Curious Neuron

My life as a neuroscientist turned entrepreneur and homeschooling mom of 3

• Cindy Hovington, Ph.D. • Season 6 • Episode 34

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Have you ever wondered why children's natural curiosity seems to fade as they grow older? This episode takes you on a reflective journey from the inception of Curious Neuron, inspired by a transformative comment from a Harvard professor. I share the pivotal moments from my academic path, including my PhD in neuroscience and postdoctoral studies, that led to the creation of Curious Neuron.

From the spark of an idea to a full-fledged business, I recount the challenges and triumphs of starting Curious Neuron. Listen as I navigate the hurdles of balancing work with motherhood, making the emotional decision to leave my postdoctoral journey, and forgoing a position at Harvard to be with my terminally ill grandfather. These experiences shaped the direction of Curious Neuron, focusing solely on supporting parents and children through innovative educational strategies.

Balancing work, homeschooling, and household responsibilities has been a constant struggle, particularly during the pandemic. I open up about the emotional toll of early parenthood and the importance of self-compassion. Through the Reflective Parent Club, we aim to provide a supportive space for parents to nurture their own well-being. As we gear up for season seven, I’m excited to share conversations with inspiring guests like Stephanie Harrison, founder of The New Happy, offering insights into personal growth and effective parenting. Join us as we wrap up season six, reminding parents that it's okay to struggle and emphasizing the importance of nurturing both their children’s curiosity and their own emotional health.

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Join our membership, The Reflective Parent Club to learn how to manage your emotions and model this for your child. Use code PODCAST 20 to get 20% off any membership and get 2 FREE WEEKS to try it out
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Speaker 1:

Hello, my dear friend, welcome back to another episode of the Curious Neuron podcast. My name is Cindy Huffington and I am your host. Today is the last episode of season six of the Curious Neuron podcast, and I'm going to turn this episode into more of a about me and about Curious Neuron, so I'm hoping that hearing that leads to you listening to the rest of the episode. There might be some bits of information more towards I'm going to talk about homeschooling and towards business and what that looked like for me starting my own company and the struggles I have in everyday life and so I'm hoping that you can connect with some of that. For today, but I do want to say that next week will be the launch of season seven, and I'm really excited because I already know who's coming up and we have the founder of the new happy that will be joining us, stephanie Harrison, and I'm really excited to share my conversation with her here on the podcast. I know that most of this season, I was really worried about whether or not there'd be a seventh season, and so I want to say thank you to the Tannenbaum Open Science Institute as well as the McConnell Foundation, so these two organizations believe in the importance of sharing science with others, and I believe in the importance of sharing science with you, the parent, and so thank goodness that there are organizations like this that support little people like me, because that means that I can continue this podcast, and this podcast truly means everything to me. There's lots, you know. Curious Neuron has lots of different parts, but there's something so rewarding about the podcast, even though I do this in the basement by myself right now. There's just something about knowing. Now that I've had all these conversations with you, you know who's on the other side. So thank you to everybody who has taken the time to listen to the podcast, and if you haven't done so yet, please make sure you rate it and review it, because it's those ratings and reviews that allow the podcast to continue, and so I will start the cycle all over again with season seven. Just take a moment to rate it and let me know you know what you think about it. It helps me grow it. It helps me know what you're enjoying and what you want more of or less of. So that would be important. You can also email me at info at kirstencom. I do mean it when I say it. I love knowing who's on the other side and maybe you have some feedback, all right.

Speaker 1:

So when I was near the end of my PhD in neuroscience, I studied mental health, schizophrenia and psychosis and how that impacted emotions in particular and cognitive ability, and that's the knowledge that I brought into Kirsten on. Later on, and near the end of my PhD, I had this idea of a company, and the only reason why I had this idea of a company that didn't have a name yet was because I felt that there was this. I was volunteering for a program called BrainReach and I just felt this sort of passion about sharing science with people. I loved what I was doing, I loved research and studying, but there was just something about talking to someone that didn't know anything about science and kind of getting them excited about science. And that BrainReach program it was a program where neuroscience graduate students would go into grade three classrooms and secondary two classrooms and talk to these students about neuroscience, and so that's what ignited the whole idea of, you know, wanting to share science with others.

