporate workshops. Surprisingly, she kept hearing the same resistance from parents. “AI felt like just one more thing to learn. Prompt engineering is a barrier. It doesn’t sound like something that is easy and intuitive. And we are overwhelmed with apps.”

So, she decided to simplify it. “I just decided I would knock them down and build a solution of my own.”

AI-Empowered Mom is a text-based tool. No app to download. No complicated prompts. “You can just text and text message and communicate in the natural way that you communicate. You don’t have to engineer a prompt. You don’t have to download an app.”

The tool focuses on core pain points like meal planning and calendar management. And it learns your family. “We’ve created a little quizlet when you sign up to share information about your family’s dietary restrictions and preferences,” she explained. “In my household, we’ve got somebody who hates peas, we’ve got someone who can’t stand mushrooms, and the AI solution remembers all of those things.”

Transparency is built in. “If you want to know what the tool knows about you, it’s right there in your dashboard. You can log in and see all of the context. And if you want to edit it or remove things, you can do that too.”

For calendars, it integrates with Google Calendar to help identify conflicts and reschedule when needed. It also sends daily and weekly previews so parents can see what is coming without opening multiple apps. “I just wish I could get a simple snapshot from my assistant that tells me what’s coming,” she said. “I don’t want to go and seek for that.”

In this episode of Trust Me Mom (Season 2, episode 34) available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, Sarah Dooley, founder of AI-Empowered Mom, shared how becoming a mother of three children under 18 months upended her sense of control and exposed the intense mental load she was carrying every day.

She explained how generative AI, which she worked with professionally in her role at Visa, became a practical support system at home. From meal planning and calendar management to custom bedtime stories, Sarah discussed how AI could help parents offload cognitive overwhelm without adding another complicated app to their lives.

We also talked about AI safety for kids, the importance of parental AI literacy, and why using technology intentionally could create more calm and connection in the family, not less.

When Everything Falls Apart

Even with systems, motherhood humbles us. “I think I have it all under control and then it all falls apart and I pick it back up and try it another way,” Sarah said.

She shared a story from her time at Visa when her children were sick and she was needed urgently at work. “I needed to be in both places,” she recalled. “I didn’t have any backup care at home, and I didn’t have any backup at work.”

She told a colleague she was ready to quit. “I remember confiding to my friend Jessica saying, I’m going to quit. I can’t do it.” Jessica’s response changed everything. “She just looked at me and said, don’t quit. Don’t quit. Just keep going.”
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That moment of support mattered. “I needed the kindness of another woman at work to tell me, ‘You can do this. This day will pass. Something drops. It’s going to be okay. Just keep going.’”

Talking to AI in the Closet

One of the most unexpected parts of our conversation was Sarah’s honesty about how she personally uses AI when she feels overwhelmed.

“When I get to those moments where I feel that I’m at my breaking point, I do often rely on AI to help talk me down,” she admitted. She uses ChatGPT voice mode. “I go into my closet or in my car, somewhere where I can be alone and just talk through everything that I’m feeling.”

She is clear that AI is not a therapist. But sometimes, access to a human in that moment is not possible. “When I feel like I just can’t take one more thing, I do turn on voice mode and talk to AI,” she said. “It doesn’t even really matter the guidance that AI gives. But just the action of taking everything that is swirling in my mind and talking it all out.”

For adults who understand the limitations of AI, it can be a pressure release valve. “I am AI literate. I know the limitations of the system,” she said. “That’s why it’s different for adults to offload to AI versus teens.”

AI and Kids: The Reality Is Already Here

Many parents still ask when children should start using AI. Sarah believes we may already be past that question. “A report was published by Aura at the end of 2025,” she explained. “They found that 73 percent of kids were already using AI.”

The implications are serious. She cited data showing that children are using AI not just for homework but for companionship. Violence appears in conversations around age 11. Romantic themes by 13. “These results floored me,” she said. “This is too young.”

Her advice is not to panic, but to engage. “The most important thing that we can do as parents is increase our own AI literacy so that we can keep the lines of communication open with our children.”

She uses AI side by side with her six-year-old twins and eight-year-old daughter. “I love it when we get a hallucination or some crazy response because that gives me the chance to talk to them about how this is a computer system. It makes mistakes. We can’t trust it.”

Bedtime Stories and the “Mean Mom Voice”

One of her earliest use cases was bedtime stories. With three small children, evenings were the hardest part of the day. “I am an early bird. By the end of the day, I am worn out and worn thin and sometimes I have very little left to give.”
She would prompt ChatGPT to create short, personalized stories tailored to her children’s interests and even behavioral challenges. “Give a story about what happens when children don’t brush their teeth. Make it be about Anna and Elsa in a frozen village and make it less than five minutes.”

On nights when her tank was empty, she used the read aloud feature. “It could be a game changer,” she said. “I’m right there snuggled up with them, getting a calm bedtime routine. I’m not using my mean voice.”

She knows some critics argue that this is letting robots raise children. “I do get those comments,” she said. “But every family has to decide for themselves.”

For her, the tool creates more connection, not less. “If I can use AI to make life a little bit easier, to find a little bit more time for connection, it really works for our family.”

A Book for Families

Sarah is currently writing a book on AI for families, to be published by Wiley in 2027. “The purpose of the book is really first to give just the high level points of AI 101, what families really need to know,” she said. “And then talk about the family that you want to be, and how you can use AI to create or empower the family that you want to be.”

Her message is not that AI replaces parents. It is that AI can be a tool. A support. A system. A partner in managing the invisible load so many mothers carry alone.

And sometimes, when everything feels like too much, it can even be a quiet voice in the closet saying, you are doing your best.

Motherhood is often presented as something that will come naturally. You will ease into it. You will feel intuitive and fulfilled. You will recognize yourself in this new role without much friction. But for many women, that story falls apart quickly once real life begins. I sat down with the therapist and content creator Vanessa Spinarsky to have an honest conversation about what happens when motherhood collides with identity, nervous system overload, and unrealistic cultural expectations. Her words resonated deeply because they name experiences many mothers quietly carry but rarely feel safe admitting.
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Vanessa is a registered social worker, a therapist, and a mother of two. She is also known for her honest, unfiltered reflections on Instagram, where she talks about motherhood without pretending it is always joyful or graceful. “Being on a guest on a podcast is one of my favorite things to do,” she shared early in our conversation, and that openness set the tone for a discussion grounded in truth rather than performance.

​A Childhood Shaped by Curiosity, Creativity, and Loss

Vanessa’s journey into therapy began long before professional training. As a child, she was drawn to both storytelling and understanding people. “I remember very distinctly, the two of them were journalism and psychology,” she said, recalling a school assignment that required her to research two careers. Looking back, those interests now feel prophetic, as her current work blends writing, observation, and deep emotional insight.

