Ben Lippen Podcast

Good Enough Parenting

• Ben Lippen Podcast • Season 2 • Episode 1

Share episode

What if the thing making parenting feel impossible isn’t you, but the way our world flips risk and connection on their heads? We sit down with Dr. Seth Scott—counselor educator, assistant dean, and dad—to unpack why raising kids in today’s culture can feel like sprinting uphill with a phone in each hand. From earlier individuation and eroding community to the tug-of-war over when to give a child a phone, we trace how isolation sneaks in, why symptoms deserve curiosity, and where parents can reclaim steady ground.

We walk through the biggest modern pressure points: the myth of constant safety, the very real hazards of unfiltered online life, and the rising expectation that parents should always know, always respond, always fix. Dr. Scott offers a whole-child framework—biological, psychological, social, and spiritual—that helps reframe “acting out” as a signal. Sometimes the right move is protein and bedtime, not punishment. We dig into how tech can numb discomfort just enough to stall growth, and how to rebuild the muscles of boredom tolerance, conflict repair, and resilience so kids can handle real-life stress without spiraling.

Parents aren’t sidelined in this story. Using the reservoir-and-dam metaphor, we explore emotional self-awareness, practical outlets that prevent evening meltdowns, and the power of tag-teaming with a spouse or trusted community. The aim isn’t perfect parenting; it’s “good enough” parenting grounded in consistent love, clear limits, and thoughtful repair. You’ll leave with language for tough transitions, ideas to delay or right-size phones, and confidence to see behavior as information, not defiance.

If this conversation helps you breathe a little easier, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs encouragement, and leave a quick review so more parents can find it. What hard place are you navigating right now?

Mrs. Erin Kay:

Welcome to another episode of the Ben Lippen Podcast. Today I'm going to be introducing a new two-part series to the Ben Lippen Podcast about parenting in the hard places. And I have with me today Dr. Seth Scott. He is a professor over at CIU. Dr. Scott, will you just tell us a little bit about yourself and what makes you an expert in this particular topic?

Dr. Seth Scott:

Sure. Glad to be here. So I'm the assistant dean for the seminary and school of counseling, and I'm the director of our clinical counseling program, our MA program, and teach and created our PhD in counselor education supervision. I'm also the father of two teenagers, a college student and a high school student. And so some personal experience in parenting in hard places. But my training and experience in clinical work over the past almost 20 years has been predominantly in working with families and kids with issues of conduct and then kind of walking families through the systemic issues of addiction, trauma, family systems issues like divorce and separation. And so most of my focus has been on supporting kids and advocating for kids and young adults in these areas and then working with couples on issues of marriage and family and addiction and in loss, separation, and trauma.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

We're grateful to have you here and to be able to lean into your wisdom to help guide our parents who either might currently be going through hard places or hard places will come in the future. So our first episode, it's focused on navigating crisis and transition. So can you share a little bit about what it would mean to parent in hard places?

Dr. Seth Scott:

Yeah, I think that anytime there's change, we have to adapt and adjust what we're doing because what we did yesterday may not work today as the parameters change. And so parenting is all about that, right? Is at every developmental stage, you might have just figured out how to parent your toddler and now they're an elementary school kid. And as soon as you figure that out, and then you might figure out how to parent one kid and the next kid comes and you try to apply those same principles and they're different. So parenting in general is difficult, but specifically parenting in hard places is the kind of external pressures and systemic factors that just add to the complexity of trying to parent. And so things like addiction, like cell phones, trauma, the noise of our world, and then your kind of your own background, history, family of origin, maybe issues in marriage, divorce, separation, infidelity, those are how do we sustain and kind of hold on to our capacity to represent God well in the lives of our kids and to parent well in spite of our own cycles and struggles and difficulties. And so parenting in the hard places can range across the continuum from expected developmental milestones like parenting kids as they head into school, parenting middle schoolers and the complexity of the 21st century and peers and isolation and friendship to parenting through our own struggles and maintaining consistency in those.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

Yeah, it's interesting that you place cell phones and trauma in the same container as parenting in the hard places. Can you speak to that a little bit more?