Speaker 1:

When I finished my PhD, I had I asked for a week off because I had already started postdoc studies my postdoctoral fellowship at McGill in science education At the same time. So I had started it with a supervisor there, and what happened is that I had applied to do a postdoc that would be in collaboration with the supervisor at McGill, and the other professor was at Harvard, and so Kurt Fisher was a who has now passed, unfortunately was the head of the mind, brain and education department, and so I reached out to him and asked you know, we had some back and forth and we agreed on me going there to do my postdoctoral fellow that would also collaborate with the teacher, the professor that I was working with at McGill. He invited me over to attend one of his classes, and so, right before I defended my PhD, I drove off to Boston and went to meet him and his team and his graduate students, and I attended one of the classes and at the beginning of this class there was a woman who gave part of the lecture and she said we are born curious and unfortunately the education system has a way to kill that curiosity, and that stayed with me till today. And so when I was finishing my PhD and that right sorry, right after defending it and starting off my postdoc, I had this idea of a company, and so I had a week off and I said to my husband I think this would be a good time to get things started. Weirdly enough, I got this email from a reporter who wanted to interview me for a science program that I was leading at a community center in Montreal. And when she sent me the email and I was questioning now's a good time to start this company, I said to my husband, to Anthony, I need to launch the company now, before responding to her, so that my signature says founder of whatever. And so within three days I waited to respond to her I started the company.

Speaker 1:

I came up with the word Curious Neuron. That was based on what that professor at Harvard had said. Because for me, curious Neuron and the point of all this was how do we get children to learn and how do we get them, how do we nurture their minds and their development? And that's through curiosity and the brain. So I just put Curious Neuron together and that's how I came up with it, and I didn't sleep much in those few days, by the way, it just didn't like naturally show up. But I had this word curiosity. It had to be part of the name of the company, and so I started the company.

Speaker 1:

I registered the company name and then asked my uncle to help me with a website, put up the most basic website that I possibly could, and then responded to the reporter and said sure, I can. You know, I could have a conversation with you regarding that science program that I'm leading, no worries, signed Cindy Huffington, founder of Curious Neuron website link, and so this was my way of planting the seed, hoping that she would be curious about what this company was. Lo and behold, she clicked the link and responded to me and said great, let's meet and have coffee here on this day. I'd also like to know what you're doing and what Curious Neuron is. It seems really interesting. And so my plan had worked and I met with her. We had a coffee and then I bullshitted my way through what Curious Neuron was so hard For me.

Speaker 1:

You know, the vision of Curious Neuron at that point was to take what I had learned from neuroscience and bring it really to the education system, which is why I had applied for the Mind, brain and Education program at Harvard. That's why I wanted to study that. I wanted to really understand how can the understanding of the brain and what we know so far support learning and education? And so I wanted to give workshops for teachers. And then I I that was the vision, and so I shared this as my vision and and she decided to write an article about it in. It was called the Montreal Families, right. So she wrote an article about Gears Neuron. Which did not exist in Montreal Families I'm so sorry for the lies is a whole bunch of emails coming in from parents who are like well, if you give these workshops and you know how the brain works and you know how you know with your knowledge, you can support learning.

Speaker 1:

Can you come work with my kids? And so I'll never forget the first phone call I got. This mom was like you know, how long have you been doing this? I said a few months. You know, I just graduated. And she says what do you do with the kids? Well, I said everything we do is play based, and so we need to, um, you know, use that uh sort of play to help your child with their cognitive abilities, and it works. There's a lot of research around it, and that part's true. And so she was like you need to come over and do this with my kids. And so I did.

Speaker 1:

And when then, when I booked my, my appointment with her, I was like, what the hell am I going to do? And so I purchased a bunch of toys and games from Amazon. One of my grandparents had given me some money for Christmas and I had saved it and I said maybe one day I'll need this. And so I used that money and I purchased a lot of stuff from different companies and Amazon and Brun Boutier here in Montreal, and I showed up at this person's house with two duffel bags filled with toys and objects and I played with her kid and I did it in a way where that child, who was very young, could learn how to count, in a way that we were just playing a game. We worked on problem solving and executive functions again all through play. And then that mom spoke to her friend and then started growing.

Speaker 1:

After a couple months I had a few clients, but I was trying to get into schools and that was so hard. And then I got into one school. I think I went to a few schools, maybe three or four and I got pregnant and I was doing a postdoc at this point and I had a few clients that were regular. The amount of driving I was doing was not sustainable, but my vision was starting to build itself. I had my first child, I gave birth and then after two, three months, I started getting emails saying hey, you know, I heard from so-and-so that you gave a talk at that school. Can you come to our school? And after three months I started preparing more workshops. That led to a parent at one of the workshops saying you should come play. You know, do this with my child as well.

