Legit Parenting
Legit Parenting
Navigating the Realities of Modern Parenting: From Social Media Struggles to Embracing 'Good Enough' Practices
Discover the unvarnished realities of parenting as , Craig Knippenberg slices through the gloss of social media. We tackle the evolving landscape of teen habits, from vaping's decline to the ramifications of a cell phone ban in a high school that's revolutionizing student interactions. This episode also takes a sobering turn as we explore the darker facets of social media, including an AI-generated scandal with serious legal and emotional repercussions.
Welcome to Legit Parenting, where imperfect parents build resume kids and families. A place to learn real solutions based in brain science to fit your unique parenting style. We show you how to tackle today's challenges for children and teens. Remember, when it comes to raising kids, you just have to be this side of good enough. Join us and we will show you how. I'm your host, craig Nippenberg. I've been a child and family therapist for nearly 40 years. I'm the business owner of one of Colorado's largest private practices, bestselling author and father of four. In my fathering world, I've been a birth death, a single parent, a step parent, adopted parent, a parent of exceptional students and a grandparent of two. By my side is Sydney Moreau, our production manager and mother of three ages, preschool through 18. Together, we bring you a guilt-free parenting perspective with solutions that actually fit into your real life. Welcome to Legit Parenting. I'm your host, craig Nippenberg, along with our producer, sydney Moreau.
Speaker 1:Today's going to be some follow-up news that I've been collecting for the last several weeks. Some of it fabulous, others not so much. First, I want to give a big shout out to Accelerated Schools here in Denver. They had their annual professional luncheon and I got to be the guest speaker for them and I really had a lot of fun with the audience and speaking there. Accelerated is a private school here in Denver for diverse learners and it is this boutique school in an old mansion, about two miles from my office actually, and it's just gorgeous inside. It is this old mansion, old furniture, and I think they only have 50 to 70 kids and really small student teacher ratios Just a really lovely place. So check it out sometime if you're looking around for a school in Denver. Okay, in the news, this first one is the definition of being a legit parent and the title from the Wall Street Journal. These Mom's Lives are a hot mess and they're ready to show it.
Speaker 1:Non-aesthetic mom in Florida's ditch female facade of social media share tips for real families. I'll read a couple things. In a world of flawless social media mom influencers who seem to have spotless houses and endless supply of earth tone outfits for the photogenic children, one decided to get real. I used to think I couldn't be a content creator because I don't live in a pretty house. Look at me, said Katie Zimmer, a 29 year old substitute teacher and mother of three, and a video posted on TikToker this year. The video showed her getting ready in the morning wearing non-descript black sweatpants and cutting food for kids in a slidely messy kitchen. My husband and I are just normal people who make just enough money to get by every month. She continued, can't afford to do daily or weekly shopping halls on here or afford to have the wardrobe of my dreams to decorate the way I would like to. Her video has been viewed over five million times. So that's a mom in Florida. It's a mom influencer. That's the one to follow, not the ones that probably only have one child, who's an angel, and don't have to work and have lots of free time to get all dolled up and spew out myths, modern myths of parenting that really don't back up in the research. So I love those mom fluencers.
Speaker 1:And for myself, I thought about wearing a dress shirt today, because I think we are filming this right, sydney. Yes, we are Okay. And I thought no, I'm going to be the dad fluencer or parent fluencer who's just going to wear what I wear around the house, and this is what I wear. I did comb my hair, so that's a plus, but most of the time I don't. I just want to have Okay. Here's another good story Survey says vaping declined among high school students.
Speaker 1:That is great. The number of high school students reported using e-cigarettes fell to 10% in the spring from 14% last year. Vaping rose slightly among middle school students to 4.6% from 3.3 and 22. The use of traditional cigarettes from high school students remained at a record low of less than 2%. Now I was in tracking statistics in high school when I was in high school, but I'm guessing the smoking rate was probably around 20% back then.
