Seen, Heard & Understood: Supporting Young Peoples Mental Health with Special Guest Lainie Liberti

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Thank you, Dr. JJ, for partnering with and sponsoring the No Problem Parenting Podcast. hey guys i'm jackie finnaman i'm a parenting strategist and coach and after 30 years and with more than 50 000 hours of experience working with kids and families i promise you there is a solution for your parenting challenges the key to this parenting gig is to guide and lead your kids with less fear and more confidence you don't have to know everything to be the expert of your child So let's get to the root of what is going on in your home with you and your kiddos, and then we're going to prepare for the worst and change the conversation.

As always, follow reviews, subscribe to this podcast. We are already a top 2% podcast. The more followers and subscribers and listens that we get, the higher up we rank and the more parents that we're able to reach. All right, for now, let's get into today's topic and meet our next guest.

All right, welcome back. No Problem Parents. Today I have a special guest on and we are going to talk all about her book, Seeing, Heard and Understood, Parenting and Partnering with Teens for Greater Mental Health. Welcome Lainey Liberty to the show. Hey, so happy to be here on this sunny morning here.

In Mexico. Yeah, I'm in Minnesota and I'm like watching, I'm seeing you on this Zoom meeting and watching the wind blowing your hair and wondering how your microphone's working. I don't hear any wind, but just the background. And I just feel like, oh, I need another trip to Mexico.

It's been years. Let me just tell everybody a little bit of background about you. Lainey, you are a powerful resource for parents and caregivers who want to better understand and support their teenagers' mental health. Drawing on personal experiences, research, and science-backed tools, you offer a new conceptual framework for parenting that emphasizes partnership and mentorship.

By working through their own triggers and traumas, parents can develop deeper connections with their teens and help them navigate the challenges of adolescence. So throughout the book, readers are challenged to do the uncomfortable work required to support their teens through some of the biggest mental health challenges of our time. I'm so into this. I love this so much.

With its focus on partnership parenting and building a genuine learning culture centered around freedom and accountability, Seen, Heard, and Understood is a powerful post-COVID roadmap for navigating the inner world of teens and adults alike. Lainey, I am so excited to have you here today to talk about this book and partnership parenting. So why don't we begin? Share it with us a little bit about your experience growing up And then what led you to when you had your son, how you were going to parent differently?

Sure. That's pretty, pretty loaded question. But well, normally when I tell my story, I start with 2008 and then I go back. So if it's okay, I'll, I'll do it in that order.

If that's absolutely you do you. Okay. So I'm originally from California and in 2008, I was a business owner. Well, before that, I worked in advertising, marketing, branding for 18 years.

And the last eight of those years, I owned my own agency. It was a small boutique branding agency out of Los Angeles, one of the first that specialized in green eco marketing. And my clientele primarily were conscious businesses and nonprofits. and in 2008 California had a an economy crash and what that meant was you know first we saw non-profits losing their budgets and then that resulted in my clients going away left and right and I was sitting there at the end of each day wondering how the heck I was going to bring back my staff after the new year and this was late one night in October you know I was pretty clear I'm not bringing back my staff after we break in December for the holidays.

I did, you know, my bread and butter clients were going away and that was just the reality. And also part of the story was I am, was a single parent. And at the time my son was nine years old. And one of the most common things that he would say to me is mom, you're always working.

You never spend any time with me. And that was just like a knife to the heart. It just was so, so painful. And, you know, my, my work really was as a single parent to provide for my family. And so there was this real deep cognitive dissidence, because I was doing this for us, yet I was sacrificing the us.

and it just like from a cultural perspective I was being supported yes you need to work hard but from an interpersonal perspective the thing that I wanted most in this world from childhood was to be a mom and it just it just didn't sit right with me and I remember sitting in the office late one night in 2008 in October near the end of the month and I it was like nine o'clock at night And it was too late to have my son in the office, but he was, as he was there with me, you know, all the time.