Speaker 1:

I kept growing on my personal clients, but then a clinic found out about what I was doing because one of their parents told their pediatrician hey, you know, my child's been working with Cures Neuron. And so that clinic called me and said would you like to have an office here at our clinic, because what you're doing seems to work and was really supporting that child in a way that we don't do. That's like this holistic approach, right? So I met with them, I agreed and I started working at a clinic. By then my daughter was about 11 or 12 months old, and so I started working at this clinic and then, a few months later, fell pregnant with my second child.

Speaker 1:

I was working evenings, and I was working on Saturdays, sometimes Sundays, because I hadn't put my daughter in daycare. She was home with me, and so the one rule I had with anything that I was doing for work was either I bring my child with me or I do it when my husband is home and he can stay with her. And so I only started leaving her when she was about 11 months old and coming to these one-off you know workshops, these one-hour sessions with kids, and there were lots of meetings when I was meeting with, you know, directors of schools or companies that were questioning what I was doing and wanted to meet with me. I would bring my daughter with me, I had a small child and I would meet with them, and they I wouldn't even tell them that I was going to show up with a child and I'd come up to this business meeting with a baby.

Speaker 1:

And then, by the time I had my second, I decided that this was a bit too much. I had launched the podcast at that point and I was working late nights, nursing a newborn every two, three hours, editing a podcast in between, and it was becoming a bit too much, and so I made the decision to leave the clinic, to stop seeing private clients and to stop giving workshops. That was really, really challenging for me. Oh, by the way, that was the second big challenge for me, because or the second thing that was really hard for me, because while I was doing my postdoc and then after I got pregnant, I decided I didn't want to go back, and so that was almost like a disappointment to those around me, because it's like you've been in school for this long and are you saying you're not continuing to become a professor.

Speaker 1:

I had given up on the Harvard position as well. My grandfather around that time fell ill terminally. He had been told that his cancer had spread and there was nothing left to do, and so leaving for Harvard at that time didn't feel right. We had been looking for apartments. My husband and I, you know we were going to make the move together, and so I decided I needed to stay and be here with my grandfather. I brought him up in a couple episodes and he's just somebody that just meant the world to me, and so there was no way that I was going to move at that point and it didn't work out anyways. So it just it was better that way, and so I didn't move. I stayed here, started Curious Neuron, like I said. So that was the first, big like oof, do I let go of research and academia, and I don't regret that decision. Then the second big like oof. I remember sitting down at the table with my husband and I was crying and I could feel it in my bones that I was done with what I was doing. It wasn't sustainable. And so he said, I think you know what you need to do. And I said, yeah, I need to leave the clinic and I need to stop Kirsten Neuron. So that's when that's right.

Speaker 1:

After I had my second child, I sat back, not for long. I'm not the kind of person who will, you know, not that there's anything wrong with it, but I'm not a TV every night kind of person. For me, unwinding is reading a book or learning something new. And so I kept reading articles and I had a website. I had not really taken the time to build it. There was a blog section, but then I realized, well, instead of just reading these articles and and you know applying them for myself and reflecting on them on my own, why not write about them? And so I started blogging on the Kirsten website.

Speaker 1:

Um, after my first child and then Janet Lansbury, I tagged her on Twitter, I believe and posted the article that I had written about the science of emotions and or, no, sorry, the science of tantrums, and I had tagged her because I had brought in her work, because I felt that it was evidence-based and it met the research that I had been reading, and she shared my article on her Twitter feed. So the five to six weekly views that I was getting that were mostly me and my family members that were reading my articles and my blogs became thousands in one week and I'll never forget. I was just staring at the numbers of my website going what the hell's going on? It was just increasing like crazy and I was like, oh my gosh, I cannot believe that she shared this article and the impact that this is having. That big jump led to a significant number of people being on the website on a regular basis and again I had a new, like a newborn.

Speaker 1:

At that point he was a few months old and I realized I need to keep writing and so that forced me to kind of write more on the blog. Oh, I just remembered my timeline was different. No, I hadn't started the podcast after my second. Sorry, I started my podcast, um, not before my second, after my second, because it was with my third child that I was editing the podcast. Sorry, I made a mistake. Okay, all this to say, we went into, so I started blogging and then I realized I need to start a social media account. I started the social media account. It ended up being about play because that's what I was doing with my two kids, got pregnant again, had my third child, had the podcast.