Speaker 1:That was the big thing to do and the irony of every class, especially the seniors. They often want to take on some issue with the school and many of these are fabulous. I've seen student walkouts to Perot, mental Health students going out to prevent suicide really great causes. And Sydney, you'll have to think if you had one. But my senior class is we wanted a smoking lounge, like the teachers had, and we wanted our rights to have a smoking lounge and I got to tell you the teachers had one in the confluence of the hallways that are small, public, private school, and when they opened the teacher lounge door a wave of smoke would come out of that room because all the teachers were smoking back then and we wanted our place to smoke too, we got shot down, and now I think about it like how stupid, how ridiculous. We should have done something on hunger or climate change, and not, we want to smoke cigarettes. Sid, do you have anything like that?
Speaker 2:We did. It was probably like the late 80s. I remember in middle school the environmental way took place and it was all about aerosol sprays, air sprays and things like that, and I remember there was a big. I think we had a sit-in in middle school. I'm serious.
Speaker 1:I think we had a sit-in and you know like we were having to protest it.
Speaker 2:That was our big thing and I think that was clean. I don't remember so much in high school but I do remember like the environment came a hot topic at that time. I think Earth Day.
Speaker 1:That started when I was a kid. Actually, I remember the first one and we all planted trees and felt so helpful for the environment. We had no clue of what actually happened. But on the middle school point, the article does says it increased slightly in middle school. Middle school is really a hard age. It is the transition age for the brain and they are extremely vulnerable creatures. I'm going to be on a podcast with the Social Institute after the New Year and one of the topics is talking about why the middle school brain is so vulnerable to what's on social media, and I love the social institute. They're trying to do positive things with social media and their founder, laura, was one of our guests.
Speaker 1:I think it's season two and middle schoolers pick up on anything and everything and they all think they know about it and they all want to try it, and that is the middle school brain and we need to keep them away from vaping. I hear a great show. I have not seen it, but someone was telling me the other day on Netflix. It's called the Big Vape. The Big Vape it goes deeply into vaping, so that might be a good thing to check out if any of you have free time. I don't have very much. I don't know about you, sydney. I guess you don't have a lot of free time either.
Speaker 2:I can't get through a show to save my life. It's been a lot. Yeah, I always fall asleep.
Speaker 1:We did watch the second half of the Broncos game last night For Monday night we taped it because we had to go to bed at halftime and it was quite a comeback by the Broncos. It was pretty exciting, but you know, after eight o'clock I'm done. Okay, related this is related to my first, I guess, blog called Adventure Dad, which you can find online. It's AdventureDadorg, it might be AdventureDadcom, I can't even remember. I haven't posted on it since we adopted our little girl almost 11 years ago because we just got too busy.
Speaker 1:But it's all these great adventures to do with your kids and many films, my son and I doing some amazing adventures. On this one it's a story and it's titled. It's an essay. I was trying to build my son's resilience and it's a pod of dad who took his kid and the picture looks like it's the Boulder Flatiron. You might see in the picture it doesn't say where, but it decided to climb a 900-foot rock, a big mountain. It's pretty much straight up and it turned out to be way more difficult for his kid than he thought and his whole thing is did I go too far? Was I not being a good dad? I was trying to help me resilient. It's a very compelling article, but the one thing I loved is that it's called the difficulty of finding the sweet spot for your kid. So challenges are challenging only if they are hard.
Speaker 1:Child psychologists often talk about the zone of proximal development, and that is the area between what a child can do without any help and what a child can't do even with help. So you have to think about okay, If Mike Child can do this without any help, that might be not very much of a challenge, right, unless you're going a further distance. First one we climbed my son was, oh, mount Evans, but it's off of Kenosha, not Kenosha Gwinello Pass. It's a very easy way to get to a 14, or you go through a bunch of weeds and stuff and then slightly up the mountains, very short. That was his first one, and then the next one. We did something longer and more difficult and by the age of 16, we were doing the harder ones and he was beating me to the top. I couldn't keep up with the kid. But you're looking for, okay, what can they do easily? Maybe we could stress it a little bit, but what is going to be too hard, even with help? And that's that proximal zone you're shooting for it's pretty much the same in school. You want your kid to be challenged but not overwhelmed. If they're overwhelmed, you need to drop it down a bit. If they're not being challenged at all, it's boring. So that's what you're shooting for on your adventures and talk to your kids. What do you think they can handle if I'm by your side?