And his name is Miro. And I remember just, you know, stopping what I was doing on the computer, sighing, turning around, looking at him while he was on another computer playing game. And I just said to him, Miro, what do you think if we just get rid of all this stuff and go have an adventure? And he stopped his game.

He turned around. he looked at me and he first thing he asked was you serious I was like yeah and he's like one question it's like what and he said do I have to go to school no no no no no and I knew intuitively that one year of travel which is what we planned on doing would be more educational than fifth grade ever could be so confidently I said no no you don't And he turned around and said to me with a big, big smile, I'm in.

And that was it. So, oh, gosh, I just have to interrupt for a second because, well, I just find this so intriguing. I've talked with so many people before about that age. So he was nine and I had a similar experience when my son was eight where I'd been working just a ton and wasn't the work wasn't feeding me anymore.

I was pulling me further and further away from, you know, what I believed in and what I really felt called to do. And so I had talked to my son at that age and just said, you know, buddy, I think for me, I think God's calling me to do something else. But I don't really know if that's the right thing, if that's what I should be doing. And it was him.

It's an episode 32 of this of my podcast. it was Andrew that said, duh, mom, it is God calling you. Because I'd shown him and people who have heard that episode, the goldfinch, the owl, the deer that were signs that had come to me. And he said, I said, but Andrew, how do you know that this is what I should do?

And he said, well, G is for goldfinch, O is for owl, and D is for deer. And that spells God. And those three particular animals had come to me out of the blue inverse. And of course, there's much more to that story in episode 32.

too. But it was that age where they really are. So parents listening today, pay attention to that. If you have eight or nine year olds, or even if you don't, like if you can remember, our kids are starting to really realize at that age, what's happening with us in our lives and whether we're happy or not. It's the intuitiveness of our kids at that age. And it's such a powerful story. And it really accentuates the connection that mothers and sons have, which is just, yeah, amazing.

So it took us just like six months and we took off. So we were able, I was able to close my business. We got rid of everything. We either sold it or gave it away.

We kept a few things and got rid of my car, just everything. And then we took off for what was to be a one-year adventure. And our goal was to leave from California and just head south. And we looked it up together to find out the farthest southern tip.

And it was Ushuaia, Argentina. So that was our trajectory. We were going to just take our time and head down to Argentina by bus. And we were going to travel slowly.

And that was our, our adventure eight months in, we had gotten as far South as Guatemala. So we decided that our path was a lot slower than, than, you know, heading straight down. And, um, that was, that was in 2009. My son was nine turning 10 at that point.

and well we still haven't made it to Argentina but we still have not gone back so that was almost 15 years later and yeah that is so fun journey he's now 24 he's lived more of his life outside of the United States and he's had an amazing amazing adventure our adventure has been focused on self-directed learning education world we call it world schooling um and basically we we launched this movement um which inspired many families to take this path because we started blogging uh podcasting our first project together was to podcast our adventure together and it's funny when I listened to Miro's voice now as a 10 year old. Oh my gosh, how fun. Yeah, it's such a cute voice. So we wrote and researched and interviewed and edited our podcast together. And that was like our project. And people started to get inspired by this journey, always talking about the things that we were learning. And we were very, very intentional about that. And we also talked about the nature of our relationship, which was in partnership. And later I started calling it partnership parenting because people started asking me all of these questions.

Going back to your original question, which was, you know, my origin story, I'm going to just sort of back up a little bit. If I was raised in a household where I experienced a lot of trauma as a child, I was yelled at almost every day. You know, I, my nervous system is pretty shot. Like if I hear somebody yelling, my nervous system gets dysregulated like that. And I'm shaking and I go fight, flight, freeze. And most of the time it's freeze, but that that's my programmed response.