Growing up as an only child with a single mother gave her a rich inner world. She spent much of her time creating, imagining, and observing. But when she was eight years old, her life changed abruptly. “When I was eight years old, my dad unexpectedly passed away and he went to work one day and he didn’t come back,” Vanessa shared. At that age, she did not have the tools or language to process what had happened. “I didn’t have the language for what I was experiencing or what I was feeling, and my mom really didn’t talk about it,” she said. “Grief wasn’t something that we really talked about in our home.”
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That unprocessed loss became a quiet undercurrent in her life. Years later, when she chose social work, she realized that the decision went deeper than wanting to help others. “Underneath, subconsciously, I think I was like, I’m trying to understand my life, and I need to make sense of what happened to me,” she said. Therapy, both personal and professional, became a way to understand rather than fix. “I always thought it was about fixing myself,” Vanessa explained. “I realized that over time, it wasn’t that there was something wrong with me and that I needed to be corrected or solved. What I found was something really different. I wanted to understand.”

When Motherhood Disrupts Identity

Vanessa is the mother of a young daughter and son. “I have a little girl, she’s four and my boy is two years old,” she said. “It was a big transition.” She does not soften what that transition felt like. “Motherhood rocked me,” she said plainly. “My transition to motherhood was very disorientating for me.”

In one of the most striking moments of the conversation, Vanessa named how profound that shift was. “It actually, I would say was more disorientating than losing my dad when I was eight,” she said, not because that loss was insignificant, but because motherhood arrived when she already had a fully formed identity. “I thought that I had a fully formed identity, a career, I had a sense of who I was. And then that all just kind of came crashing down all at once.”

She expected motherhood to feel instinctive, but it did not. “Nothing about becoming a mom felt instinctive to me,” Vanessa said. “I felt anxious and I felt rigid and I felt tensed and constantly like I was doing something wrong.” Even qualities she knew she possessed, like compassion and nurturance, felt inaccessible in those early months.

The Social Media Surveillance of Moms

Although Vanessa was not a social media creator when she first became a mother, she still felt its influence deeply. “What surprised me about that during that time is the constant surveillance that came with motherhood through social media,” she said. Even without posting, she absorbed endless messages about what a good mother should do. “I felt like I was being watched constantly,” she explained. “I felt like I was constantly absorbing these rules about what moms were doing, what made a good mom, what a bad mom does.”
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Rather than increasing confidence, that exposure heightened anxiety. “Instead of becoming more confident as a parent, I became more anxious as a parent,” she said. She also pointed out how quickly motherhood becomes loaded with expectations. “What surprised me is how moralized motherhood is,” Vanessa said, describing how complex human experiences are flattened into right versus wrong, with little regard for context, nuance, or lived reality.

Redefining Progress in a Constantly Shifting Life

Many mothers describe parenting as an endless cycle of catching up, only to fall behind again moments later. Vanessa connected this exhaustion to identity and unrealistic expectations of progress. Before motherhood, she had built a sense of self around being strong, capable, and holding everything together. “I built this identity before motherhood of, ‘I don’t have space to fall apart. I need to hold everything together,’” she said. Postpartum made that identity unsustainable. “Postpartum hit and I couldn’t hold that together anymore,” Vanessa shared. “I was looking fine on the outside, but I was crumbling and falling apart on the inside.” Asking for help felt impossible. “I didn’t want to ask for help because I thought if I had asked for help, then that meant that I was failing,” she said.

Over time, she realized that motherhood demands a new definition of progress. “Progress in motherhood doesn’t look like being caught up,” Vanessa said. “It looks like adapting.” She reframed failure as responsiveness. “The fact that things are shifting doesn’t mean that you’re failing,” she explained. “It means that you’re responding to a very living, breathing, changing life.”

Her metrics for success changed. “Progress is different for me now,” she said. “Can I notice what I need sooner? Can I recover faster when things go sideways? Can I be a little bit less hard on myself when I’m messy?” Then she named a truth many mothers struggle to accept. “That doesn’t mean that you’re behind,” Vanessa said. “It means that motherhood isn’t something that you complete. It is something that you continuously stay in relationship with.”

Naming the Truth About Not Enjoying Every Moment

One of the most validating parts of the conversation came when Vanessa spoke about something many mothers feel but rarely say. “I know other moms are feeling this way,” she said. “I know I’m not the only one, but there are seasons of motherhood where you actually don’t enjoy spending time with your kids.”

She immediately clarified what that truth does not mean. “That doesn’t mean that you don’t love your kids, it doesn’t mean that you don’t care about them,” Vanessa said. “It just means that this is really draining.” She described the experience vividly. “It feels exhausting and disorienting and I can’t catch my footing,” she said. “It does feel like I’m just getting through the moment, just surviving the moment.”

She explained why those years can feel so relentless. “Kids emotions, they’re all emotion,” Vanessa said. “Nothing that these kids are doing makes sense to your adult brain.” Parents are constantly translating feelings, soothing meltdowns, and trying to stay regulated themselves. “You’re translating their feelings,” she said. “You’re trying to help regulate when they’re melting down over the wrong cup. And that takes so much energy, so much energy from you.”

She also acknowledged that these struggles are not always tied to age alone. “Sometimes there is neurodivergence,” Vanessa said. “Sometimes your child just has a harder time regulating themselves. They have really big feelings.” In those seasons, joy often shows up quietly. “A lot of moms aren’t enjoying motherhood in these big sweeping joyful type of ways,” she said. “They’re enjoying motherhood with these little moments, these micro little moments.”

Regulation, Repair, and Taking Space Without Shame

Vanessa has been criticized online for encouraging mothers to take breaks when they are overwhelmed. She was clear about what she has learned through both lived experience and clinical work. “Being physically there with your kid while you’re dysregulated does not help your kid,” she said. “That doesn’t help them at all.”

Children sense dysregulation. “If you don’t have that in your body in that moment, your kid is gonna feel that,” Vanessa explained. Forcing yourself to stay when you are past capacity can escalate rather than soothe. “The most loving thing that you can do for yourself and for your kid is not forcing yourself to stay in those moments,” she said.

Repair matters more than perfection. “Even when I do mess up, it’s coming back in later and repairing,” Vanessa said, naming the moment honestly and reconnecting after the fact.

