Child Psych Podcast Episode #136

[Tania Johnson] Hello and welcome to the Child Psych Podcast. I’m Tania Johnson, registered psychologist, registered play therapist, and co-founder of the Institute of Child Psychology. Today we are thrilled to have Jon Fogel with us. Jon Fogel is a husband and father of three boys who are aged—are they still eight, four, and three?

[Jon Fogel] Eight, almost five, and three. He’ll be five. Yeah, I don’t know when your podcast episode is going to air, but maybe he’ll be five by that time.

[Tania] Okay, that’s a very important detail. I know I’ve got a little one in my house too. And then three—and a newborn baby girl. My goodness, that’s amazing. Four kids. Holy moly. Wow.

[Jon Fogel] Well, six months now. Yeah, yeah, four kids.

[Tania] Okay. Jon is also a world-famous parenting educator. His goal is to teach parents how to parent more effectively with less stress—sounds wonderful—and far more success. Jon has a wonderful Instagram. The handle is @WholeParent. He’s amassed over 1.5 million followers. He does this beautiful thing with neuroscience, developmental psychology, counseling, and positive, gentle parenting wisdom, all put together in really accessible ways. Jon also has a really wonderful new book called Punishment-Free Parenting that we’re going to be talking about today. It’s really fabulous. It’s so accessible. I felt like, Jon, honestly, when I was reading it, I felt like you were talking right to me. Yeah, it’s a really great book. So welcome. So happy to have you here.

[Jon Fogel] I’m happy to be here. And that’s wonderful feedback about the book. That is how I wrote it in many ways—to typical parents. And I wouldn’t call you a typical parent with all of your credentials and your education and your background. But to hear that, you know, even for the pros who are far better at this than I will ever be, that you also felt like it was just being written to you is fantastic. I love that.

[Tania] It was wonderful. Punishment-Free Parenting—let’s chat. Why did you write it? What are we doing here?

[Jon Fogel] Yeah, so, you know, the reason that I wrote Punishment-Free Parenting at its core is because I know myself to be a person who takes in most of my information from books and especially from audiobooks. I have a reading disability, and so I’ve got a lot of strategies and things to overcome that. I had to read a whole lot when I was in my master’s degree program, so I did learn how to kind of power through books. But I really have this love of literature and of audiobooks.

As soon as I started gaining traction with these one-minute videos and these kinds of quick-hit parenting tips on social media, I realized, “You know what? This… you’re never going to…” The life change that I experienced came at the hands of listening to and reading a lot of really excellent parenting books. The one downside is that I felt like I really needed to lean hard on my academic background in order to fully experience what those books were trying to teach me. And so there was this gap for me.

Not to say that other parenting books aren’t accessible—I don’t want to, you know, throw shade at any other parenting book. I’ve learned so much from so many, and I’ve passed them along to just kind of normal parents in the trenches, and they found a lot of good in those too. But there was this hole between what I was able to learn and understand just as a typical person out in the world and what developmental neuroscience, developmental psychology, play therapists like yourself—all of this stuff that had become second nature and was really par for the course, not really controversial—but was not being trickled down to the average parent.

And so you go into the grocery store, you go into Walmart, or wherever you want to shop, and you walk around and you see parents who are really parenting very poorly. And it’s not because they’re bad people. It’s because no one has told them; no one has given them any tools whatsoever to be able to effectively navigate their child’s big emotions and big feelings.

And I feel like those parents… I yelled at my kids this morning. Like, I am still very much a work in progress. I couldn’t get control of a situation, and I tried to do like all of the stuff, and then I snapped because for me, it’s still not fully ingrained. And so if I could just add to the lexicon, add to the conversation, and do so specifically for parents who are just normal, everyday people who are just trying to go to their job and have a positive relationship with their kid and raise healthy, grounded kids who just were able to emotionally regulate and go out into the world and have a wonderful experience of their childhood and beyond—if I could do that in any way, then I wanted to participate and contribute to that. And so that’s why I wrote the book.

Because I think every parent deserves this information. I think it’s kind of terrible how a lot of this information, even though nobody is gatekeeping it, feels like it has been gatekept. And I think just by getting it out there, I’ve already seen thousands of parents come back to me and say, “You know, I’ve heard this stuff from other people, but I haven’t heard it in this way. And I feel much more confident,” or “You know, I read this other book and it was really great, but I felt kind of like a bad parent after reading it,” or “I was following your account, or I follow you and ten other people that are all great, but I never really get to the meat and potatoes. I never get to the heart, the understanding at the base of all this stuff. And then I read your book and I just… I left transformed.”