And as I said earlier one of the things that I always knew was I wanted to be a parent. I just, you know, instinctually knew that from a very young age, but I also knew that I didn't want to parent the way that my parents parented me. I was raised with my attachment style is disorganized attachment, which I think I've pretty much healed and repaired through a lot of work throughout my life. And I know that you are an attachment theory expert, and I know you focus on that. So being raised with an insecure attachment style really led me down a path where I had a lot of disruptive, unhealthy relationships in my early adulthood all the way through. So it was a lot of the close pushing away. And I knew that this was not conducive of of a healthy relationship. And so I did a lot of deep dives. Part of my trauma response is hyper independence, which served me in some respects, but in other respects, you know,

put me in an arm's length from receiving help. And still to this day, it's very difficult to receive help because of that hyper independence. But that really prompted me to be a really passionate, intrinsically motivated, self-directed learner. So I always believed like if there's a problem, I can research it. I can learn about it and do it myself. And so that led me down the path during my adult years out of my adolescence to really want to learn more about attachment and about psychology and about healing traumas. And it led me down a path of, you know, some spiritual modalities and psychological modalities and neurobiological. And I really did some deep dives.

And what I discovered was there were many tools out there where I can self heal by using these tools. And that became a part of my toolbox. And I relied heavily on that. I studied things like nonviolent communication, neurobiology, just like a multitude of things to help me understand how to manage my own internal worlds.

And emotional intelligence is one of those key things that I'm really passionate about. And I really wanted to raise a child and have a child where there was a deep connection. And I managed to do that, although I was prevented time-wise from really, you know, participating in that daily. And this trip was for us to rekindle that connection.

This trip was for us to really come back together and have this relationship that we knew was possible. And we decided we were going to take this journey together in partnership. And so part of our sort of criteria, partnership criteria, was to have these tools. And we created our own sort of scaffolding to make everything make sense.

So all our decisions were going to be in partnership. We decided that we were going to say yes more. We were going to live without rules. We were going to take this side by side journey and question everything. And you may come to the conclusion that I am a bit of an anarchist. And if that was your conclusion, I absolutely self-identify as an anarchist.

one of the principles of anarchy. It's not chaos as many people think. It's really about not giving authority to somebody else or system over you where you're not in alignment with. And what that means is, yes, I can live with rules or within a system if I consent to it, but I'm not going to give my consent just blindly because you are an authority. Nobody has authority over me or my life. And that's still something that I live by today. Well, and I'm so glad you're bringing that up because it's not that you are saying that you don't have respect for law and order or, you know, rules or things that need to, that are put in place to keep people safe and to keep, you know, that kind of thing. It's about saying, I'm not just going to go with what everybody else says I should do. Or, and even when it, as it relates to mental health,

Like this is the, this is the map you've done an assessment and now you're, you have to follow this, you know, trajectory for your child or for yourself because of this diagnostic assessment. You're saying, no, I think there's other, there's other things that thank you for letting me know what, you know, maybe the diagnosis is or whatever. And now I'm going to do my own self-discovery and figure out what's best for me.

I also like that you say that you and Miro really kind of figured out your own values, your own almost like mission statement for yourselves as a family and what you, whatever decisions you make, you base that on, like, does this fit for us as a family? Is this something that aligns with us? And it's not just about mom saying yes or child saying, I want this, you know, it's in partnership with each other. you're saying, hey, does this fit for us? How's this going to work for us?

So one of the skills that I learned while I was working in advertising and branding was taking companies through the process of identifying what their core values are for their brand. Well, I took that into my family dynamic. And before Miro and I left on our trip, we did this exercise that I did with clients when I was working in branding. And we defined individually what our core values were, what lit us up, what our aspirational core values were, and what values we were currently living.

And that's a whole process, actually. And I write about it in my book and give those tools to families to use. But once each individual in the family figures out what their core values are, we have conversations about that. Then we come together as a family unit and define what our family core values are.

And instead of living by rules and rules require each family then to have a rule maker or a lawmaker, somebody who enforces the rules, and then somebody who punishes, you know, determines judge and jury determines if you broken the rules and then what the punishment is. And I didn't want any of those roles to be a part of our family culture. So instead of rules, we live by core values or values, and we were able to run each of the decisions that we needed to make or conversations we needed to have or activities we chose through the filter of those values.