Shame, Judgment, and the Pressure to Perform Motherhood

Shame is a central theme in Vanessa’s work. She explained that shame in motherhood is not only internal. “Shame can also be outward,” she said. “When someone feels shame in themselves and they don’t want to feel it, it turns into judgment.” Much of the criticism mothers face, especially online, comes from unmanaged shame projected outward. “A lot of the mom shame we see is actually unmanaged shame from somebody else being projected onto us,” she said.

Living under constant evaluation keeps mothers in a heightened state of stress. “There’s a feeling that you’re constantly being watched and evaluated at all times in motherhood,” Vanessa explained. “You’re not parenting from trust. You’re parenting from fear, from fear of getting it wrong.” She emphasized an important distinction. Outside of abuse and neglect, much of what gets policed is simply difference. “Just because we’re different doesn’t mean that’s dangerous,” she said.

Mental Load, Validation, and Being Seen

When we discussed mental load, Vanessa emphasized that acknowledgment alone can be deeply regulating. “I still feel like I am carrying mostly the mental load of our house and the anticipating and the remembering,” she said. Her request was not about blame. “I just want it to be acknowledged and I just want it to be named,” Vanessa said.

Validation reduces isolation. “These comments are my love language of just being noticed and my reality being validated,” she explained. She offered a simple but powerful shift for couples. “Can we shift from blame to acknowledgement?” Vanessa asked. “That’s going to land so much differently in your relationship.”

Nervous System Flexibility and Rethinking Rest

Vanessa closed the conversation by reframing why rest feels so elusive for mothers. “A lot of moms don’t struggle because they’re weak or that they’re doing something wrong,” she said. “They struggle because their nervous systems don’t get enough chances to power off.”

Instead of calm, she focuses on range. “It’s not about being calm all the time,” Vanessa explained. “It’s about having range.” Rest does not have to look a certain way. “You don’t have to experience real rest,” she said. “Coloring can be a form of rest for you.”

Most importantly, she reminded listeners that this work takes time. “It’s taken me four years,” Vanessa said. “I would say it’s taken me about five years to get a good handle on rest.”

A Final Reflection

Vanessa’s message is not that motherhood should feel joyful every moment. Her message is that mothers are human, and shame keeps them disconnected from themselves and each other. When truth is spoken without judgment, there is space for regulation, repair, and real connection. As she said clearly, “The goal of motherhood isn’t to enjoy every moment. The goal is to stay in relationship with your kid.”

If you are in a season that feels exhausting, disorienting, or like survival, you are not failing. You are responding to a living, breathing, changing life.

In a world shaped by screens, notifications, and constant digital interaction, one of the most powerful tools for connection remains profoundly simple: human touch.
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On a recent episode of Trust Me Mom, I spoke with author Alex Simakovsky about his book More Than a Touch: Rediscover the Healing Power of Handholding. What started as curiosity about a small, everyday gesture evolved into a deeper conversation about how touch shapes our nervous systems, strengthens relationships, and helps children feel safe and regulated.

After years of pandemic isolation and rising levels of what many experts call “tactile hunger,” Alex’s work feels especially urgent.

rom Childhood Instinct to Adult Afterthought

Alex’s inspiration for the book came from noticing how naturally children reach for one another. “In your youth, handholding is such an intrinsic, natural, almost everyday occurrence whether it's with a parent or with a friend” he explained. And then in adulthood, handholding becomes something that’s much less common. As we grow older, handholding often turns into a spontaneous or situational act rather than an intentional one. Alex began to wonder what might change if adults reclaimed it with purpose.

That question connects deeply to his upbringing. A first-generation American whose parents immigrated from the former Soviet Union, Alex grew up in a household centered on holistic wellness. His father worked as a chiropractor, a profession rooted in touch-based healing, and his mother helped run the practice.

“Chiropractic at its very core is a touch-based medicine,” Alex shared.  “This was very intrinsic to me growing up.”
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The Science Behind Touch

While More Than a Touch highlights handholding specifically, the book explores touch more broadly and its measurable effects on the body. Touch “affects how stress hormones are released,” Alex said. “Oxytocin, cortisol, and the balance of all these regulatory hormones are directly impacted.”

Research shows that consistent, supportive touch can calm the nervous system and reduce physiological stress. When touch is missing, the opposite can happen. Isolation, particularly during COVID, revealed just how deeply physical separation affects both emotional and physical health.
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“There are real benefits and real drawbacks when you’re lacking physical connection,” Alex noted. “Isolation has a very clear effect on human physiology.”

Touch as Emotional Regulation for Children

One of the most powerful sections of the book focuses on how parents can use touch to support their children during moments of anxiety, overwhelm, or emotional dysregulation. “There are exercises and practices that you could do with children when they’re going through bouts of anxiety or stress or having tantrums,” Alex said. “The book kind of mentioned several practices that I think are pretty impactful.”

One of those practices is hand-in-hand breathing. A parent gently traces their finger across the child’s palm in rhythm with the child’s breath. “It creates a sensory experience,” Alex explained. “It centers them, helps them understand their own breathing pattern, and it’s also a bonding moment in that window itself.”

For many children, especially neurodivergent kids, traditional breathing exercises can feel frustrating or inaccessible when emotions are high. Parental touch offers regulation without requiring verbal processing.

Another technique involves placing hands gently on a child’s shoulders during distress. “They’re going to feel that pressure on their shoulders,” Alex said. “And it’s just going to give them that little sense of separation from the moment and a little sense of relief from what they’re experiencing in that moment, to know that they are supported, they’re loved, and they’re not alone.”
 
The 30-Second Rule

One of the simplest but most memorable ideas in the book is what Alex calls the 30-second rule. “I think 30 seconds is a minimum amount of time we should devote to these types of practices,” he said.

That small window is often enough to shift the nervous system, whether between parent and child or between partners. It is not about grand gestures but about consistency and intention. 

Handholding in Adult Relationships

Touch does not lose its power as we age. In adult relationships, handholding can open doors to conversations that might otherwise feel impossible.

“I think holding someone’s hand in a difficult moment can open up a window to a conversation or to a dialogue that otherwise might be difficult, if not impossible to have,” Alex shared.

He recalled a personal moment from early in his relationship with his wife. “It allowed us to really reset in that moment,” he said. “It kind of showed to each other the devotion we have to each other, and from that moment, the whole conversation reset.”

In moments of conflict, touch can communicate safety and commitment before words ever do.
 
Cultural Lessons We Should Not Forget

The book also explores cultural approaches to handholding, particularly in parts of Southeast Asia and India where same-sex friends often walk hand in hand without stigma.

“This has always been a signifier of trust, of integrity,” Alex said. He points out that modern self-consciousness and cultural homogenization have caused many societies to abandon these deeply human expressions. “We should seek to preserve and enhance these very human interactions,” he said, “and not look to do less of them.”