Speaker 1:And the first time I took my son I got certified scuba diving with my brother and his daughter. They were the same age when they were 10. And one of the most glorious things was our first dive in Key Largo, florida's shallow diving 20, 30 feet, and my 10-year-old son. He'd gotten out of the preschool phase of holding your hand all the time, which I miss so much, and he held my hand on our first dive because he was a little nervous and I remember it's like yesterday swimming along with him holding my hand as we went side by side through the coral reefs. And, ironically, my son. A shout out to him. He turns 30 tomorrow and the card I got him shows a dad and his son from behind holding hands, walking along. Those incredible memories.
Speaker 1:Another article this is. I wasn't really thrilled about this one. I'm not a big believer in it was about good luck, charms and how to increase your luck, and it really what they came down to it's about. It's not really about luck. It's about putting yourself out there, meeting other people, finding out about other, meeting new people and telling them things about yourself, two or three interesting things about yourself, not just your job and when you do that you often find ways to connect. So when I'm meeting with new families that I've never met before, I kind of like to ask them about what they're into, their hobbies, their activities, where they're from, and 99% of the time I can find some connection to my own life to connect with them or their child. And so it's really about and I was thinking about for parents, for moms and dads is just talking being open to others, about your struggles, your joys, about parenting, chit-chat, making connections with other parents, and you never know what great adventure is going to come out of that. So many things in life the greatest adventures often happen through that just this casual connection.
Speaker 1:My one for my son and myself that changed both of our lives was we were interviewing with my dear departed friend, rose Kelly, who was the admissions director at St Anzapiscable, where I taught for 27 years and my son went to school and my wife then and I went to meet with her about getting him into the school when he was like three and a half. We knew it'd be hard, it knew it'd be competitive. We had no connection with the school whatsoever. We lived about 10 minutes away and I decided to name drop because I knew a friend of mine had. It was a psychiatrist and he had done some consulting for the school. And I said to Rose, I said, oh, I know Steve Scholl Roth will roll well, just trying to plant a seed right. And she looked at me and she said, oh, he retired this year. And I was like, oh damn, there goes my connection, like what do I do now? And then I quickly know I do consulting for the Havern Center and I teach in their classrooms and work with the students there. And I said I'd be happy to talk to you about, with your admin, because they were going to look for somebody. And she said we couldn't hire you. And I said, oh no, I just want to do this and give you ideas on different models, because I knew most of the consultants back then in the private schools and so I did a thing with the team the day my son was visiting the school. So after my talk I went to the library to wait for my son to come from his preschool visit and the headmaster is now a dear friend of mine. Ramsey came to me and he said we were talking and we thought we really liked your model. So we thought instead of hiring someone else, we'll just hire you. And I said but I thought you couldn't hire me if my son was accepted. And he said if you hire me first, if you shake on my head to work for us, then I can shake on your hand on your son's been accepted to our school, but if I accept him first, I can't hire you. I'm like, okay, so I got the job and my son got in in two minutes and it was changed both of our lives. It was awesome. Okay, moving on, todd, of the article going to create a less distracted classroom.
Speaker 1:Now this story comes out of Orlando, florida, at a high school, and Florida did pass some laws that students can't use cell phones during classes. They can use them in between classes, but not during class. This school took it one more level up and I got to agree and I'll read you some quotes from the principal. They don't allow phones at all. They have to be checked in the offense. They're in a locked storage cabinet. There is no getting your phone and he doesn't set the interviewers or the reporters talking about when they visited the school. When you go to most schools, anytime you see teens now they're always on their phones, including middle schoolers. So they all leave, they get on their phones and that's what they're doing In this case. He said a dozen students sat in small groups animatedly talking with another. Others played pickleball on makeshift lunchtime courts. There was not a cell phone inside and that was no accident.