Dr. Seth Scott:

So you would explain that uh in creation, God created us in his image to be in relationship with him, with one another, have kind of whole and complete understanding of ourselves and engagement with creation. Part of the fall was that we exchanged the trust of that relationship and God kind of defining things for us to choose to define things for ourselves. And that fractured our relationships. And so from there, we have this tendency towards selfish self-centeredness and curving inward on ourselves, and isolation is a component of that. And so the world around us, we're we're constantly pushing against the pursuit of relationship in kind of selfishness to relationship in wholeness. And the things that occur in our world are factors of that. So trauma is a fracturing of your sense of self and your self in relationship. And cell phones, as Sherry Turkle explained in her book, Alone Together, technology came along at such a place where we were beginning as a society to individuate and need connection. And the internet promised these connections at just the time when it was most necessary because we were starting to kind of fracture as a culture, as a society, become more individuated. And yet the promise of connection was a fake promise that created a vicious cycle of meeting our needs just enough to not motivate us to engage in effective real relationship. And so the reason we combine kind of the role of phones and trauma is they're both an aspect of the consequence of the fall of fractured relationships. But it's like amplifying the effect of the fall in that we are even more separated, even more disconnected, even more isolated from one another because of our hurt, which then causes us to retreat and seek safety in relationship, like connected through technology. But then that continued safety makes us weaker and more fragile, which makes us more likely to be shattered. And so the perpetuation of this cycle means that technology itself will make parenting more difficult because as Jonathan Hayde says in The Anxious Generation, right? We now live in probably in the United States one of the safest cultures in the world, one of the safest times in the world. And yet we're afraid to let our kids kind of engage in real life because of the perceived dangers. And yet the internet is the wild west and the unknown. And so we restrict our kids from what we know to be safe in real life in engagement, but we restrict our kids in what actually is really dangerous in technological life and the internet. We've reversed the perception of danger, which then leads to continued fracturing and disruption.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

I understand what you're the picture you're painting here. And, you know, when we look at the fall, it kind of sets the tone and normalizes for us that parenting will be hard and parenting will have hard places, even though that was not God's intentional design with it. So speaking of society and culture and where we are today, what are some of the most common crises or transitions that families are facing today?

Dr. Seth Scott:

So it used to be that probably in high school you had to navigate that connection and release as kids want to do more things in freedom and independence with their peers. That's occurring earlier now. And I think one of the biggest decisions that parents have to make is when do you first introduce something like a cell phone? It's not an individual or a family decision because of the peer pressure of everyone else. That's a hard developmental transition that we know is kind of it's happening too early, but it has big implications. The expectations for individuation, for privacy, for isolation are something that we're fighting against. The lack of community for families in raising kids. And so I think it was actually Hillary Clinton that wrote the book, right? It takes a village to raise a child. In previous generations, and in most places around the world, it does. Like people work in community, communal lifestyles to help support, if not the direct child rearing, the values and needs and assumptions of the children, of the parents, of the family. And so I think parenting is especially difficult today because we live in a society that has, we've always lived in a world that has competing values, but we now live in a world whose values are so dissonant to what we would view as biblical and Christian values that our kids are growing up with desires and assumptions that are contrary to a biblical worldview, and we're losing the voice, right? So we don't have as vocal a presence because our kids are influenced from younger and younger ages through media, through other things. And so, yeah, some of those hard places are just the degree of influence that we have, the amount of time that we have to speak into our kids' lives, the opportunities that we have. So again, we're busy. We're busier, I think, than we've been before. We spend less time while we have more total time with our kids. The time we have is not as focused, it's more disrupted. And so each of these things and being pulled in all directions makes parenting much more difficult. And trying to do it alone, I think, makes it additionally complex.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

So we have the pull to isolation with some of the advances in technology and advances in the approach. How does that couple with some of the hard places of parenting that we can relate to that happened in biblical times that are still happening today?

Dr. Seth Scott:

Yeah, I think that, you know, you've always had the family life cycle where kids grow up through different stages. Having young kids has always been difficult. You know, pairing the needs of infants with the reduced sleep that you have, I don't I think that's always been an issue, right? Mary and Joseph, I'm sure, you know, whether they took turns or not, when Jesus, you know, woke up in the middle of the night, someone had to deal with that and they're probably both exhausted. Right. So some of those things are universals. But the difference today is our increasing individualism and kind of selfishness as a culture, as a society, which causes us to have to overcome our own entitlement or expectations. That I think in previous generations there was a more cohesive collective lens. And so in biblical times, first century Judaism, right, you had a society that kind of had different values that would conform. And so if your marriage wasn't going well, for good or for bad, you didn't have many options to get out of it. And up through like the late 70s in the United States, right? We had very few divorces and probably more abuse, but very few divorces because the kind of collective assumption was marriage stays together with the freedom for no fault divorces. That creates new hard places for kids, right? The impact of divorce on kids. And so I think as each generation shifts, the normal developmental milestones of raising kids are always going to be there. When do you let kids sleep over at a friend's house on their own? At what point do you let kids ride their bike around the neighborhood? But our society amplifies. So, like since the 50s, right, kids have gotten their license and had the autonomy and freedom. And so multiple generations before us have had to, as parents, had to kind of release and address the fear of your kid driving, pulling out of the driveway for the first time. I think the complexity of that now is amplified by both the presence of a cell phone so that we know where they are at all times, but the expectation that we then should know where they are at all times as a result and that they should be always available creates a heightened anxiety or expectation, as well as the distraction that comes from that for the safety of driving, for example. Right. So every time we have an advancement in technology to hopefully provide more ease or connection, it's hollow. So that I think parenting today is more difficult because our expectations for what we should be able to do is higher. So when my daughter at college, because she has a cell phone and I can text her, I would expect to hear back from her when I text her. And if I don't, it could create heightened anxiety of well, what's wrong? Is there something wrong? Why isn't she responding? Whereas when I was in college, there is a floor phone for, you know, 30 people that, you know, I could go weeks with missing calls from my mom and or my dad and me trying to call back and missing and just leaving notes on a whiteboard. But that the expectation of access and availability has created a more anxious society because we think that we should be able to do more. So we think that we should be able to regulate and control things. We think that bad things shouldn't happen because we live in a safer society. So all of these are elements I think that make parenting hard because what we think we should do and the demands we place on us just heighten the expectations that are more difficult to meet.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

So shifting gears a little bit and looking at transitions and the crises that can occur in the lives of adults and children, how do children typically respond to these disruptions? And I know it's it'll be different for kindergartner versus a 12th grader. So could you paint a picture of kind of what those milestones would look like, what those experiences would look like, depending on where that child is developmentally?

Dr. Seth Scott:

Yeah, one of the things that's important to understand is that our experience as adults of transition, of uncertainty, of anxiety might produce hesitancy or sadness or fear. In kids, those same symptoms might look very different. So a child that's experiencing friend issues in school and the the aloneness or the you know melancholy from that may start acting out behaviorally or may start, because they have trouble sleeping, may be more grumpy or moody. And if we try to apply like behavioral approaches to that without understanding that they're reacting or responding to a normal social piece, then it ends up actually create fracturing more our opportunity for relationship. So as kids hit each of these pieces, we need to look at the whole person, right? Which means we need to make sure that they're getting effective sleep, that they're getting sufficient nutrition, that they have good connection and social relationships for trusting, listening and responding. All of those things kind of need to be in place as well as their capacity to understand and express what they're experiencing inside to people that are able to listen and respond. And so in a society that maybe doesn't give us the language or the opportunity to discuss, kids are going to be more likely to avoid, distract, or numb the experience of uncomfortable emotions that they have, which we have the perfect delivery system for avoiding distracting or numbing in technology today, right? So the ability to sit with discomfort or be able to talk through and address problems with friends, problems at home requires the language and the time and the willingness to lean into that. And that's kind of a learned muscle of relationship. If every time we feel any discomfort, whether it's pain that we medicate or hunger that we feed, if our immediate response is to escape or avoid that discomfort, that will then apply across all aspects of life. And we will kind of lose the discipline or muscle of doing harder things. And so as we work with kids, in many ways, parents need to let kids be bored, right? They need to let kids learn how to deal with and experience aspects of discomfort because it's through those experiences that we grow muscles and we have the capacity to kind of engage in more difficult things and through resiliency. And so some of those developmental milestones that are normal are, you know, peer pressure or peer relationships, right? So kids have to figure out how to get along, how to disagree, how to have conflict. When they observe their parents not being able to resolve conflict, and that leads to maybe separation or divorce, which complicates it, then they don't know how to deal with it either. And they're dealing with the added pressure of observing that and the uncertainty of that and not having modeled to then cause disruption in their in their peer relationships. And so we would see you'd see sleep disturbance, behavioral disturbance, maybe grade issues, right? It's hard to focus. Kids might have symptoms of anxiety that is not necessarily anxiety or symptoms that look like ADHD or ADD that are more sleep disturbance or disruption from technology. And so we want to be quick, we want to not be too quick to just assume that it's anxiety or ADHD or trauma and assess the whole person in their system's context to say, are you getting enough sleep? What are your relationships like? Because we need to prepare you for normal developmental pieces like disagreeing with friends, like launching into high school and the added stressors of homework, preparing for uncertainty of self in later high school, going to college, right? And so if we can look at the whole person and look at the system, some of those symptoms are symptoms to tell us something's wrong without maybe being quick to just solve the symptom. Right. Johan Hari in his book Lost Connections gives the example of eating a tainted apple somewhere in Asia and it it caused vomiting and diarrhea. And he was dangerously dehydrated. And he told the doctors, no, I just give me something so that I don't feel this anymore. And the doctors told him, No, the symptoms tell us that something is wrong, right? We we need the symptoms to tell us something is wrong. I think we live in a culture that is quick to try to resolve the symptoms by avoiding escaping or numbing and not deal with the underlying cause, which is fracturing of self through sin and disruption of relationships in a culture that individuates and isolates. And so parenting is especially difficult today, I think, because we all tend to be more distracted and isolated than before.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