And if those choices were in alignment with our values, and that required an internal check, like self-inquiry, are these in alignment? Do they feel in alignment? Do we perceive these to be in alignment with our values? Then we can emphatically say yes.

But if they're not, we've got an inner guidance system to say, no, that's not in alignment with our integrity or our values. And that by using a tool like that, that not only exposes us to normalizing internal self-inquiry, but understanding what living a value-based life is and the conversation about the internal world. Those were an active part or it still is an active part of our family culture. So, you know, emotional intelligence, understanding the internal worlds, that's a massive part of our family culture and what I call partnership parenting.

So they're normalizing not only the internal worlds, but how it relates to our external experiences. Well, and I think this is so great. And I think that you can start this as a family from day one as you're starting your family, as you're having children. But I really love that your focus now is on those teenage years and really including the teens or preteens into this and designing your core family values. And your book walks everybody through all of that.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The reason why I'm so focused in on the teen years is for my son, it was probably the most challenging because we were living nomadically when he hit his 13, 14 years old, which is big transition years in adolescence. he was doing exactly what every teen needs he was starting to individuate and the individuation process means there needs to be more social connection and social learning is a massive part of this process and living high in the andes at the time in cusco peru he didn't have a whole lot of community we had community that were like potato farmers andean potato farmers and they were beautiful people to connect with and to learn from but they weren't really specifically his peers we met other travelers we met um peruvians that lived in in the area but it wasn't the same for him and the turning point for us was I told you we were blogging and podcasting and I was writing and we really started to create this movement just by accident because people were inspired and started this Facebook group and it blew up to near the end, about 45,000 people that were interested in world schooling and living a life this way by immersive learning and cultural learning at 13 and 14 he was we were both invited to go speak at a conference in the united states it was an unschooling conference and that was the first time miro had been around a group of his peers i call them free range kids you know there were kids that were not going to school

they were home educated um and there's a lot there's a you know as a parent of one of these kids and working with teens for the last 10 years, I could tell the difference between a kid that's raised in freedom and the internal resources they tap into to navigate the world versus those that go to school. I am, again, I'm, you know, I'm not, I don't want to step on any toes here. School is necessary and it's a cultural norm for many people and a lot of families choose school.

But I am an advocate for getting your kids out of school for so many reasons. And I don't feel that school really serves the developmental process that we all, we all deserve, we all deserve to feel empowered and to have exploration and to be in alignment with our own developmental needs at the time. And I just feel school is, it thwarts that process. It restricts learners and development.

And I also feel from a political perspective, it's a lot of indoctrination. And, you know, I don't think kids and teens need to be exposed to that kind of conditioning. I really feel like they need, especially in there from zero to seven and then seven to 18, let's say, they really need to discover those internal worlds. This should be a really safe time to be exposed to exploration and creativity and risk taking in a safe environment and making mistakes and understanding emotions and problem solving and all these great things that will really serve a young adult or an adult through their lives.

we stop that process by saying you know you need to be exposed to history and math and we're going to tell you the you know the amount of time that you need to focus on that then we're going to ring a bell and tell you to switch and do something else and we're going to tell you when you can eat when you can go to the bathroom and and we're going to program you to be a great worker. And if you are not excelling in any of those subjects and you're not able to catch on, or they don't feed you, or you're just not interested in, so you don't do well, we're going to tell you you're failing. Right. And we're going to set you up in a system of rewards and punishment. And, you know, as great as that system works for dogs, it doesn't work to really bring out the spirit and the brilliance of each individual human.

So we can, and it's not that I love this too, because it's not that you're not having your kids do school. It just looks different. You're not sending them into a school where it's again, the time clock schedule and the sit in your chair and comply and obey and behave and be quiet. Let's share with the audience what has happened and what has developed in your son by doing this. Because like you were mentioning, he needed, he wanted community.

He wanted some more, you know, solid friendships of his own that he could stay in touch with, even though he loved the journey and the experience of being able to go to all these different places. Right. And so a very interesting thing happened where not only did he find community, he also became an entrepreneur. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I've always lived with the spirit that I could do anything. Like that's one of my core beliefs. I could do anything.