Speaker 1:Then talks about Florida passing that law and the principal says parents said their children should be able to. Oh, parents who disagreed with it said they should be able to contact their children during the day. Now in my mind I'm old school I don't really see a need for that. If you're child sick, the school will call home. If you have an exceptional student, we have made for younger ones accommodations. If they're anxious they can contact their mom, their dad. If they're feeling a little anxious and need reassurance, that's just fine. But I can't really see reason to be contacting home anyway.
Speaker 1:But the principal then talks about how social media during school is threatening students' education, well-being and physical safety. In some schools, young people have planned and filmed assaults on fellow students, then upload the videos on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. And it's been 15 years ago when the earlier versions of the phone were coming out and one of my high school kids showed me a video of his friend beating up another kid in the bathroom, and I'm like that's just disgusting. Students and principals warn that social media apps such as Snapchat have also become a major distraction in promoting some people's to keep messaging their friends during class and anytime I get a text from my daughter during the school day, my first response is shouldn't you be in class right now? When you just love that city, shouldn't you just be in class? Why are you texting me? I'm supposed to go to school. Well, I think the same thing.
Speaker 2:I think the same thing when I get text too. I'm like, okay, yeah, you're at school.
Speaker 1:You're supposed to be studying or listening, right?
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:All right, now we're going to move into the not so good stuff. So I'm doing a talk in January for Denver Waldorf here about social media and pornography. And pornography, especially for young men, is a real addiction. I see a couple of young men now who are struggling with that. One I'm so proud of. One is a support group. He actually asked me to write a letter to a school asking if he could get rid of the iPad because that's the major venue, that tool he used to look at pornography and could he get stuff in Word documents. So I hope they do that accommodation for him. But I'm really proud of him. But it's a wicked addiction in the brain.
Speaker 1:But this one takes us to a new level. In short, a group of students at one high school took the pictures of some of their female classmates from the yearbook school yearbook pictures and then created on AI naked bodies to go with their face and of course, they sent that out to all their buddies around the school. Now if that happened to my daughter and said, I think you'd feel the same way. I'd be pissed. And the question here is is that real child pornography? So if it was an actual child picture of a naked classmate. That kid's going to be in trouble for possession and distribution of child pornography, which carries huge penalties. But if it's AI generated, is it the same thing? So I don't know what they'll do with that one. They haven't mentioned any court cases in this high school, but obviously it's really caused a lot of emotional problems.
Speaker 2:I can't see how that would be different, because you think about the augmentation with Photoshop, which has been around for years and years, which is basically a form of AI.
Speaker 1:I don't see how this is like another step right. I'm sure AI. People claim these are just nothing more than cartoon images. They're generated by a computer. It's not the real thing, it's not the same, but to me that is. The next tide of wave coming is AI, and AI has amazing capabilities and students can learn so much from it. But, man, I always look from the lens of how's this going to impact the kids on a social level and kind of the lens I see it through. I don't really look at it through of oh, ai, this is going to be great academically. I'm always thinking about the downside and what the kids might do with it, like the kids at this high school.
Speaker 2:Terrible.
Speaker 1:It's a slippery slope and it's going to get worse Now for those of your teens who have tried to use AI to write their school papers I'm sure none of yours have. I've known a few kids that have been doing that, using AI to write their term papers or their book report. This article was about how AI chatbots quote hallucinate more than you realized that they often will start doings of writing you a report, whatever, and they add in stuff that's not real. It's faked, and they found that chatbots invent information at least 3% of the time and as high as 27% of the time. So that means your kid could turn in the report and 27% of the information is false. That ought to do well on the report card. So talk to your kids about not using AI to write papers. It's not always accurate.
Speaker 1:Now, this one next article is something that I'm thrilled about. It's sad, but I've read the original article and it's about this dad, arturio Bijar, who worked for Metta. He was working for Mark Zuckerberg and he was working on a project that kind of helped kids stay safe online and he came to the real life. So he's worked in the industry his whole career and his 13, 14 year old daughter started and apparently she's into finishing cars, like polishing up cars, remodeling cars. She really did cars. She started posting pictures of herself on Instagram with a car. 14, 14 year old girl. Guess what she got back, sidney, can you think of any replies that she might be getting?