Ancient art from Egypt and Greece depicts hands clasped as symbols of connection and loyalty, reinforcing just how historic and universal this gesture has always been.
 
Touch in a High-Tech Future

In the closing chapters, Alex brings the conversation into the present and future, shaped by AI, remote work, and digital-first relationships.

“We rely so much on conference calls, Zoom meetings, long-distance relationships,” he said. “How much of a grounding effect just reaching out and holding somebody’s hand could have in so many different scenarios.”

In his own life, that intention shows up in small, everyday moments. “We make it intentional,” Alex shared. “Even if we’re just watching a show after we put our kids to bed, we’ll try to hold hands while we’re watching the show.”
 
A Simple Gesture That Carries Real Weight

One of the most moving stories in the book describes a father and daughter whose relationship had always been loving but emotionally distant. In a single moment of handholding, that distance collapses. “That physical connection reminded her of that special bond that they have,” Alex said. “That’s the power of handholding.”

While hugs are powerful too, Alex believes handholding holds a unique place. “It’s a simple gesture,” he said, “but it carries so much weight and so much meaning in how it’s done, when it’s done, the situation, the moment that it’s done in.”

In a world that often feels fragmented and overstimulated, he leaves readers with a question worth sitting with: “Could we all be doing it with a little bit more intention to help us feel better and improve our relationships? Certainly with our children, this is a huge opportunity that we should all look at more closely.” 

“Talking about teens is one of my favorite things,” therapist and author Katie K. May told me at the start of our conversation. Katie is the author of You’re On Fire, It’s Fine, and her work centers on helping families understand what’s really happening beneath intense teenage behavior.
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In our conversation, Katie unpacked why some teens experience emotions as overwhelming and all-consuming, what parents often do (with good intentions) that accidentally makes it worse, and how to communicate in a way that builds trust, safety, and emotional skills over time.

Katie’s Story: Pain, Coping, and Breaking the Cycle

Katie’s expertise comes not only from clinical training, but from lived experience. She shared openly that she “struggled as a teenager,” raised by a single dad who “didn't have the skills to parent, let alone parent a fire-feeler, deep-feeling teenager like me.”

To survive, she used what she now recognizes as coping strategies –“self-harming, using substances, doing anything I could to escape the pain that I was feeling inside of me.” The turning point came in her mid-20s: “It wasn't until a surprise pregnancy… that I really had the motivation… to realize that there was a world that was bigger than the pain inside of me.” That realization led her into healing and eventually into the work she now does with teens and parents.

Who Are “Fire Feelers”?

Katie coined the term fire feeler because she “really wanted a way to illustrate for people who are not fire feelers what it is like to have the experience of having these big and overwhelming emotions.”

A fire feeler is a teen who feels intensely, reacts quickly, and takes longer to calm down. In Katie’s words, these are “your zero to 60 in 10 seconds flat kind of kids… and who take a really long time to calm down once they are triggered.”
And the internal experience can feel consuming: “The way that I describe this is that your feelings are so big that it feels like you're on fire with your emotions, that you're all consuming.”
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This framing matters because it shifts the lens. If a teen feels like they’re on fire inside, of course their brain searches for relief. As Katie put it: “It makes sense that a person's brain would come up with solutions to make that fire go out.” Those “solutions” often look like the behaviors parents fear most: “self-harm, self-destructive behaviors, drugs and alcohol, binging, scrolling, numbing out, lashing out, cutting off relationships.” And her reframe is crucial: “So what most people see as the problem is actually a solution for a fire-feeler who's overwhelmed with their own emotions.”

Why “You’re Fine” Can Backfire

Katie made an important distinction between invalidation and validation and emphasized that many invalidating responses come from loving parents who are trying to help.

Invalidation can sound like minimizing: “that's not a big deal,” or “everyone has friend troubles.” Or it can sound like quick fixes: “Go take a walk… take a nap… go get a snack.” These are well-meaning, but for a fire feeler, they can land painfully.

Katie used a metaphor that sticks: “It's so easy to make this feeling go away… it feels like a little squirt gun of water for this person. Like it's not helping make the fire go out.” Worse, the teen may internalize the message that something is wrong with them: “It's giving this underlying message that it is easy to make these feelings go away, but it's not for me. So, there must be something wrong with me that I can't make this go away.”

What Validation Actually Looks Like

Validation is not agreeing with everything a teen thinks or does. Validation is communicating: I see you. I hear you. Your feelings make sense.

Katie said it starts before words, with presence: “The first is just presence and paying attention.” She shared a memorable line from her work with younger kids that applies to teens too: “Your attention flows where your nose goes.”
In practice, that can mean pausing what you’re doing and showing you’re listening, even when the topic seems small. Because, as Katie reminded us: “They're not going to come to us with the bigger things if we can't show that we're there… for the smaller things.”

Then, scripts can be simple: “That sounds really hard.” Or: “We're just naming, we're paraphrasing and repeating back… I see that you're really sad about this.”

​Raising a teenager with big emotions can feel overwhelming, especially when nothing you say seems to help. In this episode (Season 2, Episode 31) available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, author and therapist Katie K. May shares strategies for how parents can help their teens. Katie introduces the concept of “fire-feelers,” teens who experience emotions intensely and struggle to calm down once triggered. Drawing from her own lived experience and years of clinical work using Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), she explains why common parenting strategies like minimizing, fixing, or pushing for conversations often backfire.

​The Escalation Trap Between Parents and Teens

Katie described a common dynamic where parents and teens unintentionally trigger each other: “We call it the transactional model and it's this idea that what I do or say influences you and what you do or say influences me.”

A familiar pattern: teen is overwhelmed and says, “leave me alone,” then heads to their room. A parent follows, thinking, “They're being disrespectful,” or feeling urgency to fix things now. The conflict escalates until it reaches “a crisis point.”
Katie’s alternative is simple, but not easy: regulate yourself first. Let things cool. Then return to problem-solve.

She summed it up with a line that applies everywhere: “I like to say that you can't teach someone to swim when they're drowning… you can't solve a problem when you're both flooded with emotions.”

A “Text Check-In” Instead of a Face-to-Face Blowup

Katie also offered a concrete strategy for reconnecting after cooling down, especially with emotionally sensitive teens who may “read the nuance in your facial expressions and your tone of voice.”

Her suggestion: “I like something called the text check-in.” And she gave the script verbatim: “Text check-in, hey, I'm a little bit calmer, how about you? Are you ready to talk about this yet?” The goal is collaboration, not control: “You're inviting them to be collaborative in when and how we problem solve.”