And for those people, I’m just like, “Man, if just one of those comments had come in, it would have been worth it to write the book, much less thousands.”

When Parents Feel Powerless: The Default to Punishment

[Tania] Yeah, huge and I think, you know, I think part of that is that it’s empowering. You know, the parents in the grocery store whose kid is down on the floor kicking and screaming because we’ve said no to the candy—I think there’s often this feeling of “I don’t know what to do.” And I think that’s often when punishments sneak in because it’s like, “I have to control the situation as quickly as I can, but I don’t have the tools to do that.”

[Jon Fogel] That’s right. And I think that’s the real truth: most of us… Very few parents that I know—it’s not to say that it doesn’t exist at all, but very few parents I know—are doing what I call kind of ’90s traditional bad… not ideal parenting. I shouldn’t call it bad parenting, but just unthoughtful, punitive, threats-based, control-based parenting. They’re doing that not when they’re at their best. That stuff happens like this for me this morning when I’m screaming at my kid because I can’t get control of a situation and I’m holding this six-month-old who has just had an exploded diaper everywhere.

And usually I want to, you know, do the thing, and I want to go over and I want to kneel down and I want to get on their eye level and get curious and do all this stuff. But like, I’m in the living room and they’re in the playroom, and I’m trying to get control of the situation by voice only. Well, all of a sudden, that part of me comes out and it goes, “The way to get control of the situation is to become authoritarian.” And so that’s what I… Like I said, it’s still a work in progress for me.

But that’s what I wanted to offer parents: that you know what? Actually, in this moment—and that’s what my wife said to me later—in that moment, it’s still more effective to do the stuff that you know you need to do, or that you know is the best way to do it. And those are the moments where we have to give ourselves a break and give ourselves some forgiveness, which, by the way, is exactly what we’re advocating that we should be giving our kid. And we need to be able to do that with ourselves as well.

Understanding Brain Development: Teaching at the Right Time

[Tania] Yeah, which is a huge one. It’s a huge, huge one that I think parents don’t do very well with. Jon, you talk a lot about really understanding a child’s brain development when it comes to kind of parenting strategies. And we just heard you have four, so it’s beautiful. You’re like, you’re in the thick of it right now. What is it about parents needing that knowledge, and how does it actually inform some of those practices?

[Jon Fogel] Well, you know, I think at the most basic level, you know, you hear a lot about how the education system—whether you’re in Canada, the United States where I live—needs to experience some reform. And a lot of times what people will say when they’re calling for that reform is that we need more practical information; we need to teach the trades, or we need to teach how to do your taxes.

Well, one of the things that I think we need to teach is just a fundamental understanding of neuroanatomy and emotional regulation. We don’t… I mean, there are some people like Mark Brackett—Dr. Mark Brackett from Yale—who are trying to do a little bit of emotional intelligence training with his RULER training and things like that out in school environments. But most of us receive absolutely no substantive understanding of human emotions and how those are experienced or how those are manifested in our neuroanatomy.

And so just understanding very basically that when our child is throwing that tantrum in the grocery store aisle, or when they’re dysregulated at home over something that didn’t go their way, or when we have to hold a boundary and we are dysregulated, that we aren’t operating with the same parts of our brain as when we’re calm, when we’re thinking about things critically, when we’re in playful environments—which is, you know, we call play in adults “flow.” In children we call it play, right?

When you’re working on that project—I know that you’ve experienced this, I’ve experienced this—whether it’s writing or something else, and you’re really enjoying what you’re doing, and time just seems to disappear, and all of a sudden it’s been two hours, and you realize that your neck hurts because you haven’t moved because you’re so locked in… that’s play. And those are the times when we do our best learning. Those are the times when we do our best processing and moral development and all that other stuff.

The times when we’re dysregulated, when we’re screaming and kicking and throwing a tantrum—whether that’s an adult screaming at their kid throwing a tantrum or their kid on the floor at the grocery store throwing a tantrum—those are the times when we’re actually not learning anything.