Speaker 2:My experience with social media, when I've done things, hasn't been so favorable as to the responses I get from men.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I can only imagine. To be blunt. Many of them were about oh babes, boobs and cars Like oh boy, and others were to be blunt dick pics, and I'm always just amazed by guys who think that sending a picture of your penis to a female is going to be attractive. It's not very attractive in general.
Speaker 2:I don't think it's about that. I have come to the determination that it's like a power play.
Speaker 1:Power play.
Speaker 2:That they want to do that and they feel entitled to that because you've posted something and I don't.
Speaker 1:There's definitely that dynamic of power.
Speaker 2:I think that they don't expect you to be like oh yeah, you're who I want. I think that in some way it's just like an exhibitionist, like control thing of it. I mean I've had it happen to me personally. It is an absolutely weird thing that happens with social media and women. Maybe it happens to men too, I have no idea.
Speaker 1:Well and the most. No, I haven't got any dick pics and there's no women sending me pictures of their body parts, because I posted something about how to parent. That hasn't happened.
Speaker 2:That's funny. It's a real dynamic.
Speaker 1:There was one fellow who was trying to show it as a sign of romance the world famous quarterback, brett Favre and it didn't go so well for him. He got canceled for several years, but now he's back and he's in commercials again. All is forgiven. But this gentleman His daughter came to him and said this is what I'm getting. So he created a new way for Metta to analyze bullying kind of behavior, and it involved a survey of users to say hey, have you felt bullied in some way or uncomfortable with posts you're getting? And this was new compared to whatever data collection they were doing on kids before, and most of that was around are their child pornography ranks, which that obviously needs to be put to rest. But they really weren't doing a deep dive. So he created this platform, did the research on it, presented to Mark Zuckerberg, he put him down to some committee and they said okay, you can tell us about it, but you can't cite any of your research or anything like that. So basically, they just told him to go away. Well, about five days ago or so, that attorney general's lawsuit against Metta is starting investigations and on stand was this man, mr Bjar, talking about how Metta purposely ignored better ways to screen social media for youth and I hope it works. Talk about payback I just loved it, okay. Topic of guns I talked about the attorney general's doing things with social medias. There's others doing things around guns.
Speaker 1:Michael Bloomberg wrote an incredible opinion page last week that was published in the Denver Post following the shootings of Maine and he hit on several different things that the number of guns in this country, which outweighs the number of people now we're on averaging. So about the spring, my students in eighth grade were talking about how we'd only had a hundred days in the school year of the 2023 year and there already been over a hundred shootings. So that's one per day. Now it's two per day. There's two mass shootings per day in our country. Then he also took on this idea of what's mental illness. It's all caused by mental illness and he pointed out that other countries, like our own, they have mental illness too, but they don't have nearly the rate of gun deaths as we do and it's because we have too many guns. And he basically was saying then our issues of mental health was a way to avoid attention with them and put pressure on them to get rid of the guns. Really a compelling story. So I wrote a follow up editorial for the Denver Post and they picked it up. It's like an opinion piece they have. You can write on the letter about articles and they publish mine. I'll read it to you.
Speaker 1:That spring, after the national school shooting, my eighth grade students shared how the US had already had more mass shootings in there were days in the year. Now the number has doubled for the day so far this year. Students as young as first and second grade are hearing this news and are afraid their school will be next. As a result of our gun culture and social media, our youths are having a pandemic of fragility, and that's a new phrase I'm using. The pandemic of fragility is not our children's fault. It's not their fault. They're fragile. It's our fault for exposing them to guns, social media, not doing more about climate change. That's on us as adults. They don't feel safe and are drowning in depression and anxiety. It's time for younger parents and grandparents to step up and demand changes in our laws regarding weapons of war and social media.
Speaker 1:And I had my name on it, which is fun. So it's fun getting picked up in the newspaper. That's great. I like doing that. I've done that a lot over the years.