Validation and Boundaries Can Coexist

For parents with a more authoritarian background, Katie emphasized that warmth does not eliminate limits: “Having the ability to validate your teen… does not change the fact that teens still need limits and boundaries and expectations.” But boundaries work best when they focus on what you will do, not demanding a teen’s emotional performance. Katie offered a clear example: “Hey, I really don't like the way that you just talked to me. I don't feel good about that. I'm leaving the room when you're ready to talk to me in a different way.”

And she reinforced why: “Removing yourself from situations like that are going to be more effective than demanding a different response.”

What to Say When a Teen Shares Suicidal Thoughts

When the stakes are high, Katie was very direct. If a teen discloses suicidal thoughts, start with: “Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for telling me.” Then: “Mind your face. Mind your tone. be a calm presence.” If the teen has acted on an urge, the first step is safety: “We wanna make sure that we're getting medical or emergency support… as a first step to stabilize.”

“Trying to Hold a Beach Ball Underwater”

Toward the end of our conversation, we returned to a question many parents ask: how can teens feel intense emotions safely instead of suppressing or numbing them?

Katie’s answer was one of the most powerful metaphors in the interview: “It's like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. Like you can only control it for so long before it pops out of the water and you never know who it's gonna hit in the face at that point.”

She explained why quick-fix strategies are tempting: “We use these short term strategies to make emotions go away quickly because it works in the short term but it makes life harder in the long term.” The real work depends on capacity and safety. For some teens, emotions spike so intensely that moving too fast can increase risk. That’s why she focuses on skill-building and support: “wanting to make sure they have the right skills to manage emotions and then having the right guide, which in my opinion is a therapist, to help them build tolerance… over time.”

The Core Message: “Parents Go First”

Katie closed with a point she wanted parents to hear clearly: “I really like to drive home the point that parents go first.”
If teens are learning skills, parents have to model them: “It is a parent's responsibility to learn how to manage their emotions, to model better management of their emotions if they expect the same of their child.”
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And she added one more clear recommendation: “If teens are in therapy, parents need to be in therapy too so that they can all be working on feelings and skills together and separately.”

When Abby Eckel became a mother, something didn’t sit right. Like many women, she had absorbed years of glossy images and carefully curated narratives about what motherhood was supposed to look like. But after her second son was born, the gap between expectation and reality became impossible to ignore.
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“I felt really lied to about motherhood,” Abby says. “Everything I had been seeing, all the influencers I had been seeing, their carefully curated lives… I was like, this is such bull**t... I kind of set out to shed light, an honest look at motherhood, because I didn't really see that outside of Scary Mommy. And so I started creating content."

That moment became the starting point of a journey that would turn Abby into a widely followed content creator, educator, and advocate for more equitable partnerships and honest conversations about motherhood, marriage, and gender roles.

When “Equal” Isn’t the Norm

Abby didn’t set out to become an advocate. She started by sharing her own life. But one moment, in particular, revealed just how far her family’s setup diverged from what most people considered normal.

After moving into a new neighborhood, Abby casually mentioned to neighbors that her husband was inside making dinner. “They were like, ‘Is your husband working?’ And I was like, ‘No, he’s inside making dinner. It’s his week to cook.’ And they were kind of dumbfounded.”

In Abby’s household, cooking, bedtime routines, and domestic labor rotate. Both parents participate fully. When Abby shared this online, the response was immediate… and massive. “I realized very quickly that this was not the norm,” she said. “Even though I knew it wasn’t the norm, I didn’t realize the extent of it.”

That realization opened the door to a deeper education, which Abby says never really ends. “The more you learn about the inequities of marriage and motherhood and simply existing as a woman in the world, it never really ends.”
 
Raising Boys Without Gendered Shortcuts

Abby is raising two sons and is intentional about modeling equity at home, not through lectures but through expectations.  “There aren’t really any gender-specific roles,” she explains. “They’re doing their laundry, they’re cleaning up after themselves, they’re loading the dishwasher. They see both mom and dad doing all of these tasks.”

For Abby, accountability matters just as much as participation. When tasks aren’t done properly, they aren’t quietly fixed by someone in the background. She recalls a moment at her mother-in-law’s house when her son rushed through cleaning up train tracks, assuming his grandma would finish the job.

“He was like, ‘No, it’s okay, Nana has her own way that she wants it done.’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no. Nana doesn’t want to do this. She doesn’t find enjoyment in cleaning up after you.’” Instead of leaving it as is, Abby made him start over. “Now you’re going to sit down and you’re going to dump the box out, and we’ll put them in there together… If you have questions, I’ll be here to help you. But now you will complete this task.”
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The lesson wasn’t just about chores. It was about dismantling the belief that women enjoy cleaning, or that someone else will always pick up the slack.

It Is Not Women’s Fantasy That the House Falls Apart

One of Abby’s most viral responses came after the comedian John Christ mentioned on his Net Positive podcast that moms secretly enjoy leaving the house and returning to chaos because it makes them feel “needed.” Abby didn’t mince words. “It is not women’s secret hope or fantasy that when we leave the house is in shambles. It is quite literally most women’s nightmare.”

She explains why: the mess doesn’t magically disappear. “They’re going to have everything to clean up and piece back together… That’s a punishment. That’s not an enjoyment.”

For many women, the chaos triggers fear, not validation. “If you go out with your friends, or you go to an event and enjoy something or fulfill your hobby, and then you come home and it looks like a tornado went through your house — the kids haven’t been fed properly, the dogs haven’t eaten, toys are all over the place, and there are ground Goldfish crackers in the carpet,” she says passionately. “That’s not an enjoyable thing for anybody to come home to and be like, ‘Look how much my family needs me.’ That is very much like, ‘Holy sh*t — what if something happened to me? This is what my kid’s life would look like if I wasn’t here.’ And that very often is the main reason so many women stay in unhappy marriages, because they are terrified of how little proper care their children would receive in their absence and during the time they would be with their fathers during his custody.”
  
Abby provided an example of how Kentucky’s recent equal-custody law, framed as a way to reduce divorce, may in reality keep many women in marriages out of fear rather than happiness, because they are deeply concerned about the level of care their children would receive in their absence.

​In this episode of the Trust Me Mom podcast (Season 1, episode 30) available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, Abby Eckel and host Ekaterina Konovalova unpack why so many women feel overwhelmed, unseen, and resentful, and why the problem isn’t communication, effort, or “doing more,” but deeply ingrained systems that still center men at women’s expense.

​Abby shared her journey into advocacy, the TikTok moment that went viral when she talked about splitting household labor equally, what centering yourself actually looks like in real life, and how raising boys differently can change future generations.