You've mentioned the whole child, the whole person several times. Can you explain a little bit deeper what you mean by the whole child?

Dr. Seth Scott:

Yeah, so God designed us as bio-psychosocial spiritual beings. So we are we are biological, we have mirror neurons, we have synapses, we have biochemicals in our system that inform that is influenced by sleep, by nutrition. We are psychological that forms belief systems and values of thinking and processing that can be adjusted and informed. We are social in that we are made for, God designed us for relationship, and that we are spiritual, we are created for relationship with Him and others. All of those dynamics together influence and affect one another and can be habituated or learned and adjusted. And so, for example, if when you feel hungry, you feel like that means, well, I have a pit in my stomach, that means that I'm hungry. Your belief is that hunger should be resolved. And so you go to the cabinet and get something. And that getting something makes you feel better both emotionally and physically. If you do that in isolation, that's the relational pieces, all kind of tied together and informing one another. But if when you feel hungry, it drives you to uh have a meal with your family, the bio, psychosocial, spiritual relationships that we associate then with hunger become something that meet our relational needs as well as our physical needs instead of just our physical or emotional needs. So kids are all of those things together, but our tendency is to break things down into component parts and try to come up with simplistic solutions. And so uh when kids are misbehaving at 3:30 on your drive home from picking them up at school, we tend to view that as a behavioral issue. If they're 10 years old, the likelihood is, or even if they're 15 years old, the likelihood is that they ate lunch at 10:30 and now it's 3:30 and they're tired from sitting still and paying attention all day, and they're hungry. So that what looks like a behavioral issue could be resolved with peanut butter crackers. And so recognizing that all of these things influence each other helps us see a child and see the component parts as influencing and informing one another to be able to represent love and compassion across their whole self.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

Do you see an over complication of parenting approaches to navigating some of these simple things like I ate lunch at 10:30 and also the more complex things that children are going through, whether it's a divorce or a death in the family, things like that. Do you see an overcomplication of how parents are engaging in working through those things with their children?

Dr. Seth Scott:

I think that we're flooded with information all of the time. And so it's difficult to know what to do at any given moment because it seems like there's always more research to be done and there's competing responses for those, right? So there's, you know, five steps for this, seven steps for this. We want to address the whole brainchild here, but we want to make sure they get leafy greens and organic here. And so I think because we have so much information, it paralyzes us in making any choices because I think parents are told that the wrong choice has significant implications. And I mean, one of the dangers, even in the past couple of weeks, of the exploration of all right, well, what seems to contribute to autism is there's a danger in trying to identify one thing in a complex system because it creates an aspect of blame potentially for you did this or you caused this. If only I had done something different in this moment. And so I think that because we live in a society where there's so much information, we feel like we should know better, but there's competing information and we have to make a decision in any given moment. I think the simplistic approach to parenting is we need to just be a good enough parent. We're not gonna be a great parent, probably all the time, and we're not gonna be the best parent for our child at any given moment. We need to be a good parent, which means we are attentive to our child's needs and we exhibit God's love to them in as consistent manner as we can by representing God in their lives. And that's gonna look like discipline at times, that's gonna look like grace and mercy at other times. But in order to be able to foster the identity of your child, you need to know who you are in relationship to self and God and others. And I think that's where we break down a lot of times. And so parenting becomes especially difficult if you haven't dealt with your own stuff. So if you're unsure of who you are and you're still trying to kind of use others or use things or use your child to give you meaning and value and purpose, then you're not going to be able to give from a place of wholeness and completeness to your child. And then your child doesn't establish their sense of self in kind of attachment and acceptance. And that just trickles down generation after generation. And so parenting means that you know you are loved by God and you are able to then experience that love and express that love to others in healthy relationships and provide care and support for your child from the safety of that relationship.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

As parents, we are whole people as well. Just because we graduate from high school or cross over the threshold into adulting doesn't mean that we are any less of a whole person than we were when we were a child. So, how can parents balance their emotional needs and even their needs to be a whole person while also supporting their children?