Speaker 1:Now this last story is just disgusting for the United States Absolutely disgusting Tied up articles in Time Magazine. What's behind the spike in child poverty? In the US In 2021, 5.2% of children were living in poverty. In 2022, the figure was 12.4, or about 9 million children. This hike was part of a wide horizon poverty recorded by the census, some of which can be attributed to inflation, but advocates for children say the leap is particularly stark for kids and was avoidable. That goes on to talk about how the child tax credit helps so many families and so many children during COVID that that policy is no longer exist. And, as one advocate said, poverty in our country isn't about a personal failing but rather a policy choice, and our law makers need to bring back the child tax credit to have 9 million children's country living in poverty.
Speaker 1:In my mind, it's sinful. It is absolutely sinful, and especially us parents. I was guilty of the two. We love to indulge our children and get them the latest things or take them on great trips and stuff. But, man, when you think about that, that 9 million of those kids have nothing and the other kids are getting everything. Not that black and white, of course, but it's one of the reasons.
Speaker 1:Anytime I take my kids on nice trips, especially my son and I would go to different islands and places that were just way out there, but I always made sure that we got if we were doing a resort. Many times we didn't touch resorts, but if we did go to a nice all inclusive resort, I always made sure we got out of the resort and did a tour in the local areas so that he could see what real life was like. Most of our kids who go to Mexico Mal Cabo or whatever their idea of Mexico it's all fruit, drinks, rainbows and unicorns and everybody lives that way. Well, they don't. And when you step outside of a resort, do it with your own kids too. Get them out of the resort and go through a local town. Either rent a car, take one of those excursion trips and you really see what real life is like. And our kids need to understand that not everybody has what we have. So anything we do to fight poverty and homelessness in this country would be a very good thing. Okay. Should any final thoughts comments?
Speaker 2:No, I just. I read a statistic though that kind of pertains to what you're talking about homelessness and homelessness in America and where we put our resources and it talked a lot about how women, especially women with children, are usually the most silent of in the homeless situation and that we see and it is stereotypical to see, but if you see people on the side of the street begging for money, it's not usually women with children. That is the greatest impact that we have and that, rather than giving not that any degree of homelessness is any less, but when you think about children that don't have a place to sleep and they don't have food to eat but we don't see that insecure food and they're not able to get into shelters or the shelters aren't safe for them.
Speaker 2:That should be our highest priority. Yeah, is that those kids have a safe place to go. But they say that women are the most silent and they stay on the street because shelters aren't safe. Because it isn't, they're not able to get in their kids aren't safe there.
Speaker 1:And the other is for women who are undocumented and have kids and they won't go to the police, for if they're assaulted they won't go to the police because they're afraid of being deported or being separated from their kids. So what a messed up choice is that?
Speaker 2:Right, it's a complex issue and there are a lot of resources available for homeless people, or I think you're supposed to say people experiencing homelessness. But there is a lot of resources available but why are they not using it? Because it goes very much untapped and it's hard. I worked with a company not too long ago called showers for all and they provide showers for homelessness, but that, believe it or not, I mean for people that are homeless and, believe it or not, they had a hard time recruiting people to come use their services, which you think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they would run to, but it probably doesn't feel safe. Right, and I think the term now is the unhoused oh, the unhoused. Okay, yes, I think that's, as you know, the person. It's hard to keep up with all the new language.
Speaker 2:But there's no negative connotation in any way, from at all, in fact.
Speaker 1:I was talking to our new chaplain, our school yesterday, a delightful chat with a wonderful woman, 28, I think, 30. And I was talking about our program for mental health consumers and she's like what's that mean? It's what they used to call them chronic mentally ill, which is like people's severe schizophrenia, bipolar, etc. And she said, oh, I know that term. She said Is that the new term? I'm like, yeah, mental health consumers. She's like, oh, okay, so even younger people have our time keeping up with it all.
Speaker 1:But language is important. I truly believe language is important and it shapes the way we think about the world. Okay, I want to get to things of beauty make me cry, and it's on this topic of homelessness. Something happened to me last week. But first I want to explain my philosophy. My favorite philosopher is a fellow named Albert were.