Speaker 1:

At that point the podcast to me, in case you haven't heard like I think I said this at the 100th episode I had recorded a podcast with a pediatrician that I had worked with at my child my children's clinic, and we spoke about screen time and I interviewed her and it took me one year to publish the podcast because I kept telling myself I'm not a podcaster, I don't know how to interview, I hate my voice, I hate my accent, I don't like anything about this, and I became so hypercritical on analyzing myself and telling myself that I just didn't know how to do this and I wasn't good enough that I didn't publish it. It took me one year to publish the first episode of the Cure Strong podcast. It just sat there on my computer and I regret not doing it earlier, so maybe that's the first lesson of all of this. No, that's the second lesson. First lesson is go with your gut, because my gut was I loved research, but I needed something different for myself and my family, which had to revolve around being home with them. It meant a lot to me and I don't regret a minute of it and I know that not everybody can, so I'm very aware of that but for me in that moment, regardless of the amount of education I had, I wanted to be home with my newborn daughter and I didn't want to have any of those regrets, and so I stayed home. And it wasn't. It had nothing to do with not liking my job, it was just something in that I couldn't explain. And that has happened to me many, many times where I don't have an explanation for something. But I have this gut feeling that I need to go with that and I've done it. And so far in my life, every time that I've done that, I have zero regrets. So that was the first one.

Speaker 1:

Then, leaving the clinic. Now we were at the podcast part and so I launched the podcast and that became a lot of work. That was already. Social media at that point was taking me about eight to 10 hours a week, which I've cut down tremendously, but the podcast itself was taking 10 to 15 hours a week, which I've cut down tremendously, but the podcast itself was taking 10 to 15 hours a week. So that was a lot. Because Instagram doesn't pay you. Podcasting doesn't pay you unless you get a sponsor. But even as a sponsor, it's not that they're going to pay you. They're going to make sure that you have the money to run the podcast right. So it depends how much the sponsor is giving you. So I was working 20 to 25 hours a week, not being paid, with a very small child.

Speaker 1:

Then I got pregnant and then I had my third one and I sort of neglected myself after that point. The hours that I was doing again with a newborn, nursing overnight and working and editing the podcast. It just wasn't sustainable. It wasn't healthy and I know, if you know me and you're listening to this, you're like Cindy, you still kind of do that. I know I get it. We'll get to that part by then.

Speaker 1:

By the time my third was about six months, the pandemic hit and my husband ended up staying home and I was really, really struggling with stress and overwhelm at that point and I was ignoring it. I just thought that if I would power through and, you know, put myself on auto drive, that I would get through this very difficult time, and that was a mistake. Not tuning into myself was a mistake. Not listening to myself was a mistake. And so one day I just had this a bit of a mental breakdown where I just felt so overwhelmed and you know I might talk about this in an episode on its own. The episode will definitely be called the day I yelled at my soup and I shared this story with some teachers that I gave a workshop to last week. I give workshops in schools and this was for an entire school board where I talked about wellbeing and burnout and stress management and conflict resolution. So if you work at a company where they need some support with that, or because I do that as consulting on the side, feel free to email me, or schools or whatever it is preschools that on the side.

Speaker 1:

So the reason why I yelled at my soup was because I had three young kids. I had been home all day. I was overwhelmed, my husband had just gone home and we were eating soup for dinner. I placed the soup on. Uh, at the table was feeding my um, then two-year-old. My four-year-old was beside me eating saying mom, mom, and my younger, my middle one, was crying, didn't want to eat. And then my baby needed to be fed and started crying and I needed to go feed him, breastfeed him.

Speaker 1:

My husband showed up and it was almost like him being home gave me the safety or the feeling of safety to kind of let it out, and I just yelled at the top of my lungs. I was sitting down, there was my soup in front of me and I just yelled at the soup. My lungs, I was sitting down, there was my soup in front of me and I just yelled at the soup. And then I ran upstairs and crumbled on the floor in our bedroom and cried hysterically. It was this feeling of I can't do this. I'm overwhelmed. I haven't taken a breath for a second, because the reality of my life at that point was I could barely go pee. There was always somebody. I had a newborn, a two-year-old and a four-year-old. She had just turned four, and so what that looked like for me was chaos Almost.