The Danger of Repackaged Misogyny

The conversation turned to cultural narratives that appear progressive on the surface but still place the burden on women. When author and podcaster Scott Galloway argued that unmarried women tend to thrive while unmarried men spiral, Abby saw a deeper problem.

“I think Scott Galloway is, for lack of a better term, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” She explains why the message feels dangerous. “His entire message is like, we just need men to get married… because when men are single, they are destructive… We must pacify them with women.” For Abby, this framing ignores systemic issues and quietly assigns women responsibility for male behavior. “Women again should not be given up and sacrificed for men’s wellbeing. It’s just misogyny packaged a little bit prettier.”
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“You Cannot Communicate Your Way Into a Better Husband”

Perhaps the most provocative moment of the interview came when Abby was asked how women might create more balance in their marriages. Her response was so disarmingly blunt that I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow: “Get a divorce?” She quickly clarified but didn’t soften the message. “There’s no amount of communicating… books… podcasts… counselors that are going to change somebody who has benefited greatly from the way things have been set up.”

Abby challenged the idea that women are responsible for fixing inequity through better phrasing or timing. “You cannot communicate your way into having a better husband. This is solely on men.” She explained why so many attempts fail. "You can't make him see your worth. You can't make him see that or suddenly deem that what you do is important enough to want to help out with, to want to participate in."

Centering Women in a World Built for Men

One of Abby’s core concepts is centering, or rather how rarely women are allowed to do it. “Men have always been centered,” she says. “The world was literally built by them, for them, on the backs of women.” Even men who consider themselves egalitarian often default to their own needs.

“They’re talking at their wives, not with them,” Abby explains. “It is me, me, me… and they don’t even realize it.” Her advice for women who cannot leave, many of whom are unable to do so, is radical in its simplicity.  “Start centering yourself.”
That might look small, but it’s powerful. “Make a meal that you like, even if everybody else hates it. Set the thermostat to your preferred setting.” These acts matter because they reconnect women to themselves. “This is about you finding fulfillment and happiness… outside of being a wife and a mother.”
 
The Work Still Ahead

Abby doesn’t pretend this path is easy. “This is going to feel really uncomfortable for men,” she says. “It will create friction.” She believes it is necessary, not just for women but for future generations. As she raises her sons in a household built on accountability, empathy, and shared responsibility, Abby is clear-eyed about what is at stake. “We give up our bodies. We give up wages. We give up promotions. [The world] was not built to empathize and understand what women go through.”

Change, she says, doesn’t come from women doing more, but from refusing to disappear inside systems that were never designed for them to thrive.

Are kids really more fragile than previous generations, or are they reacting exactly as we should expect to the world we have created for them?

That question sits at the heart of Kids These Days, a deeply researched book by Dr. Will Dobud, social work clinician and researcher and Dr. Nevin J. Harper. In a recent conversation on Trust Me Mom, Dr. Dobud unpacked how teen mental health became medicalized, why diagnosis and labeling often do more harm than good, and what truly helps young people heal.
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His perspective is shaped not just by research, but by lived experience.

From Troubled Teen to Social Work Trailblazer

Dr. Dobud does not approach youth mental health from a distance. As a teenager, he struggled himself. His father left the family, school was a constant source of conflict, and therapy became a regular part of his life. “I like to say I couch surfed from therapist to therapist,” he shared. “Therapy was just part of my everyday life.”

At 18, wanting to shift from surviving to contributing, he became a volunteer firefighter and EMT. Around the same time, he began working with young people in outdoor settings. What struck him immediately was the disconnect between how teens were described in clinical environments and how they actually showed up in the world.

“Therapists would come out and say, this kid is anxious, they have all these problems,” he said. “And I’d think, but when we’re camping, everything’s good. I don’t see that version of that child.” That disconnect sparked a lifelong curiosity about what actually works.

The Problem With Labels and the Medical Model

One of the central critiques in Kids These Days is how modern mental health relies heavily on diagnosis, categorization, and treatment manuals. While these systems promise clarity and safety, Dr. Dobud argues they often strip young people of agency and identity.

“We talk about these things like they’re natural laws,” he explained. “But there were times when none of this existed. These ideas came from somewhere, and that means we can question them.” When teens internalize labels like “anxious” or “depressed,” those labels can quietly become identities rather than descriptions of experiences. Over time, the focus shifts from growth to maintenance.

“We need people to be sick to have worth in our jobs,” Dr. Dobud said candidly. “So when someone asks a therapist what they do, it’s always about what’s wrong with people.” This framing, he argues, reinforces a medical model that does not reflect how therapy actually works. “If you ask any therapist what works, they’ll tell you it’s the relationship,” he said. “Imagine if your relationship with your surgeon predicted whether the surgery worked. It would change how we think about everything.”

When Therapy Becomes About Protecting the System

Decades of research show that therapy is effective, but also that no one model consistently outperforms another. Despite this, the field continues to produce more manuals, more diagnoses, and more standardized treatments. “Since the first meta-analysis in the 1970s, outcomes haven’t improved by even one percent,” Dr. Dobud noted. “We keep looking at the wrong thing.”
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He describes this as a form of professional self-protection. By defending manuals and diagnoses, systems defend their legitimacy, even when doing so undermines the very relationships that create change. “No one has ever said, I had the best therapist in the world, they followed an amazing manual,” he said. “That’s never happened.”

Power, Consent, and the Real Risk in Therapy

One of the most important themes in the conversation was power. Therapists hold immense power over children and families, whether they acknowledge it or not. “When you walk into therapy, you give up all the power,” Dr. Dobud said. “This is a stranger asking you to trust them with your kid.”

He believes harm occurs most often when professionals deny or misunderstand that power. “You can only hurt a child in the name of therapy if you really believe you’re the expert,” he said. “When you know you have all the power, you also know you have the off switch.” Rather than more rules or longer training pipelines, he argues the field needs deeper reflection on ethics, humility, and consent.

Outdoor Therapy and the Myth of the Magic Method

Dr. Dobud is known for his work integrating outdoor and adventure-based therapies, but he is quick to challenge the idea that nature itself is a cure. “Nature doesn’t care about healing you,” he said. Even though he really enjoys outdoors, he said, "I’ve never walked outside and thought, time for me to heal… time for my dose of nature. I’ve also seen rattlesnakes, grizzly bears, and I’ve been in a cage with a great white shark. I work in Australia, where everything can kill you." Dr. Dobud explains, “Space becomes healing when people attach meaning to it.”

Early in his career, he believed outdoor therapy worked because nature was inherently better. Research forced him to reconsider. “What I realized is I’m a better therapist outdoors,” he said. “What we do is probably the most boring part of the story. It’s about me and the client.”