Speaker 1:Albert North Whitehead lived in the late 1800s, early 1900s. He was at Harvard and he invented something called process philosophy. And I like to tell people I'm a whitehead and that's who I follow and it's a very simple. It's a very. It's actually quite complicated, but the simple definition is that as humans we're going through life. We can't say, have to think about three zones. One zone to your left is your past experience, as your past choices that led you to where you are, in the middle, which is now this position of now and he talks about. You could never be totally free of your past. It's resulted where you're now came from that. But the goal would be in the now to look back and think, huh, how did those choices work out for me? How did I get here as the what's the David Byrne, the talking heads great song, how did I get here? And the days go by, I won't say, but you got to look at where you came from. How you got here. Then, to the right is your future, and that there's all these choices we have for our future that we could make in that moment.
Speaker 1:And the problem with not Whitehead, what he felt is some people just didn't understand their past. They kept replicating the same choices from their past and we're stuck in their past, basically, and that as humans we tend to jump. We go right from the now into the future. We're always making quick choices. And his whole idea was to stop in the now and really analyze all the choices before you. And then he believed he was what's called. He was in a metaphysics, so he was an atheist but he believed in sort of this harmony of the universe.
Speaker 1:Nowadays I think he'd probably be a string theory guy, but he believed the universe provided lures to beauty, like a fishing lure that would lure us to beauty, that if we made that choice it would bring beauty in the world. And so the goal as a process philosopher is to always stop in the now, analyze your past, figure that out, then really analyze your choices and think about which of these will bring beauty. So it's where this whole thing things of beauty make me cry. It's really came from. I always felt that when I even when I was a little boy, I can remember watching the Brian Piccolo story, which is about a Chicago Bears football player who died of cancer, and with my best friend and some buddies we were watching. It was a famous movie and I'm over there crying, going. Oh God, I hope my friends don't notice I'm crying. It was so moving, just something else. But when I studied process philosophy I became even more in tune with that and really believe that there's lures out there all the time for us and it could be at anywhere, any place.
Speaker 1:So the other night worked about eight o'clock it's dark out early now.
Speaker 1:Big start, cold little rainy out here in Denver and I turned out of my office to get on take a ride on one street and the left on another street goes right to my house. I'm five minutes away and as I was turning right I noticed what appeared to be this elderly, homeless man with this kind of poncho raincoat thing who was just as thin as could be and head was down, his shoulder was down and he couldn't push his shopping cart onto the curb even though it had a ramp. He was struggling to get into his shopping cart and I kind of zipped by him fast because I wanted to get home and I thought I need to go back. So I went around the block and I came back and there he was and I pulled over and I got in the car and I helped him with his cart and he said thank you so much, sir. He looked at me and he was not an old man, he was probably 22 or 23 and he had the look of someone who's a mental health consumer.
Speaker 1:He had a schizophrenic look and if you've worked with people with schizophrenia you can see some of those symptoms. And I was just blown away. He was just a 23 year old guy who's amatiated and I got his cart there and I pulled on my wallet and gave him some money and I said I gave him 20 bucks and I said, look, right down the street there's a chipotle, there's a Chick-fil-A. I want you to go there, get something to eat and warm up. And he was thank you so much and I'm leaving. He said bless you, sir. And I turned around to him and I said you just blessed me Because in that moment I got to see beauty.
Speaker 1:Or, from a Christian perspective which I grew up with, I saw Jesus in him. I got to see Jesus. That night I encountered beauty and it only happened because I stopped. If I kept going I would have missed that. So to all the homeless folks out there, god, I hope we do something in Denver. I knew Mayor's time but we still got a long ways to go and that's scourge on our population. So all that I will say thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the program, please feel to share with a friend. Don't forget to check out my new book Shame Free Parenting. Go to your bookstore, they can order it or you can get it through. Amazon Would appreciate that. And until next time, just relax. You only have to be this side of good enough. Thank you.