Dr. Seth Scott:

I think it's important. So we think emotions begin with our expression of them, but actually they begin in recognizing that lots of things contribute to the experience of emotions and then the expression of emotions. So I have an analogy that I use of a reservoir and dam for emotions, in that lots of events come in and build up flowing upstream into our reservoir that build up pressure behind the wall of the dam. And our ability to experience and express emotions is determined to some degree by our insight and awareness of what we are experiencing, and then our capacity to express and control those emotions in appropriate ways to provide outlets to power our relationships. And so I think as society, and then specifically as parents, we lack awareness of our emotional states. We're not aware of what's going on inside of us until it's too much, until it's more than we can handle. And then we end up kind of exploding with the water going over the top of the damn wall instead of going through in powered control. And so one of the things that as parents we need for our emotional needs is we need to be able to be aware of what our present emotional state is. As I work with a lot of parents in conduct issues, they'll say, My kid goes from zero to 10. And so no interventions work. And I said, Well, actually, everybody goes through all of those numbers, but we may not be aware that we're actually starting at a six or a seven, not a zero, because we're we don't have awareness of our internal state. And so the work in working with kids is trying to help them be aware of, all right, what are you experiencing inside? How does the sensation in your body influence your interpretation of that experience to produce a belief that informs an interpretation of emotion that we then express? So kids have trouble doing this because it's learned and modeled from parents. So as parents, we can be aware of all right, how has our day impacted the level of water in our emotional reservoir? So that when I get home and I'm tired and I'm cranky and I'm hungry, and it's 5:30 and I'm trying to have my kids do homework and make dinner, and my spouse comes in the door, our water reservoir is cresting at the top. And so that means that maybe we release water earlier, we let out emotions through effective expression or practice or physical exercise so that we know that four o'clock to seven o'clock time frame is gonna be a flood of lots more emotions. And so I need to prepare myself and have appropriate outlets to exhibit and express those emotions in effective and constructive ways. But this is where I think God's design for two parents and then community and village is so necessary because just like growing up watching, you know, WWF wrestling, tag team, hopefully in in parenting, in families, when you're overwhelmed, exhausted emotionally, physically, relationally, spiritually, you can tap out and tag somebody else who's able to come in fresh. And so that's part of the necessity of maintaining the priority of your marriage as a couple as the primary preventative support for raising good kids. You have one another's back. You're able to experience God's love, you're able to express God's love, you're able to feel seen and valued and heard so that your emotional reservoir is regulated to then give more than you're ever probably imagined you're able to to your kids in times of need because you have someone else that's there for you and hopefully lots of people that are there for you. So, yeah, as parents, our own emotional needs mean that we are aware, we have insight and capacity, and then we have appropriate expressions and outlets relationally to maintain our own spiritual, emotional, relational help.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

It sounds like when we're parenting in some of these hard places, whether it is through when my child is going to have a cell phone and those hard discussions that occur to death in the family or some other kind of hardship in that way, that the nuances of parenting are different in the situations, but the foundational approach is consistent. Would you say that's true?

Dr. Seth Scott:

Yeah, I think that's a great summary.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

All right. So, what can our listeners expect in our next episode as we continue this conversation?

Dr. Seth Scott:

I think we want to look at what are some specific ways to build resilience. And then how do we recover from having done things poorly? All of us could have done, made better choices at particular points, right? We tend to take the shortcut. So, you know, when you took the shortcut and let your kids, because you needed emotional space, watch, you know, four hours of blues, clues, whatever. How do you recover from that when they're habituated to expect that shortcut, right? How do we recover? How do we improve? You know, if you've been divorced and you're single parenting, how do you do that? What does that look like? We know what the ideal is, but we know that we also don't live in an ideal world. And so I think that's part of what we want to look at next.

Mrs. Erin Kay:

Great. Thanks, listeners, and make sure that you subscribe so that you can catch the next episode.