All I have to do is figure it out and do it. And so, you know, he grew up with me modeling that attitude. Okay. We have a problem. Let's solve it. Let's create a business. Let's do it together.

Let's figure it out. Can we do that? Yes, we can do that. And we've done it over and over and over.

Yes, we can do it. I would rather take the risk and, you know, try something and fail because I'm going to learn something from that. And so, yes, at 14, we launched a business or I wasn't 14. He was 14.

We launched a business together. And so I knew that I had a head on my shoulders where I can research. So I learned everything I could that would support that business. The business that we launched is called Project World School.

and it is developing or it is creating temporary learning communities in different places in the world for teens. We did this primarily so my son would have homeschoolers and unschoolers come to different places in the world. So we'd have a community and have friends and he'd have that, you know, immersive social experience that he so deeply craved. And then he can go back to living, you know high in the Andes and we could explore the Andean mysticism and history and archaeology and all the things that we really discovered that we had a deep love for just by experiencing them and that kept us there we kept over and over re-experiencing these wonderful magical cultural immersive things that made Peru Cusco Peru our base our home for three years we loved it there. So we started to bring teens to different places in the world with us. Our first place was Cusco where we lived. So the first year that we launched, it's called Project World School.

We brought a group of teenagers to live with us in Cusco and we did all the things that we loved and expanded their experience. And it was just amazing. So I learned everything about teenage adolescent development from a psychological, neurobiological, and social perspective. I learned about how to create and facilitate learning communities. I went deeper into my studies with nonviolent communication so I can safeguard and hold space and really understand how to facilitate. And that was really powerful. I learned, I studied things like, what is, what is, I can't think of the culture right now, but there's a Native American cultures where they would do sharing circles. So I studied about that. Learning communities, like I said,

most learning communities that I studied and reached out to people and interviewed were in the college level because that's where learning communities and all the studies were written but I brought this to a younger group and then we deeply researched the kinds of experiences one after another that would build a body of of information or learning that would be useful and relevant for the learner. I also recognize as we started to facilitate these learning communities through Project World School, the tools that I use to self-direct my own healing then became a part of our curriculum or experience as well. And when you facilitate a month-long retreat for a group of people, you know, things come up. So, you know, one week you can probably avoid like the stress or the anxiety, but you know, as time goes on, people feel outside of their comfort zone.

Sometimes they go into fight, flight, or freeze, or there are cultural beliefs that are in opposition with the thing that we're experiencing. So we needed to have the tools to be able to question and challenge those ideas and really work through and see what emotional anchors are keeping those beliefs in place and create safe spaces to, you know, envelop new ideas through the experience and then have safety in working those things out. So the tools for the internal worlds became a big part of the Project World School experience as well. And after we did our first trip, we clearly recognized that the outer world experience was simply a reflection of the inner world. So those two things really became a big part of our community, our temporary learning communities. And yeah, so Project World School was born. And since then, we've brought like 200 teens to different places in the world. We've been to places like Peru, like I said, Ecuador,

Mexico, South Africa, Greece, Spain, Thailand, Japan. Yeah, we've brought teens all over and we've produced these amazing trips. And the connection that I have with the teens kept reminding me that every time I'm showing up for a teen and I'm creating space for them to really be seen, heard, and understood. I'm healing a part of my inner child that was never seen, heard, or understood in my own adolescence. And for me, being a facilitator and partnering with the teens in such a way really became part of my own self-healing process that I didn't know needed to be healed. Isn't that cool? Yeah, that's amazing. That's absolutely amazing.

And so through, was it really Project World School that then led you to wanting to write the book? Well, yes and no. The tools that I used were powerful and I recognize that from working with teens for 10 years. And in 2020, you know, and I said that we created this big community, like we had thousands and thousands of people, you know, looking to us, asking us, well, what are we going to do? We're out here in the world. We're families. We're out. We're world schooling. They've adapted the term that we use. We're world schooling. What do we do? And so I really worked very hard to serve our community during 2020 and beyond when the world was shut down. And part of the thing that I did was I started to facilitate the tools for mental health for the teens that were grounded.

