Ben Lippen Podcast

People Need People

• Ben Lippen Podcast • Season 2 • Episode 2

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Parenting gets harder when life does too—divorce, grief, tech overload, and the daily strain can leave even steady homes frayed. We sat down with Dr. Seth Scott to unpack a different path: lead with grace, lean on community, and parent the whole child—body, mind, relationships, and spirit. Rather than trying to be the sole fixer, we focus on building a circle of care and setting clear, shared expectations that calm chaos and help kids thrive.

Dr. Scott breaks down practical co-parenting strategies after separation, including unifying house rules across homes and agreeing on consequences ahead of time so decisions aren’t made in anger or fatigue. We talk about how kids actually grieve—often through play and uneven waves of emotion—and how to model sadness without overwhelming them. You’ll hear how to teach an emotions vocabulary, guide appropriate expression, and use the “rule of five” adults to give children a wider net of support. When trust has been broken, he offers a simple script for repair that restores connection without shame: apologize clearly, ask for forgiveness, and make amends.

We also explore wise transparency—what to share, how much, and why it matters to show our kids that we seek help from peers, pastors, and counselors when needed. Dr. Scott outlines when professional counseling makes sense, especially when past wounds block present growth, and why the church is uniquely positioned to provide sustained encouragement, presence, and practical care. Through it all, we return to hope: God’s love and sovereignty hold our families, and perspective grows when we’re not walking alone.

If this conversation helps, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs encouragement, and leave a quick review so more parents can find practical hope. Your support helps us keep these deep, honest conversations coming.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben Lipin Podcast. In this episode, we are entering into episode two in our Parenting in the Hard Places series with Dr. Seth Scott. And Dr. Scott, share with us just a little bit about what we highlighted in our first episode.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so we looked at recognizing that parenting is hard. And so just by itself, it's a hard place. But the complexity of the world that we live in and different situations like divorce, loss, technology amplify the difficulty of the developmental stages and developmental crises we face naturally. And that part of the solution to that is recognizing that while there's lots of noise out there, lots of information, the trying to address the whole child of the kid, right? In body, soul, spirit relationship, and knowing that by basking in God's love yourself and experiencing God's love across your whole person and caring for your whole person emotionally, relationally, socially, biologically, spiritually, you're then able to be in a place to give and care for your child in the midst of these hard places.

SPEAKER_01:

So, what do you think is the most important mindset shift that parents need to make when they're facing these various challenges?

SPEAKER_00:

I think we live in a society that tends to cause us to think that we need to be the sole solution or that we are fully responsible for the solution while at the same time blaming others or situations for the problem. And I think actually both of those are incorrect, right? We exist in community. We need community, we need relationships. And so we can build into community and relationship opportunities for support and help and encouragement while also maybe taking more responsibility for some of the situations we're in. So it's the both end of those elements to say we need one another, and that in the difficulty of pursuing others, it's going to create its own problems. But we have to be careful not to shortcut into self-protection, individuation, isolation.

SPEAKER_01:

In your work with families and in your research, have you discovered or leaned on any particular principles that apply across different types of hard places?

SPEAKER_00:

One of my favorite authors that my mom gave to me when I was first started parenting my two kids by Tim Kimmel called Grace-Based Parenting. And his model, this recognition that because we live in a fallen world and are fallen ourselves, we're going to make mistakes. And our own struggles, insecurities, family of origin, perspectives, and expectations distort and adjust us. And so we need to be quick to acknowledge our need and dependence on God and others and our ability to start over quickly, right? To experience grace and to express grace in our relationship with others and not kind of hold things over long periods of time. So both for ourselves and for others, right? So we messed up, right? Being able to experience God's grace and forgiveness and exhibit and express God's grace and forgiveness to others to keep short accounts in our capacity to move forward in relationship.

SPEAKER_01:

So let's get down to some more specifics. And one of the common things that we can see, as you know, you talked about in the previous episode with divorce and how divorce rates are a little bit higher than they were in the 70s and before. So what approaches have you found to be most effective for co-parenting after a separation or divorce?

