Rebel Therapist Podcast Transcript

I was featured on Annie Schuessler’s Rebel Therapist Podcast, Episode 181! Listen at the link or find the episode wherever you listen to podcasts. Below is a transcript of my portion.

I feel honored to be included in a group with such incredible people doing powerful, thoughtful work, and I am glad to be able to share their information with you. All our programs have now been featured in a three-part series on the podcast and you can find more information about connecting with each of them on the the podcast web site.

Hi, my name is Sarah Dobkin. I’m a clinical social worker in the San Francisco bay area.

Over the past 9 months, I’ve created a 5-week program called The Puzzle of Parenting that supports high-achieving parents to feel more confident as they raise their toddlers and preschool-aged children. In this program I work individually with a parent or parenting couple to develop strategies that work for them and their family based on their own observations, understanding, and reflections. My program is built on the foundational principles that all behavior has meaning -children’s behaviors and adults’ behaviors- and when we can understand the needs that drive our behaviors and our children’s behaviors, we can create better connections and find more joy in our relationships.

I started this work because I was an infant and early childhood mental health specialist before becoming a parent myself. I’d read books and attended trainings and learned a lot about child development and parenting skills. And then I became a parent. To twins. And all the things I thought I knew became difficult to implement. I remember sitting with a colleague while I was going through one sleep training battle or another and saying, “can you just tell me what I need to do to get this kid to sleep?” To which she responded, “I could tell you something, but the only thing that’s going to work is you deciding you know what’s best.” This response has guided the way I think about how I support parents to both understand their own needs and their children’s needs AND to inspire them to feel confident they know what’s best. I know that there isn’t one right way - and as my colleague reminded me, any strategy for responding effectively to children must involve an adult feeling confident that what they are doing is the best they can do for their child right now – not feeling “I’ve tried everything else, this is my last resort” or feeling “I know I should do it differently, but I’m exhausted and this is all I have left to give” and especially not “this is what I’m supposed to do.” That last one is hard to avoid for those of us who are used to doing what we’re supposed to do, doing it well, and getting rewarded.

In both my personal and my professional roles, I get a lot of marketing about how to deal with any number of parenting struggles. This marketing is usually suggesting a lot of simple solutions that have supposed life changing effects. I knew going into creating my program, that marketing approach wasn’t going to work for me. I wasn’t going to be able to sell my program as a “quick fix” or a “single solution” and I wasn’t going to be able to offer “the 5 things you have to try right now” because the parents I hear from, the parents I know, are all different. They have different values, different needs, and different routines. And while their goals of having safe and healthy children might be the same, the ways they achieve that may be different because their children are also different. 

Ironically, or perhaps very predictably, one of the things that has been hardest for me in the process of building and selling this program is finding my own confidence. Because I’m wanting to avoid giving those quick solutions, it means I sometimes end up feeling like I don’t have anything concrete to offer. Plus, with my own young children at home, I have plenty of opportunities to walk the walk, and plenty of opportunities to observe how hard what I’m asking parents to do is for me to do myself. And it’s happened, more than I care to admit, that I have gone directly from a meeting with parents about their toddler’s tantrums into my very own power struggle at preschool pickup and wondered “do I really know what I’m talking about?” 

Working closely with a group of entrepreneurs and program developers has given me a chance to observe the ways that we all wonder this: the ways that each of us, in very different stages of developing our programs and businesses, have felt successful and have felt less than. I’ve been inspired and learned to take risks that I wouldn’t have taken before, to remember that in creating a program my role is not to fix things for someone or to have all the answers but to help them know this same fact: that we all wonder if we have any clue what we’re doing, and that that kind of wondering is ok, it’s healthy, and it can even be constructive when I don’t get stuck in a place of letting that wondering reinforce questions about my self-worth.

This learning also supports me to create the content that so far has driven much of my marketing. I worry less about appearing to be an expert. I worry less about my content needing to appeal to everyone. I worry less about the fear that someone will read what I’m saying and have a dozen articles to disprove it. Because 1) I know that people are going to have different answers, 2) I know that I’m going to make mistakes, and 3) I know that the people who find my content appealing are going to find my style appealing. And when those people pay for my program, I know it’s not for some secret I have access to that I’m going to share with them, it’s for my time and attention. Or said another way, I know that what I have to give is not just information, it is a way of thinking, a way of honoring effort, of building skills, of seeing and hearing, of creating empathy - and that comes from who I am and how I am, not only what I know.

And, as it turns out, this is the same thing I want parents to know about parenting.