My Son Told Me to ‘Be the Parent.’ He Was Right.
This past summer, I had the most humbling parenting moment I've had in years, and my own kids weren't even involved. I was at a family reunion, reconnecting with my goddaughter and her young children — kids I hadn't seen in a long time, who live out of state. I showed up in full auntie mode: smiling, excited, ready for a good time. What I didn't show up with was any structure, any routine, any rules at all.
I'd planned a whole day of fun, trampoline park and everything, but what I hadn't planned for was that I was no longer in young-children mode, and those babies felt it immediately. Instead of being clear and direct the way I would have been twenty years ago with my own kids, I started giving options — too many options — negotiating, explaining, trying to reason my way into a child putting on their socks. Before we'd even gotten out the door, one of them took off running into the trampoline park by themselves.
My own grown, college-age son looked at me, shook his head slowly, and said, be the parent. I stopped cold. He wasn't being disrespectful, and he wasn't joking. He was watching someone who teaches parents for a living completely forget how to be one, and he called it out quietly and directly, exactly the way I'd always taught him to handle things. And he was right, and I knew it the second he said it.
So I did what I'd tell any parent at my center to do. I stopped, gathered everyone, and had a quick pow-wow before anyone took another step. The rules were simple: stay where I can see you, tell me before you go anywhere, we stay together, we look out for each other, and we're here to have fun — so let's go do that. No lecture, no negotiating, just expectations stated once, clearly, and held. And we had a wonderful time, because the structure didn't ruin the fun. The structure is what made the fun possible.
Sometimes the most important reminder comes from the person you least expect. In my case, it was my own son, watching me do the exact thing I've spent years teaching against, and loving me enough to say so.
This is episode 30, and if you've been with me since Season 2, thank you — we're moving into something new now. No more seasons, just Raising Scholars every single week, because raising scholars was never a seasonal activity, and neither is becoming the parent your child needs. This episode is the most personal thing I've recorded on this show. It isn't about a framework or a strategy. It's about who I had to become, and who I had to stop being, to raise the children I raised. I'm sharing it because I know you're in it right now, and I want to give you what I wish someone had given me twenty years ago — before my kids were packing for college and I was looking back wondering what I'd do differently. You still have time. That's the whole point of this one.
Where I Lost Myself
Let me start at the beginning. When I had my children, I lost myself — not dramatically, gradually, the way it happens to so many parents so quietly that you don't notice until one day you look up and can't remember the last time you did something entirely for you. I was a mom. I was an educator. I was a business owner. I was managing the house, the schedules, the homework, the activities, the relationships. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, Jackie disappeared.
Here's why that matters:You can't parent from an empty place.You can't give your children an authentic example of who to become if you've lost track of who you are.
Getting Clear on My Anchors
The turning point for me was getting clear on my anchors — the things so fundamentally me that when I'm living them, I know I'm on track, and when I'm drifting from them, I know something's wrong. For me, those anchors are:
Faith
Family
Education
Fitness
Doing hard things on purpose
Once I could name that clearly — this is what I'm about, and this is what I'm not — everything got simpler, because now I had a filter. When guilt or pressure or somebody else's expectations came at me, and they always do, I could hold it up against my anchors and ask: is this actually me? Does this fit what I believe and value, or is this someone else's idea of who I should be? If the answer wasn't authentically me, I could let it go — not without effort, but with clarity. You can't raise a child who knows who they are if you've forgotten who you are.
Letting Go of Supermom
Here's the other thing I had to release: Supermom. I had this image in my head of what a perfect parent looked like — she handled everything, showed up for everything, never dropped the ball, never missed an event, stayed put-together and present and somehow fully in control. I'm a Type A personality, raised with high expectations, and I brought all of that into my parenting with the very best intentions. It cost me. I was so focused on doing everything right that I missed some of the moments I was trying to get right in the first place.
Here's what I wish I'd known then: good enough is enough.
Not lazy enough, not checked-out enough — good enough.
The parent who shows up imperfect and present will always outperform the parent who shows up perfect and distracted. My good enough was enough for my children. It gave them a mom who was real, who was human, who made mistakes and said so, who was still becoming something and let them see it. That's not failure. That's modeling. Research consistently shows that children of parents who model self-compassion, who demonstrate that it's okay to be imperfect and keep going, develop more resilience and a greater ability to handle their own mistakes without falling apart.
The perfect parent teaches children that mistakes are not allowed. The good enough parent teaches children that mistakes are survivable.
Your child does not need a perfect parent. They need a present one — and those two things are almost never the same person at the same time.
Warmth and Structure
Here's something I haven't talked about publicly before. I came from a controlling parent, and I knew from the inside of that experience, from a very young age, that I did not want that for my children. In our two-parent household, their father brought a strong, structured presence, and I brought warmth and flexibility. Together, we made a whole — the firmness and the softness existed in the same home, and our kids had both.