Speaker 1:

It felt like that the entire day until my husband got home and then we shared the chaos, and so I wouldn't voice that, I'd pretend everything was fine. Obviously, people would call and you're like I'm good, everything's good, I'm nursing my child. As I talk to you, I actually can't talk to you because now I have to change the diaper of my two-year-old and my four-year-old's hungry, and then it's going to start all over again. It was overwhelming, but I never shared that with anybody and, like I said, we're going to get into that, into another episode, and I wish in retrospect that I would have just said like wow, this is hard as fuck and I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to handle this. I was saying it in my head but I wasn't really sharing it with anybody.

Speaker 1:

Anybody who called would be like I'm great, everything's fine, and I wish I wouldn't have said that. I wish somebody and you know what no, even if somebody would have told me it's okay to say that, I don't think I would have wanted to say that, because to me it was a failure. If I can't do this, then I am a failure and I wish I would have thought differently, because that is the reason why I share this with parents now. That is the reason why I remind parents today through the podcast, through Instagram, through whatever I'm doing, that it's hard and that it's okay. For you to say that it's hard. It doesn't mean you're a failure because it's hard, it's just naturally hard. And we're going to have days that are crap days and we don't know what to do anymore and we're overwhelmed. And I want you to give yourself compassion because I didn't. And now I know how important it is and that's why I do what I do with Curious Neuron.

Speaker 1:

And so the pandemic hit after that, and or no that it was around. That time my husband was still coming home. So, all that to say, soon after that the pandemic hit, my husband was home and I was able to take more of those deep breaths and take a moment, and he saw what I was living through and what I was doing during the day, and so he was helping me out a lot, and that led to me having a little bit more time to step back, started seeing a therapist, started working on myself, and I really switched Kirstner on from science-based parenting advice, which was about the child, to parental wellbeing, and now I'm starting to see that there's an in-between right, like I'm still talking about how your child's brain develops and how your wellbeing and personal growth impacts them. So it's still there, I you know. But I just for me, at the core and of the of what I want to do with with Curious Neuron, and my passion is supporting you, the parent, because we don't get told enough that it's okay to have a hard day. We don't get told enough that we need to be more compassionate with ourselves, because if we judge ourselves, we need to be more compassionate with ourselves, because if we judge ourselves, odds are we easily judge others, including our kids, and so we need to work for our child's sake. We need to work on our self-compassion. We need to work on realizing that our needs matter.

Speaker 1:

I made all those mistakes. Curious Neuron is based on all those mistakes that I had made, knowing the research, knowing what mental health and illness and struggles look like, and guess what? I wasn't mentally ill, I just wasn't well. Psychological well-being is a thing and I wasn't well. I hadn't nurtured myself, my relationship with my husband, I had just ignored it. I was just taking care of three babies, which makes sense. We had both ignored it. My relationship with myself, my self-awareness, speaking with friends or seeing friends, that was non-existent, and so I was powering through this alone and I don't want other parents to do this In 2020,.

Speaker 1:

That was when we registered our oldest child for school and then she was supposed to go to French school. That was close to our home and we had never spoken to her in French. She was going to learn French from scratch from the beginning in school, and we just thought that that would have been the best way for her to learn French. And the pandemic hit that March and so in September there was the second wave of the pandemic and we decided to keep her home. One because I was home with a small baby and a two-year-old and I just felt that it wasn't right to send her to school because they were all masked. Not that I had an issue with the masking, but I had an issue with her trying to learn a language. That I had an issue with the masking, but I had an issue with her trying to learn a language that she wouldn't understand, with all her friends and teachers masked, and that would have been much harder to learn the language and hear the words and understand and it might have been overwhelming for her, and so we made a decision that year to keep her home.

Speaker 1:

That was a good decision. It's another thing that I just don't regret, because it allowed us to spend more time with her and the kids and the young boys. They grew, the middle child and her became very close they already were, but they got even closer and, most importantly, doing schoolwork with her which, by the way, was like half an hour a day in kindergarten, the rest was through play. Doing schoolwork with her allowed my middle child to say hey, what is this concept of sitting down and not running around the home? What is this? And so he became curious and wanted to do what she was doing, and although he might have been coloring or painting beside her, as she was learning letters and sounds, he was learning how to stay focused longer, and that, to me, was a huge benefit of starting homeschooling that way. We registered her for grade one, and then that next September came another wave and most of the kids stayed home as well. But we decided we were going to keep her home and we weren't going to send her to school. We homeschooled her for grade one, and that one I was very worried about.