And so even if you don’t take away any of the anatomical language, the physiology of the brain, just simply understand your brain does different things. The different things that your brain does are better or worse at different tasks. And so when your kid is throwing a tantrum, or when your kid is just really sad or really upset, or when you are about to punish your kid or even you just have threatened to punish your kid—those are all times when their brain and your brain are not in teaching or learning mode. They are in reactive emotional mode. And what you have to really force yourself to do is understand that at other times during play, once your kid’s well-fed, after they’ve had a good nap, once they’ve connected with you again—those are the times when your child is incredibly ready to learn, when their brain is primed for learning and development.

And so just that simple thing… So many parents tell me, “It’s so terrible to have to say the same thing to my kid ten times.” Well, you keep saying it at the wrong time.

That one simple switch means that you don’t have to say it ten times. You say it twice, three times, depending on the kid’s age. If they’re two, maybe five times. But once you understand this, once you understand your child’s brain, you are going to be so much more effective as a parent. And it goes beyond the tips and the tricks and knowing the scripts to say, and “Oh, I just have to do X and Y when they do A and B.” You have to become more improvisational. You have to really understand what’s going on.

And once you do, even if you don’t remember all the words for it or all the anatomy that undergirds this stuff, if you just remember, “Hey, I’m going to pause for ten seconds because nothing good is going to happen in this immediate aftermath of my kid screaming or me screaming”—just that one tip alone, that’s going to save you. And it’s not going to save you in one case where you can apply that principle or that thing that you learned in my social media video. It’s actually going to teach you and train your brain to be a more effective parent in the long term.

Creating Change Through Calm Brains

[Tania] It’s beautiful. I absolutely love that. It’s this whole idea of “Let’s wait till my brain is calmer. Let’s wait till their brain is calmer. And then we can actually create change.” It’s not while they’re down on the floor and I’m saying, “I told you a million times, give me your iPad,” whatever it is. It’s just that it’s permission to step back a little bit, to wait till we have those calm brains.

[Jon Fogel] Well, and just understanding that it’s not a defect in your child if they can’t calm down, right? Even that little fact. One of the things I say in the book—one of the things that people often come back to and they say, “I really like this”—is: Your kids are not giving you a hard time; they’re just having a hard time. You know, that simple fact alone…

Most of us were brought up in a paradigm where kids’ less-than-ideal behaviors, their misbehaviors, when they’re causing problems, when they’re attention-seeking—all those things—were identified as flaws. No, those aren’t flaws. Those are just part of the journey. The same way that, you know, the first time that you’re learning something new, you’re not going to be great at it. You’re going to make mistakes, and it’s going to become more unconscious for you to do it the right way, or the simple way, over time.

So too with your kid and their emotions—they’re not doing it the right way the first time because they can’t. And so just understanding that one simple fact… If nothing else, it gives us a lot more empathy and compassion for our kids. And when you lead with empathy and compassion, it’s amazing how much easier everything is.

Practical Boundaries: Moving Beyond Punishment

[Tania] Yeah. And I bet, Jon, that helps with those triggers for parents too, because for so many parents, the trigger is that “my child is not listening to me; they’re not being respectful”—which is all part of our own childhood stuff. But I think that recognition of just coming in with a heart-based approach and allowing permission to step back helps you to recognize your own triggers too, to go, “Hold on, this is the moment I need more space to breathe.”

Okay, so kiddo’s down on the floor. We’re just going with the grocery store here. They’re down on the floor, they’re screaming, they want the candy. How do parents begin to put in some boundaries without resorting to taking away everything that the kid loves? “I’m taking away this, I’m taking away that, you’re not having your play date”—places that I’m sure many of us have been to. But what do we do?

The Five-Step Process: Beyond Survival Mode

[Jon Fogel] Right? Well, in all of those scenarios, everything that a parent is doing in that moment comes from their own survival instincts and saying, “We need to gain back control over this situation that’s out of control.” And so I have this five-step process. It’s the last five chapters in the book, but they’re not really long chapters. As you’ve read the book, they make up like 10% of the book—all five of them together, maybe 15% of the book. And the book has only 13 chapters. So it’s like the first eight chapters are pretty long, and then the last five are really short.

And the reason that I wrote the book in that way—that there’s kind of like a separate part—is for this reason exactly. In those moments when we are in that survival mode, when we don’t know what to do, and we want to resort to all of the things—which, by the way, is totally normal, totally natural as a parent to want to resort to the things that you know, and the stuff that you know growing up wherever you grew up is probably punitive, control-based threats, bribes, punishments parenting. So understanding that in that moment, we have to walk through step by step how to re-engage our brain, re-engage our kid’s brain, and then move forward.