SPEAKER_00:

I think even in when families are together, kids are going to try to pit parents against each other to find the answer that they want. That's kind of our sin nature generally. In divorce and separation, they know that there's cracks in the parental relationship and the ability for the parents to kind of be on the same page in their parenting perspectives. And so one of the most important things that we can do that we do clinically is try to create consistency and cohesion in rules and expectations across the different environments and make those explicit. And so every family has rules and expectations, but most of the time it's implicit and unconscious or unexpressed. And so everyone in the system kind of knows what's allowed or not allowed. But when it goes unexpressed, it's hard to then make choice for following it and then the consequence. So clinically, one of the first things we do is we create consistency in those expectations and house rules and try to apply it across both environments and then agree in advance what the consequences are for not following through on those expectations or rules. So that in the moment the parent doesn't have to try to come up with a consequence because in the moment, our consequence will either be too severe or too light. And neither of those will be effective at encouraging growth and formation and discipleship with our kids. And so it's the ability to kind of work in spite of the parental relationship to create consistency in their environments so that kids can feel safe at least in knowing what to expect and how to behave.

SPEAKER_01:

When it comes to parenting through grief or after a family loss, what strategies help children to process their emotions in healthy ways?

SPEAKER_00:

I think we often expect kids to grieve in the same way that we do in, you know, sadness and emotion in lots of emotions, whereas kids often don't have the same access to the experience of emotions. And they're still maybe they process slower and differently. If they're young children, they often process everything through play. They try it out. That's why we see young kids playing house or playing princess or playing cowboy. Like they're they're trying out adult roles to know where they fit. And it creates a good opportunity for us to kind of hear and see their perspective of our roles, which is kind of interesting. So in grief and loss, it's the opportunity to kind of give them space to process an experience to allow a wide range of emotions from anger to sadness without discipline necessarily tied to appropriate levels of expression, but consistency in your availability to allow them to experience and express their emotions and just be seen, valued, and heard, as well as for parents to, I think our tendency, especially in loss, is to hide our emotional expression from children because we don't want to overwhelm them or we don't want to make them feel sad. But then that teaches them that sadness or overwhelming emotions aren't okay to express. I think traditionally we've like kept kids from things like a funeral service because they don't really seem to understand anyway. But then that limits their experienced modeling and expression of emotions in grief. And so I think part of the strategy is having kids hear about the emotions that people are experiencing, about talking about the person who was lost or who left and let them kind of express their relationship, what they remember, what they understand, to give them an outlet for exploring and kind of sorting the differences and emotions that they have.

SPEAKER_01:

At Ben Lipin, we do have some families that have one child, but we also have a lot of families that have multiple children, sometimes five or six different children. What can parents expect when they are entering into a season of grief and loss within their family unit across the experience of their children when it comes to grief?

SPEAKER_00:

It is fascinating, both by age and just by temperament, how everyone experiences and expresses grief, sadness, joy, excitement differently. And so one of the things that I always found helpful clinically is doing a gram, which is a picture of the family. It lets me explain to parents the difference in levels between parents and kids. And so I think in our contemporary world, parents are quicker to jump in and want to intervene to protect kids from emotions, from difficult situations. And that actually reduces their capacity, their muscle building, their resiliency of emotions, of relationship. And so with multiple kids, they're all going to experience and express loss, grief, relationships differently. And in some ways, letting the kids learn from one another and support and encourage one another in that range of experience is going to be really beneficial for them without us needing to necessarily intervene and either consciously or unconsciously say what types of emotions or types of expressions are appropriate because we're in what we do and what we don't do, we're constantly teaching social norms and expectations. And so in many ways, it's allowing the kids across because they haven't maybe learned the cultural or family norms. And so they'll just express what they're experiencing, which gives a wider range maybe than what we've been habituated to as adults.

SPEAKER_01:

When a family is dealing with the aftermath of foices, whether that is by parents or children, how can trust and stability be rebuilt in these relationships?

SPEAKER_00:

I think one of the most important things that a parent can say to another parent and to their child is, I'm sorry, I was wrong. Please forgive me. How can I make this up to you? And being able to model quickness and forgiveness and acknowledgement of error because we're all fallen and we all continue in the fight against sin as we as we desire for the spirit to live in us, modeling that is going to be important. And then also modeling the ability to trust in dependence on God for the results. C.S. Lewis once said that we're all time travelers, but we're all we can only impact the future, right? We're all moving forward. And so that's an important perspective, I think, that we have as well is that we can always dwell in the past and beat ourselves up over the known trajectory now of past choices. The problem is we don't know all of the trajectories of alternative choices. And so we need to be quick to acknowledge maybe the consequences of the choices that we've made and how it's led us here today. But we don't know what the consequences of alternative choices would have been. And so I think we're quick to acknowledge this was not the right choice. Here's how I know it was the wrong choice. And even maybe expressing not with lots of detail, but helping your kids learn from your mistakes so that they don't have to repeat them if possible, but also not dwelling on those mistakes so that your identity is as a saint in Christ moving towards restoration and able to live in the unity and hope of redemption and not in the perpetual brokenness of the fall.