Speaker 1:

I'm not a teacher, I'm not the kind of person to say I don't believe in this school system. I think everybody's doing a shitty job. No, that's not me. I have full respect for teachers. I know that our system has failed our teachers and our kids. That I've learned from working with schools. But I respect teachers and the knowledge they have and the abilities and the skills that they have, and so to me it was really scary to keep my daughter home. I had never taught another human how to read. I knew I didn't know how to do that and so I was so afraid to mess her up and and and you know her failures would be my fault. The social part was never a concern for me, never. We were part of a community center before the pandemic hit. We, um, you know, played outside with friends and kids. We saw a lot of family members and my kids were very good with their social skills. So that, to me, was never something I was afraid of.

Speaker 1:

Although when I started telling people that I was homeschooling which I was always afraid to say and that's why I don't talk about it very much here on the podcast there was a lot there's still a lot of stigma. I've been told off by people, you know, saying that I neglect my child or what I'm doing of stigma. I've been told off by people you know saying that I neglect my child or what I'm doing is illegal. It's not here in Montreal. You register your child through the school board or the ministry and you are followed by somebody. I need to teach exactly what a child at school is learning and I'm followed and if I don't do a good job you get one warning and if you don't meet the requirements after that warning your child loses the right to be homeschooled, and I think that's a good thing. I know that many people here in Quebec complain and hate that because we are followed so closely and monitored so much. I like it because, again, I'm not a teacher and I don't want to pretend that I am. But man, am I enjoying homeschooling my kids? Now I've been doing it for three years. I'm going on to year four and I love it so much.

Speaker 1:

You know, now with grade last year, with grade three, my daughter would do anywhere between two to three hours a day, depending on what we had in the subjects. You know, french is a little bit harder, we spend a bit more time on that, but in grade one it's about an hour, an hour and a half a day. In grade three it was about two and a half to three hours. It might be about three hours, three and a half hours, this year for grade four, but the rest of the day we get to be together as a family. So if you want to plan something during your day, we can have that picnic, we can go out, we can go play, we can play board games together which is our family is really into board games and so we can do all of that. The kids could bond together. We can have an earlier dinner.

Speaker 1:

I get to work from home, which I'll get into in a second but it's not easy. It's a lot of work because I have to hand in a lot of paperwork. It's hard, but again, it gives me that comfort and peace of mind that if they tell me it's not good, I can correct it and if it's not at par to what her education should be, I will lose that right to homeschool her and I'm okay with that. Obviously I worry that it happens in a snap, but I'm okay with that because it means that I didn't know what I was doing and I don't want to pretend to know what I'm doing. I don't want to fake it. That's not a good place to lie and fake, and so I'm okay with that, and so we're starting our fourth year of homeschooling.

Speaker 1:

The struggle that I have is managing and balancing everything. I have meetings during the day, and I try to make them early during the day or later in the day, or sometimes in between depends. But in between that, I'm cooking, I'm trying to, you know, do laundry and fold clothes. My husband helps me as well. He will, you know, chip in in terms of the cleaning part, but sometimes it's still hard to balance the cooking and the cleaning of the dishes and phone calls and meetings that I have. And sitting with one child, sitting with the other child doing that homework, stepping back to like feed and, you know, make supper, and then running downstairs by 6 pm to work until midnight, that's what my days look like, and those are hard days. I don't know how sustainable that is, and so homeschooling for us is a year by year basis. If, at some point during the year, I realize that I just can't and that it's affecting my health or well-being, then we have to make that decision of okay, do I continue, curious Neuron or what's more important, and I keep coming to that.

Speaker 1:

I love everything that I do with Curious Neuron, especially now with the membership. We've been testing out the membership all summer and we've had a group of 25 parents testing out what this looks like, and it's incredible to hear parents say I look forward to the Tuesday call. What we're creating is this community where I don't want you to be stuck on something and ruminate. You know we have so many of those thoughts where it's like oh, I can't believe I said that to my child, or I'm so worried that this happens to my child, or I'm stuck with that argument that I had with my partner and it's making me really mad, and so, because of that, I'm yelling at my child, or I have less patience. I don't want parents to have that stuck in their minds, which is why, on September 9th, the doors will open for the Reflective Parent Club, a space that is truly unlike any other.

