Welcome to this conversation
To Get to the Other Side, Episode 3 (July 12, 2020): The Grown-ups Our Kids Need I have played around with a number of job titles in my time with Fabric, Director of Children, Youth, and Family, Master of Fun to name a couple, but I think the one I feel most at home with is being a champion for children. It is probably why I am so drawn to Mr. Rogers and the profound and revolutionary yet simple work he committed his life to. I think Fred Rogers would have viewed himself a champion of children. He was relentless about the work of helping kids to grow into the people our world needs them to be. I am excited to share the work of author and podcast host Carvell Wallace as he lifts up the wisdom of Fred Rogers to begin to catch a glimpse of The Grown-ups Our Kids Need to get to the other side. - Heidi Esposito
Key takeaways & Practice
Do you know what to do today, right now to help, to be the grown-ups our kids need us to be to help them to grow into caring, loving, whole adults?
Learning how to recognize your feelings and know what they are is the key to everything else.
Finding Fred guest Ashley Ford describes empathy as the ability to find the spaces between the parts that connect us, to find connection beyond our flaws and to see others as whole people, not just the monstrous parts or the sum of the parts we disagree with. “a person can be one person’s hero and another person’s worst nightmare…both can be true.”
Fred Rogers also recognized that we as adults need to have coping strategies for dealing with trauma, big feelings, and crisis, and that kids need to be included in those strategies.
If we want to change the world, we need to take our empathy and do something with it. The things that are most important to us, the things our world needs on the other side need to be modeled in ways that become like breathing for our kids.
Loving the clay calls on us to be the best version of ourselves that we can be, and then to let that be seen.
Recognize in others the specialness and stick with that, relentlessly.
Homework Practice: Get out the box of crayons and draw or doodle the big feelings you are having this week, then write down as many words as you can think of that match those feelings – push past ‘happy, mad, sad…’ and get to the complexities of your emotions. Share your drawing and ideas with one other person. Pay attention to the ease and difficulty you had in naming your feelings and where their root lies.
Featured Voices and Links
Finding Fred Episode 1 - Podcast with Carvell Wallace
Finding Fred Episode 2 - Podcast with Carvell Wallace
My Grandmother’s Hands - Book
Menakem, Resmaa
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