Then we divorced, and I was alone in that dynamic. I knew the environment my kids were experiencing in the other household had a lot of control in it, so I swung in the other direction — toward flexibility, toward giving them more latitude, toward being the safe, easy, comfortable side. If I'm honest, I went too far in that direction sometimes. There were moments I wondered if I'd let too much go, where I could feel the balance was off, where the guilt of the divorce was making me too lenient in places that needed a firmer hand. A loving correction from one of my own children eventually reminded me the pendulum had swung too far, and I needed to come back to center.
Here's what the research tells us: children need both warmth and structure, not one or the other. Studies on authoritative parenting — not authoritarian, authoritative — consistently show that the combination of high warmth and high structure produces the most confident, capable, and resilient children. Neither extreme works. The center does. The antidote to controlling parenting isn't permissive parenting. It's intentional parenting.
Letting Go of Fixing
There's one more thing I had to learn, and I only fully understood it in the last two years. I'm a fixer. If something's wrong, I fix it. If someone needs something, I handle it. If there's a gap, I fill it. That's one of my real strengths. But applied to parenting without boundaries, it becomes a problem, because fixing everything for your child doesn't help them. It enables them. It teaches them that there's always someone who will step in, that the gap will always be filled, that the consequence will always be softened — so they never need to figure it out, because you'll figure it out for them.
Here's the humbling part: my own daughter saw this before I did. She started pulling toward independence earlier than I expected, taking control of her own things, handling things herself. At first, I felt it as rejection — like she didn't need me anymore. But what she was actually doing was protecting herself from a pattern she could see clearly: if she let me keep fixing things for her, she'd never learn to fix them herself. She was more self-aware about my pattern than I was, and that stopped me cold.
I realized the most loving thing I could do wasn't to fix less. It was to let go completely, in the right places — to trust what I'd already built in her, step back, and let her rise. Fixing everything in your child is not love in action. It's fear in disguise — the fear that they can't do it without you. And the only way to prove that fear wrong is to let them try.
What I Got Right
I want to be careful here, because this episode could sound like a list of everything I got wrong, and that's not what it is. There are things I did well, things I'm proud of, things I wouldn't change. I paid attention from the very beginning — watching my children, not hovering, watching. I saw who they were before they could fully name it themselves. I saw what lit them up and what shut them down, what they were naturally drawn to and what cost them too much energy. I identified their strengths early, and I supported the decisions that grew from who they actually were, not from who I needed them to be, or what was most convenient, or what looked best from the outside. My son's confidence, my daughter's independence, the academic foundation I built in both of them — that's real. That happened, and it happened because I was paying attention.
Paying attention is the single most underrated parenting skill there is. Not the discipline system, not the homework routine, not the extracurricular schedule — the ability to see your child clearly, to watch who they're becoming, and to respond to that specific child rather than a generic idea of what a child should be. Every family who walked through my center's doors taught me this. No two children are the same, and the families who got the best outcomes were almost always the ones where a parent was paying the closest attention. You cannot support a child you're not actually seeing.
Who Were You Before?
I want to ask you something I ask myself regularly: who were you before you became a parent? Not as a nostalgic exercise — as information. That person, the one you were before the diapers and the homework and the school schedules, had passions and strengths and a way of moving through the world that didn't disappear when you became a parent. It may have gone underground, but it's still there. And your child needs to see that version of you, too — not just the parent. They need to see someone with a life, a purpose, an identity of their own.
That parent raises a child who understands that people still live and have purpose and selves. That's independence. It's not abandonment. Having your own identity isn't selfish. You can still be you, and not just your child's mom or dad. Who are you right now, outside of that role? Name it, claim it, and bring it back.
Here's why I built this podcast — not because I had it all figured out, but because I spent twenty years figuring it out while I was already in it. By the time I understood some of this clearly, my children were adults heading into their own lives, and some of the moments I wish I'd handled differently were already behind me. I'm not telling you this with regret. I'm telling you with urgency, because you are not behind me. You're in it right now, in the exact years where the foundation is being laid, where your influence runs deeper than it ever will again, where the patterns you build today become the defaults that carry your child into adulthood. You don't have to figure this out the hard way. You don't have to wait until your kids are packing for college to understand what you wish you'd done differently. You're not raising a finished product. You're raising a direction — and that direction starts with who you're becoming, right alongside them.
Listen Now
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Raising Scholars helps parents of elementary school kids build confident, independent learners without nightly battles. New full-length episodes every Tuesday and Sunday Reset episodes every Sunday.
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If you're the mom in the thick of it right now — losing yourself in the doing, trying to be perfect, exhausted by it — this episode is for you. Send it to the other moms you know who need to hear that good enough is enough, too.