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It is not about learning what to say to your child. I'm not giving you the scripts. I'm helping you nurture your wellbeing and work on the personal growth, that inner work that we hear about all the time. What does that look like? Well, the biggest part of that is insight and awareness. If we're having unhealthy arguments and conflicts with our partner. Where does the work need to start? And learning how to question that and step back and reflect is what is going to allow you to do the work that you need to do, whether it's relationships, work-life balance, personal growth and well-being, or you as a parent. We cover all of these four areas, and so the waitlist is still open. If you want to make sure that you get a special discount, you need to make sure that you're on that waitlist, so click the link in the bio. But if you're just waiting for the doors to open, I cannot wait to see you on September 9th inside the Reflective Parent Club. And so that is what my life has looked like Balancing work, homeschooling, the journey and the life of Curious Neuron. That is everything.

Speaker 1:

I've never, ever shared this story, and putting it all out there feels good because now that I've spoken to 56 parents so far, most of them come from the podcast, and so I know that you've been listening to me for a while now, and I think that it's only fair that you know a little bit more about me. Only fair that you know a little bit more about me. There was, there was somebody who asked me um, you know how to start a company and how to kind of um start a company specific to helping parents. The only thing I can tell you is, before you have any idea of a company or a business that you want to run and I mean I was doing this alone and now I have a team want to run, and I mean I was doing this alone and now I have a team I cannot, I can't believe that I have these team meetings and I have people that I could, you know, work with and bounce these ideas off of. To me, that has been so satisfying and also still a learning journey, because I need to know how to lead these people and I want them to be as motivated as I am and so far these people that are on my team are, and I'm learning how to lead a company and lead people and figuring out how to grow this. And so the only advice, or the number one advice, that I can give you is, if you want to work with parents, or if you want to develop a product for a certain niche of people, who is your customer, and once you know who that customer is, who is that product for, then care about the customer, and it's the same thing with our kids. If we want to be a good parent, I don't think you need to read 300 parenting books or memorize scripts. I think that it's about understanding your child and tuning in. I have three kids and they're all very different, and it's about truly listening and trusting yourself in that moment and saying okay, when I do this with you, it doesn't work. When I say that with you, it works a little bit better. Let me double down on what's working a little bit better. The same thing applies for a company. What's working a little bit better? The same thing applies for a company.

Speaker 1:

I was supporting parents, and so I always took the time to speak to a few parents. This summer is the first time that I speak to this many parents, and what I've learned is that you are struggling the most with your emotions. So many parents are yelling and then feel guilty right away. So many parents are yelling and then feel guilty right away. So many parents are triggered and don't even know why. What is going on? Why am I doing this? Why do I do this every single time? That's number one.

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Number two is confidence. I have noticed that parents keep saying I don't know how to do this, and so I read a lot of information. I'm going to record a podcast on its own about that, because, especially if you are a new parent, I think it is important to read information and gain knowledge. That's definitely important, but if that is to compensate for a lack of confidence in yourself and trust in yourself, then that's a different story, and so that one mixed in with a feeling of being alone and not having a community. Those are the three reasons why I launched the Reflective Parent Club because I listened to parents, and if over 85% of parents are saying these three things that they have no control over their emotions, that they lack the confidence, are always unsure and need the validation in terms of what they're doing, and feel like this is a very lonely journey, you know, in terms of parenting I realized we needed a club. We needed a club that we can go to, not the clubs we used to go to. This is the new club. This is a club of nurturing parents that want to grow, that want to do better, that want to undo things that they've learned when they were young, and that's the kind of support we're offering parents, and so, my dear friend, I hope you learned a little bit about this journey. It's much longer than I thought it would be. I'm so sorry, but I hope that it also inspires you that if you have a gut feeling, go with it.

Speaker 1:

If you something feels wrong, have a conversation with somebody If you don't feel well, if you maybe it doesn't mean that you feels wrong. Have a conversation with somebody if you don't feel well, if you maybe it doesn't mean that you have to have a mental. You know diagnosed mental illness. You know being sad doesn't mean you're going to be depressed or you are depressed. But question it, question your well-being. Don't ignore it. Don't pretend it's going to go away or hope it's going to go away. Nurture it, feed it, listen to it, because you matter. Thank you for listening to the Curious Mom podcast. Thank you for this sixth season. I have to thank you because without you I would not be here and I will see you next time in season seven. Bye.