And so the thing that… you know, I’ve been much better about this since writing the book, but really in the last couple years, as I’ve been learning this stuff, the thing that triggered me with my kid this morning was that I couldn’t… it was two kids fighting. And I knew that the older one wouldn’t hurt the younger one—he was eight years old and three years old. But I don’t know that the three-year-old won’t, you know, if he gets too overwhelmed by the situation, resort to one of his most malignantly difficult behaviors, which is biting. Or, you know, the other day he just kind of threw something at somebody and it turned out bad. Usually that doesn’t turn out to be anything, but in this case it was a Lego and it hurt somebody. So I didn’t know what was going to happen.

And so my first step is to prevent future harm. And that was where I got stuck. I couldn’t prevent future harm because my hands were full, and so I was trying to use my voice to prevent that future harm. So step one is to prevent future harm.

Boundaries vs. Permissiveness

And I should say here: We are going to get to the boundaries. There’s just a lot more that has to happen before that. Don’t think that punishment-free parenting then automatically means boundary-free parenting or permissive parenting. That’s a common misconception. In fact, when the person who wrote my foreword, Tina Payne Bryson, the author of No Drama Discipline and The Whole Brain Child—one of the things that she highlighted in the foreword, the reason for the need for a book like mine, was that too many of us have gone towards the permissive side of “If I’m not supposed to punish them or yell, then I just let my kids do whatever they want.” That can’t be the solution because your kid, in the same way that they’re learning how to do anything in life—emotionally regulating—they’re also learning how to make good pro-social decisions and good decisions in general about their own safety. So you can’t always just let your kid do whatever they want.

So your kid’s kicking and screaming on the floor of the grocery store. Okay, what aisle are we in? Is it an aisle with a lot of glass? Do we need to move away from the bottles of maple syrup on the wall that are about to come crashing down? You know, is my kid throwing a fit in the liquor aisle? Like, we have to make some choices here. But sometimes you’ve got to pick your kid up and carry them to a safer location. So step one is just make sure that we’re going to prevent future harm.

Then step two—and this is where I kind of get into step 1A or step 1B. This is where I get into those latter five chapters. We’re going to consider what’s going on in our brain. We’re going to consider what’s going on in our kids’ brains. We’re going to lead with empathy. That’s step two, right? If the first one is just kind of assessing the situation, making sure there’s no future harm, what’s going on in them, what’s going on in me, step two is we’ve got to validate. We’ve got to honor what’s going on with them.

A lot of people think, “If I tell my kid it’s okay that they’re having a tantrum, then that’s encouraging them to have a tantrum.” Nope, it’s simply stating that you see that they are having a tantrum. “Hey, I see what’s going on.” This is the problem with ignoring behaviors. This is one of the classic authoritarian methods: “Well, if I can’t hit my kid, I’m just going to ignore them.” Something that happened, you know, early 2000s, late ’90s—that was like a big parenting movement, just ignore the tantrum. Whatever you ignore is just going to keep going until they feel heard and validated. And if it doesn’t keep going, it’s because they’ve repressed it. So number two, we’re going to validate whatever’s going on.

Number three, we’re going to outline the boundary of what’s going on. Hey, we need to outline: Here’s what we can’t do. We can’t just get whatever we want all the time. We can’t just grab the syrup down from the rack and have it all fall down, whatever, right? We’re going to outline what we need to do. And that’s where, you know, if there’s something that’s happened in the midst of this, where something’s gotten broken or there’s been a mess made or somebody’s been hurt, we might as part of that boundary also say, “Here’s what we’ve got to do to make right what we’ve already done, the mess that we’ve already made.” Not always essential in that moment, because sometimes we’ve avoided the harm—that’s the ideal. Not always, though. Sometimes mistakes happen; we have to correct those mistakes.

And even if you don’t fix that at that moment… For example, a week ago, my kid was at a place where he ripped down all these signs that he just wasn’t thinking—he was eight. And these signs were new and he had asked me—I run the place—and he had asked me like, “What are these?” And I said, “I don’t really know. Somebody else did that.” And so he took it as his license: “I’m just going to rip them all down.” And we had to go back and clean them up. But that’s not the time in that moment when I’m kicking and screaming on the floor or whatever, when they’ve just done the thing, to say, “Now we’re going to go do this right now.” It was more like, “We’re going to have to fix this, but that’s not going to be right now. We’ll come back tomorrow and do that,” or whenever, in an hour.