Outdoor settings strip away professional performance. Teens see adults struggle, adapt, and respond authentically. That realness, not the activity itself, is what creates opportunity for growth.

Creating Experiences That Become Exceptions

Rather than focusing on problems, Dr. Dobud designs experiences that become exceptions to them. “If negative experiences can harm,” he said, “then experiences can also heal.” He described watching teens who were labeled as unfocused or incapable demonstrate determination, patience, and leadership while navigating challenges outdoors. Those moments allow young people to internalize a different story about themselves. “I don’t want to tell them what makes them strong,” he explained. “I want them to experience it.”

Kids as the Canary in the Coal Mine

Perhaps the most powerful idea in Kids These Days is the metaphor of children as the canaries in the coal mine. “No child creates the environment they grow up in,” Dr. Dobud said. “They don’t choose the school system, the toxins, the politics, or the technology.”

He pointed to well-documented examples, including lead exposure, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and agricultural toxins that remain legally permissible despite decades of research showing harm. In some cases, these substances have been banned in other countries while remaining widespread in North America. “What’s troubling,” Dr. Dobud explained, “is that we allow these things into kids’ environments, and when kids react to them, we diagnose and medicate the child instead of questioning the system.”

When kids struggle, the response is often to medicate or diagnose them so they can remain in environments that may be harming them. “If a kid was in a mine saying, ‘I can’t breathe,’ would we say, ‘take this pill and stay in the mine,’ or would we change the environment?” Instead of asking why kids cannot adapt, he urges adults to ask what they are adapting to.
 
A Call to Adults, Not Another Parenting Manual

Kids These Days was intentionally written for adults, not as a checklist, but as a challenge. “We didn’t want to write another book telling parents ten things to do tomorrow,” Dr. Dobud said. “We’ve survived a decade of contradictory parenting manuals.”

The book invites readers to question sensational headlines, resist oversimplified explanations, and reclaim responsibility for shaping healthier systems. “Kids don’t belong to us,” he said. “They belong to tomorrow. The moment they’re born, our job is to set that tomorrow up better.”

The work is uncomfortable and often slow. But for Dr. Dobud, it is also energizing. “If you’re fighting for the right thing,” he said, “you don’t burn out.” And that may be the most hopeful message of all.

Is ABA therapy right for my child? How does ABA therapy work?

To answer these questions, demystify Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy, explore its benefits, and talk candidly about the real experiences of families navigating autism, behavioral challenges, and mental health, I sat down with Brittany Maurizi, an ABA therapist and founder of Balanced Behaviors.
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With over a decade of experience in early childhood and special education, and as a mom of two, Brittany brings a unique blend of professional expertise and deep empathy to her work.

From Teacher to Therapist: Brittany’s Path to ABA

Brittany’s path to ABA began in the classroom: “I started out my career as an early childhood educator and special education educator. I was in that field for 10 years before I started really working closely with ABA therapists and I just saw the wonderful things that ABA therapy can do for people.”

Seeing the impact was enough to push her toward a new direction: “I knew that I wanted to branch a little bit outside of teaching. I just didn’t really know how. And then I got to work closely with a fantastic group of people and decided to go back to get my master’s degree.”
 
Inspired, Brittany returned to graduate school, became a Licensed Behavior Specialist in Pennsylvania, and is now completing her board certification hours. Today, she works with clients across ages and abilities while growing her practice, Balanced Behaviors.

What Is ABA Therapy?

ABA, which stands for Applied Behavior Analysis, is a structured, evidence-based therapy widely used to support children with autism, though Brittany is passionate about expanding access to people of all ages and diagnoses.
ABA typically focuses on four developmental domains:

1. Communication
2. Socialization
3. Functional/life skills
4. Behavior reduction

While commonly associated with autism, Brittany emphasizes that ABA can support any individual seeking to improve quality of life, learn life skills, or reduce challenging behaviors.

ABA is not intended to be indefinite: “ABA therapy is not a therapy that you have for the rest of your life… Our wheelhouse is about two to three years.” Treatment is consistent and goal-based: “You receive this therapy daily… Monday through Friday. My position is I write the treatment plan… and then I coach the technician to implement the treatment plan.”

And above all, the goal is independence. Brittany said, “We want to work ourselves out of a job… we want the quality of life for our client to improve."

ABA Across Ages: What It Looks Like

For Young Children

The focus often begins with communication. Working closely with speech therapists, Brittany aims to address frustrations that arise when children cannot express their needs: “Communication deficits are often where behaviors begin. We start there and build.”

For Teens

Socialization and functional skills take the lead, including task completion, vocational skills, safely using appliances, or preparing for adulthood. Brittany partners with schools to coordinate transition plans.

For Adults

A major gap exists in support for adults with developmental or behavioral needs. Brittany hopes to fill that gap by creating community, teaching independent living skills, and offering social skill-building programs. Or, as she put it: “Parents tell me they don’t have a community of people who understand. I want to create that.”
 
The Power of Community, And the Grief Parents Don’t Expect

As a mom of two boys, Brittany understands the emotional journey many families face. Her younger son has experienced speech delays and reading challenges, giving her firsthand insight into what parents go through when facing diagnoses, evaluations, and tough decisions.

“You almost have to go through a grieving process when a diagnosis comes for your child… Even myself being in the field, I had to go through that process.”

This lived experience helps her connect with families on a deeper level, earning trust that’s essential in ABA. 

In Season 1, Episode 28, you will learn what ABA therapy really is, how it works across different ages, and how parents can decide whether it’s the right fit for their child. Brittany Maurizi, ABA therapist and founder of Balanced Behaviors, breaks down common misconceptions, explains practical strategies families can use at home, and shares candid insights from her work and her own parenting journey. ​By the end, you will have a grounded, realistic picture of what effective ABA support looks like in everyday life.

Where Therapy Happens
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ABA services are flexible. Brittany regularly provides therapy:

• in clients’ homes
• in schools
• in daycares
• in the community

Although she doesn’t have a physical office yet, she dreams of opening a sensory-friendly therapeutic space with areas for kids, adults, and their caregivers.
 
Accessing ABA Therapy: Insurance & Evaluations

Most insurance pathways require:

1. A diagnosis from a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist, or LPC
2. A written order recommending ABA
3. An assessment conducted by a clinician like Brittany
4. An individualized treatment plan (ITP)

Daily sessions are typically conducted by an ABA technician under Brittany’s supervision. Insurance coverage varies widely, though progress is being made - some states are expanding access to individuals with Down syndrome and other conditions.
 