SPEAKER_01:

That speaks to the next question about transparency. And how transparent should parents be about their own struggles, whether it's they've made a poor choice or they're just struggling with a divorce or a death in a family. How transparent should parents be?

SPEAKER_00:

That's a hard question. I think there's a lot of factors, right? The developmental age of the child. I think it's similar to in counseling. I train my students to say we need an appropriate level of emotion, right? So if your client is sitting there and is crying and is really struggling, if you're sitting there kind of stoically checking your nails, like that's not going to build relationship. If you're crying harder than the client, that's also not going to be beneficial for the relationship. And so part of what we want to be able to do as parents is recognize all right, well, what is the kind of perspective and understanding and capacity of our child at this stage? Because they shouldn't carry our emotions and our emotional needs. We do it that on our plane with our peers, with those above us and those on our plane, not to those below us as children. But we want to be able to be honest and exhibit the experiences that we have. We want them to see us trusting our spouse, trusting our friends with hard things, so that they learn that they can do that as well and that they can trust us. We don't need to trust them with those things. And so it's recognizing, I think, if you can see those, the planes of kind of a genogram is to say we want to model for our kids what healthy dependence on God looks like. And so maybe we say, yeah, we're struggling financially this month, and let's pray together that God will provide for what we need, but maybe protect them from all right, well, here's the bills. What do you think we should do? Right. So looking at at big picture aspects and as an opportunity to direct them towards the right response, not as a dwelling on the problem, but an opportunity to direct towards how do we live in the solution?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, how do we live in the solution? And that ties right back into the C.S. Lewis quote that you mentioned. So when we're in these hard places, how can parents create safe spaces for children to be able to express their feelings about family challenges?

SPEAKER_00:

I think we model that in the opportunities for relationships that we have, right? So if you go on a field trip, I think five kids to one adult is like the, I think, the normal count, right? And then you have like your buddy system and everything. The literature that we've seen too is in marriage, you need five positives for everyone negative. In parenting, you need five positives for everyone negative. The literature that I've seen with raising kids is your kids need five adults that see them and know them and value them, that they can rely on. And the best way to get those adults is that there are peers as adults. There are friends that the advice that someone that they go to that they would get from them would be consistent with what we'd want from them. And so I think that part of this space is that they also have their own friends and peers that they can experience and exhibit emotions without us having to necessarily sweep in or address it, but that we put parameters on experiencing and expressing emotion within the scope of the truth of the gospel. And so, even, you know, we tend to focus on Philippians 4 and use it as somewhat as a bludgeon of well, don't be anxious, just kind of quickly shut that off and think better, think positive. And we end up being like Pollyanna-ish about it a little bit. But the reason that we are able to dwell on what is true, pure, and right is because Philippians 4.8 says that the Lord is near, the Lord is at hand. And so the reason that we don't have to dwell in anxiety is because, like the disciples in the boat, Jesus is there, right? So when the storms are happening, the emotions that we experience are tempered by our willingness to experience the presence of the Lord. And so with our kids, as they experience emotions, we want them to be able to express and experience the range of emotions, but we want to filter the experience of those emotions through the truth of our presence as parents, that you don't have to be anxious about that thing, like we're here to care for that, and be able to provide a kind of a corrective interpretation of the emotion without limiting the emotion itself, because they'll learn correct interpretation by the safety of being able to exhibit the emotion. But that means that we also have to then maintain those correct beliefs and interpretations ourselves and live in alignment with them. And so the space for that is we give them space with peers, we give them space with siblings, we talk about emotions and train them in the language of emotions, seven primary emotions, right? We train them in the language of that, and then we train them in the process of interpreting what they're feeling sensationally, physiologically, to how they make sense of that, to then be able to express it. But there's appropriate ways to express it in inappropriate ways. So you can feel angry about something, but exhibiting that through breaking something or hurting someone is inappropriate expression of anger. Anger is not the problem. It's the way that you're exhibiting that. And so we want to, through regular practice, teach them the language of emotion and connect it to the experience so that we can model and practice appropriate expression.

SPEAKER_01:

What types of professional support do you recommend for families who need additional support?