And then, then that’s where we get into like, once we’ve done this—we’ve considered the situation, we’ve validated for them, we’ve outlined whatever boundaries/consequences need to exist—then at that point is where we start to do some of the brain-based practices: grounding exercises, deep breathing, that stuff. It’s all what I call the leading. It’s how we move kids—limbic resonance, matching their energy, moving them out of the tantrum.

The Most Important Step: Empowering for the Future

And then last, and this is the most important piece… And I think that if there was one part of the book that I didn’t get enough feedback from people saying “this was really important”—I think it’s the most important part of the book. It serves me right for putting it at the very end of the book as the last chapter that nobody remembers. I kind of was hoping that people would read the whole book and they would be left with this. In reality, most people don’t finish the books that they read. I probably should have put it at the beginning. But the last step in my kind of five-step method of moving through any of these big emotional situations is to empower for the future.

So to come back an hour or two later and go, “Hey, so you were walking through the grocery store. You saw that cereal up on the shelf. You started screaming, threw yourself on the floor. How should I handle that situation in the future if we can’t get cereal? What do you need? What should we have done differently? Should I have told you ahead of time that we weren’t going to get it? How could you have approached that situation differently?”

And this is where a lot of parents have to resist the urge to just immediately go to, “Well, you know, if you hadn’t screamed and kicked and thrown your body on the ground, then I probably would have considered it.” But now that… that’s punitive. You’re making them go into shame, and you’re going, “Hey, under the guise of learning what we can do,” you’ve actually just turned this into a lecture. You’ve weaponized your processing.

Instead, you can say something to the effect of, “You know, the easiest way for me to make a good decision about whether we should get something is if you just tell me and you explain it to me.” And a lot of parents right now are going, “My kid’s too young; they can’t do all of this.” And the answer to them is, “Okay, first of all, your kid’s not going to be two forever. A lot of this stuff is going to… a year from now, two years from now, it’s going to become really, really essential.” But just because your kid can’t be as involved in the process doesn’t mean that they don’t want that modeled.

So even with my—now he’s three, but he was two not very long ago—even with my Liam when he was two, sitting down with him and saying, “Let’s talk about what happened an hour ago. This is what I was feeling. This is… it seems like this is what you were feeling.” And it’s much more of a monologue than a dialogue. But just practicing that. Now, it’s amazing how an hour later, he’ll start that process with me. “An hour before, when this happened, this happened.”

A Real-Life Example: When Kids Practice the Process

And what’s actually most amazing, if I might just take one more moment here, is that—and I don’t want to make too big of a deal about this; it was actually not a great parenting moment for me—a little bit ago, it was about two or three days ago. My kids have next-door neighbor kids they play with every single day, basically. And they’ve become kind of a part of our family in a way of playing. Their parents are very different from me. In some ways, very similar. In some ways, they’re from the opposite side of the world—they’re from Jordan. So their stuff is also just not remotely the same.

And I came upon a situation where it seemed like there were some kids and they were kind of getting into it with each other, a little bit of name-calling, but usually I would just avoid… ignore this situation because they’re working it out. And if they want to come and talk to me about it, then I’m happy to do that. But it was not going to get violent or anything. It was just, you know, “I didn’t like when you did this.” “Well, I didn’t like when you did that,” you know? And I didn’t do anything. I just walked through.

And they tried to rope me in as the judge, you know, “Hey, what do you think about this, Matt’s dad?” And I just kind of said, “You guys will work it out.” And then I went inside. I was holding my baby and he came back to me like an hour later. He knocked on the door to our house. He said, “Is Matt’s dad here?” And my wife answered the door. She said, “Yeah, he’s right here.” And he came to me and he said, “You know, I didn’t like that you didn’t stand up for me because I felt like I was being bullied. And I felt like you needed to do something.”

So even with kids totally outside of your life, if you do this, and if you practice this well, he was emotionally processing the difficult thing that he went through. And I was just totally unaware of it. And I didn’t actually respond very well at that moment. I was just kind of like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But then five minutes later, I was like, “Oh my gosh, he’s trying to empower me for the future.” Like he’s out here trying to learn: “What should I have done in this situation?” And so I went over to his house and I said, “Hey, I’m sorry that I wasn’t there for you.”

The Key Insight: Timing Matters Most

But that really most important piece, to be honest, is after the dust settles. And this is where parents get it wrong. They think, “My kid’s screaming on the floor. The most important thing is what happens in the next 30 seconds while they’re screaming and kicking on the floor.”