Crisis Support & Community Safety

ABA therapy often extends beyond behavior change - it can play a role in crisis prevention and support. Brittany shared a case of a nonverbal client who eloped from home. The police response became a powerful example of how community awareness saves lives: “They squatted on his level… showed him their badge… so he was getting familiarized with a safe person.”

She is now collaborating with local officials to train police departments on how to respond to individuals with autism or communication challenges.
 
Supporting Higher-Functioning Kids

For children who are verbal or more independent, interventions often focus on:

• visual schedules
• reducing anxiety about the unknown
• reframing instructions
• teaching self-regulation strategies
• positive reinforcement
• building trust

A key tool is the Premack Principle: “First this, then that.” Brittany emphasizes avoiding empty promises: “Do not get lost into empty promises… ‘We’re going to Chuck E. Cheese’ when you know that’s not a reality… The trust is going to be even harder to build.”
 
Positive Reinforcement Over Punishment

ABA is grounded in positive reinforcement, not punishment. Brittany teaches parents to recognize small successes, remain consistent, and avoid unrealistic rewards.

Even simple praise works: “I really love how you’re sitting and doing your homework for me.” Consistency, trust, and relationship-building are at the core of successful therapy.
 
How ABA Differs from Other Therapies

Unlike traditional mental health therapy, which might be weekly, ABA is:

• structured
• intensive
• daily or near-daily
• skill-building focused
• data-driven
• highly individualized

Skills learned on Monday are practiced again on Tuesday, reviewed Wednesday, and strengthened throughout the week.
 
Breaking the Stigma Around Mental Health and ABA

Despite growing awareness, stigma remains - both around autism and ABA therapy itself. Brittany wants to change that.
“When that diagnosis comes through, allow yourself to feel it… sit in it for a little bit and go from there.” Her hope is to create spaces where families feel supported, not judged.

Are we getting our kids ready for the world ahead of them?

That question sits at the heart of my conversation with Kepler Knott, author of Raising Tomorrow: Talks to Prepare Our Kids for What Lies Ahead. Kepler’s life has taken him through military service, teaching, global travel, fatherhood, and a long career in tech and marketing - experiences that eventually inspired him to write a book for his two daughters.​

From Pandemic Letters to a Guidebook for Families

During COVID, Kepler began writing - not for work, but for his daughters: “I began to write a series of letters to my own children on different topics… and I'm like, this is a book.”

Originally there were fifteen letters, one for each topic he felt mattered most as they grew up. But he didn’t want the tone to feel prescriptive or rigid: “It's not about telling my kids, hey, here's all the right answers, but here's some things to think about as you grow up… I wanted my kids to have a fun and flexible playbook.”

Each chapter blends stories, research, humor, and hard-earned wisdom into conversations families can actually have - on identity, relationships, values, work, money, and more.
 
Parenting in a Time of Overwhelm

Part of Kepler’s motivation comes from the emotional reality of today’s teens: “Ages 18 to 24… show the highest rates of depression. At the same time, two thirds of parents say parenting is harder than ever.”

Instead of panic, he wants parents to focus on teaching kids how to adapt, question, and navigate a world that’s both more connected and more confusing. He believes “our life's work as parents is not to clear the road for our kids. It’s to help them navigate it.”

A Father on Boys, Girls, and the Chaos of the Teenage Brain

When asked which chapter he enjoyed writing most, Kepler didn’t hesitate: the chapter on boys. As a father of daughters, he wanted them to understand the inner workings (and the bewildering parts) of teenage boys. "Plato once said of all the animals, the boys, the most unmanageable,” he jokes. 

He mixes humor with candor: “The woman's brain is multifaceted and diverse… The men had like… sports, sex, sex, food, friends… a simpler thing.”

But he also highlights the challenges boys quietly face: “Teenage boys… are four times more likely than girls to drop out of school, more likely to be placed in special education.”

It’s a chapter about empathy, not stereotypes, helping his daughters understand their peers with both awareness and compassion.
 
Identity: Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What We Share

Kepler’s own background informs the chapter on identity. He was raised white, Southern, Protestant; his wife’s family is Eastern European and Jewish. And like many multicultural households, they navigate different beliefs, practices, and histories.

But he encourages his daughters to balance individuality with connection: “Be proud of who you are and where you come from, but realize that we're all in this together.”

He includes a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “I have a dream where one day my children will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

And a quote from his mother: “Finding someone who gets you is one of the best feelings or experiences you can have in life.” 
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His hope is that kids see identity not as a box, but as a lens, something they carry with them while still recognizing the humanity in others.

Religion, Tradition, and Raising Kids With Openness

Faith is another theme he approaches with balance. With kids growing up between two traditions, blended holidays are part of family life. When asked about Christmas, Kepler joked: “I'm still lobbying for a Christmas tree… For my wife… it's not how she grew up.”

But rather than choose, the family embraces both: “We actually celebrate both of those, all the holidays… everybody's invited to everything.”

His broader philosophy on spirituality is simple and generous: “I'm not your director of religious education, I'm your director of religious exploration.”
 
Teaching Critical Thinking in the Age of Endless Information

Kepler is passionate about teaching kids how to think, not what to think. He quotes Mark Twain: “I've never let schooling interfere with my education.”

And he warns that information alone isn’t clarity: “The truth of things is not just the information tidbit, it's the context… who's saying it and why are they saying it?”

He is equally adamant about teaching practical life skills like laundry, cooking, managing money - things he sees many teens lacking: “Kids get very educated in the formal sense, but yet they can't like function.”
 
Family Boundaries, Politics, and the Art of the Olive Branch

Traditions aren’t the hardest part of blending families, he says. Politics is. And he describes family gatherings the way many listeners can relate to: “A lot of holidays go sideways… It's about what's going on in the state of the country.”

His approach is rooted in relationship, not argument: “The simplest way is to keep your tongue in your mouth… we're sitting down at dinner together… so there's a certain level of respect and accommodation.”

Someone has to extend the olive branch, and someone has to take it.

What He Hopes Parents Will Walk Away With

At the end of our conversation, Kepler returned to the real purpose of the book: “Not all the right answers, but I think there are a lot of the right questions.”

He hopes families use the book as a starting point for conversations they’ve been meaning to have but didn’t know how to begin. And he offered a line that captures his whole philosophy: “I can't control the bigger picture of the world… but I can exert some influence… over myself and my own family.”

He added with a smile: “The parts add up to the whole and one plus one equals three.” (Yes, metaphor only - we clarified the math!). In the end, his message is simple: if each of us strengthens our own families through honest conversations and intentional guidance, we create a ripple effect- one that can shape not only our children’s futures, but the future we all share.