SPEAKER_00:

I'm reading a really good book right now on the role of the church in kind of filling the gap. There's not enough professional counselors. And as someone who trains professional counselors, not everyone needs to be a professional counselor. And so part of the role of support is saying people need people. And while some issues of complex trauma or unresolved emotion may benefit from professional support, we need people that see us, that value us, and that know us. And so one of the things that this book by Jim Sells is addressing is that lots of people in the body of Christ can just be present and listen, right? So professional support has levels, right? We need those five adults that see our kids, that love them like we do, that know them. We need them to have peers that allow them to kind of practice differing opinions and conflict resolution. We need medical professionals that are able to evaluate, right, are there biological issues that are going on? But when we get to clinical, the way that we would know that it's clinical versus non-clinical is usually if their ability to move forward in the present and future is impaired by something that's unresolved in the past. And if you have to go backwards to resolve some impediment, usually that would be a clinical counseling lens, right? If they just get if they're stuck in some way, or if their experience of emotion seems beyond their capacity to experience and express it, either because they don't have the language for it, or there's some limitation in their capacity to understand or express in a learning limitation or intellectual limitation or significant relational trauma. Those are all things that kind of are in the past that are influencing their present to impair their future. That would be a professional scope.

SPEAKER_01:

What resources have you found to be most helpful for parents who are navigating difficult circumstances?

SPEAKER_00:

I think that in our world today, there's very few social communities outside the church, right? And as I work with clients, it's really hard if they're not Christians to find outlets for relationship. And so one of the best community supports is your peers and those older than you who have journeyed ahead of you in the body of Christ to build relationship, to risk the vulnerability of being known and providing opportunity. And so, you know, it can go from the level of doing a parenting book or training together with a group of people so that you can be supported, reading through scripture with other people in a small group, right? So those supports seem to be most effective to make us not feel isolated and alone, to give us the space to express and experience frustrations, hard spaces, and to just practically provide hopefully relational support so that when you're running to and fro and can't be in two places at once, you have someone that's willing to step in, right? And watch your kids and wash your laundry. And, you know, like we need those aspects of community that I think for most in our kind of mobile environment where we move all around and we aren't maybe close to biological family, is going to come from the church. Interestingly, that the saying that we often use blood is thicker than water, which assumes that you know the biological family is stronger than whatever water would be, is part of a larger saying that has a reverse meaning, which is the blood of the new covenant is thicker than the water of birth, which is an early church saying that says the body of Christ and the relationships that we establish are more important than our biological relationships. And we need to live in that reality. That's what Jesus said in the Gospels when they come looking for him. And he says, Your mother and brother and sisters are looking for you. And Jesus says, Who are my mother and brother and sisters? But those who do the will of my father in heaven. And so, as followers of Christ, our best community supports and our best opportunity to support others who are in the stage that maybe we were in is going to be the body of Christ, too, as a maybe someone who's about to be empty-nested, right? Be able to support parents with young kids and give them a break, give them a night out where you don't have to spend, you know, a hundred dollars for babysitters, right? It's being able to support and encourage and interact with one another and live according to the whole body, right? According to that community.

SPEAKER_01:

What final thoughts or advice would you like to leave with our listeners to include hope? What hope do we have when we are parenting through a crisis?

SPEAKER_00:

I think the present situation always seems most immediate and as our priority and an urgent. But if we look back through whatever was most urgent at the moment, we often realize that it probably wasn't as dire as we thought it was, right? So objects in our mirrors are closer than they appear in the immediacy of the moment, being able to surround yourself by people who can see your situation from a variety of perspectives will help us maybe see it with greater perspective. So I would encourage people to be in community because with others, we're able to both carry more and bear more, but also to rest more effectively. And I think the hope is that God loves us and God loves our kids more than we do, and he is sovereign over all things. And he, you know, we see in scripture really good parents that have really good kids, and that's kind of our hope. But we also see really bad parents who have really good kids and really good parents who have really bad kids. And so ultimately we we rest in God's sufficiency and sovereignty and his love for us, and we seek as much as possible to love him with our whole self and love others as the expression of that whole self.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you for that. If our listeners have more questions or would like to get in touch with you, what is the best way for them to do so?

SPEAKER_00:

They can email me, Seth S-E-T-H period S-C-O-T-T, Seth period scott at CIU.edu. They can swing by my office at Columbia International University. They can take classes in the master's or clinical counseling or the PhD in counselor education and kind of take what they've learned and are learning and want to train and teach others. Any of those are ways they can make in touch with me.

SPEAKER_01:

Great. Thank you so much. And thank you to our listeners. And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the BidLip and Podcast.