Actually, that’s the least important thing. If you pick your kid up bodily and put them in the cart and walk them out of the store, like, it’s not the end of the world. If you let them scream and kick on the floor, it’s not the end of the world. Like what parents do at that moment, as long as they’re not getting violent with their kids, I could care less. It’s what you do an hour from then that makes you an amazing parent.

And that, that actually for most people, they’re like, “I can never think what to do at that moment. I can never think of what to say. I can never think of the script. I can never think of this. I can never remember your advice.” And I’m just like, “Yeah, but that’s actually not when the best stuff happens. The best stuff happens later.” So just focus on that.

And so I think that really in the grocery store, for example, there’s a lot of stuff we can do. And there are hacks galore in the book of “you can do this, you can play this color game and you can, you know, kind of hijack their brain and get them back regulated,” whatever. That stuff doesn’t really matter in the long term. What matters is: How do we handle this in the car on the way home? And that is where you’re going to do your best parenting work. And it’s where you’re going to make yourself… You know, when I say “parent with less stress and more success,” that’s where you’re going to do that work to parent with less stress and more success.

It’s always stressful at that moment, but you can do stuff that can make that situation so much less frequent—or so much more infrequent—where at that point, you know, you’re just not seeing this type of dysregulation. And my kids in some ways are the worst-behaved kids in public because they, you know, they’re not just going to fall immediately in line. In other ways, if I say the thing that I need to say, my kids have way more ability for impulse control because they know, “Like, hey, we’re going to talk about this later.”

The Beauty of Emotional Learning Opportunities

[Tania] Yeah, Jon, I think what I just love about that is I think when we rely on some of the more traditional disciplinary techniques, we lose so many beautiful opportunities for emotion regulation. And to me, that’s everything we’re speaking about here. It’s empathy, it’s love, it’s regulation. And that’s that example that you just spoke about. The little boy comes to speak to you, you go speak to him. Such beautiful learning that would never happen if we came in really hard with all of these consequences. There’s no space to learn.

[Jon Fogel] Right? Well, exactly. And there’s no… what we’re modeling in that moment if you are untrustworthy with your own emotions, and “I have to control the situation.” Instead, what we’re modeling is, “Hey, together, we can make it through this difficult process of having a developing brain.” And, you know, everybody makes mistakes along that process. I know of no perfect parents.

But the best parents I know are the ones who acknowledge when they’ve made a mistake and they try to apologize for it.

[Tania] Jon, I think we could talk forever about this. There’s so much here. Any final words for everybody listening in?

[Jon Fogel] Yeah, absolutely. You know, the number one… if you are considering getting the book, and this has been by far the top feedback that I’ve gotten: If you’re considering getting the book, but you’re afraid that this book is going to make you feel like “I’m not a good parent” or “I’m not good enough”—the book is written specifically to dissuade you of the idea that you’re not a good parent. I think just by buying the book and opening it and reading one page, you’ve done more than the overwhelming majority of parents will ever do, in that you’ve considered that maybe you should do things differently.

And so I think each and every one of you, just by listening to this episode of the podcast, if you never get the book, just by listening to this episode of the podcast, by listening to other stuff that is coming out of these platforms, you are already amazing parents. You don’t actually need as much help as you think that you need.

You may just need a little bit of advice, a little bit of encouragement, but you’re already amazing parents. And then the second thing is that really, I think a lot of us have to move out of this idea of parenting from a place of just immediate needs. We’ve got to start thinking long-term. Our kids are growing up into a very different world than we all grew up in. The teen mental health crisis has never been as bad as it is right now.

And all of that stuff means that we’re going to have to choose to make some different choices. We’re going to have to make different decisions for our kids. And in order to do that, we have to be equipped to do that. So if you want to start parenting with the end in mind, parenting more effectively, I hope that you’ll consider getting my book. But even if you don’t, I already think that you’re an amazing person.

[Tania] Amazing. And we’ll link it in the description below. Jon, for everybody who wants to find you, where can they do that?

[Jon Fogel] At @WholeParent on all of the social media—that’s W-H-O-L-E, not H-O-L-E, W-H-O-L-E Parent, P-A-R-E-N-T—and then my website is WholeParentAcademy.com. If you know the person who has WholeParent.com, please let me know. I’d be willing to have a conversation with them, but my website is WholeParentAcademy.com.

[Tania] I love it. Thank you so much, Jon.

[Jon Fogel] Thank you.