I mean, everybody was grounded. Right. And if you think about the emotional developmental stage of adolescence, they need to be, teens need to be in community with one another. They need to connect. They need the social engagement. And the shutdowns were like kryptonite for for adolescents.

And so I needed I started to create safe spaces online for them. And part of what I was doing through my free hangouts, every weekly hangouts, which I still do, by the way, was to facilitate conversations using these tools. And then I said, you know what, I need to really just create classes. So that's when I launched transformative mentoring for teens. And I've been teaching courses for teens online using these mental health tools. I designed a 12-week course for the older teens that brought them through different stages of or different aspects of development.

and then I created a course with my son for the younger, for the tweens. And so we co-teach that one as well. And then I recognized that, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I get to, you know, meet with teens all over the world. They've got a safe space to come. We're, you know, sharing all of these challenges. We're using these tools. They get to hear other teens use the tool and it normalizes their experience. They don't feel so alone. And it was really powerful. But then I recognized that in a 12 week course, I've got maximum 15 teenagers in the course, because any more, you know, it's just too much. It's just too much. And so that meant I could really only serve maybe 45 teens a year. I decided to take the tools and the experiences and put everything into a book. So while I was teaching, I was concurrently putting those tools and experiences into a book. And the book is seen, heard, and understood parenting and partnering with teens for greater mental health. So it's, it's a combination of, of like stories from my childhood, talking about how I overcome some of those situations. It's talking about neurobiology,

psychology, developmental stages. It's talking about partnership parenting, and it's got a whole chapter of tools. And the idea of the book is to have parents to go through this journey and use the tools themselves, and then to reach out to their teens and facilitate the tools by creating the connection of sharing what they discovered about themselves. So it's an invitation for parents to really get familiar with their internal worlds as well. And that becomes the basis of the connection with their teens who really need to have that connection. Yeah. So that's the inspiration for the book. So I can create, help create a movement of mental wellness in our, you know, among youth. It's just so great. And of course I'm a big fan because that no problem parenting that's my, my jam is to help parents become the confident leader that I say our kids crave us to be. And I think your book is really I can't wait to read it. I have not read it. You and I have connected, but I have not read the book, but I do look forward to reading the book because I do think it starts with the parents and we often come with our baggage and our history and our own trauma or beliefs or, you know, negative beliefs, I should say. And, and then we kind of impose those on our kids without even knowing it sometimes, you know? And so, so yeah, I really love that you're walking parents that they can do this on their own through your book. They can

follow you. They can connect with you. They can sign up their team for a transformative mentoring. I do. I teach online and we still produce retreats through Project World School. My son, who's now 24, is taking a greater leadership role in those retreats.

And the other thing, I don't think I told you, we've got a website. My son and I co-teach parenting courses, short parenting courses on partnership, actually teaching all the tools that we used. And it's through partnershipparent.com.

you have done so many things, your heart for mental health, your personal experience, your unique ability, and just decision to kind of go against the grain and just make sure that you had relationship with your son, had something that you wished for as a child and never had. And then you just like literally did your own self healing. So I look forward to continuing a relationship with you and partnering with you. And I really encourage you parents, especially parents of teens, go check out Lainey's book, Seen, Heard, and Understood.

You're just such a gift. Be sure to thank Merle for me too. I know I didn't get to meet him. Maybe we'll have you guys back on and I can meet the two of you.

I would love to do that. But thank you so very much for being here today. My pleasure. Thank you.

And keep up this work. The world needs this information and your vision as well. Thank you so much. All right, parents.

That's it for today. Make sure you head over to the website, noproblemparents.com. Sign up to get our emails. We're going to be giving away tips, tools, techniques, and resources, updates on podcast episodes, roundtable events, and more. Check out noproblemparents.com. For now, hugs and high fives. You got this.