Ep 71: One Liberatory Way to Review 2025 With Your Family (Before Setting 2026 Intentions)

Before you set intentions for 2026, may I invite you to review one thing in 2025 first? So that you can begin 2026 with a lot of compassion that will ignite and sustain both your social justice parenting in your home and social justice advocacy in your neighborhood.

[INTRODUCTION]

Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.

[EPISODE]

Welcome back to episode 71 of the Come Back to Care Podcast. If you’re reflecting on the year, it might feel easy to measure your quote unquote success using the master’s tools of productivity and perfectionism. You might review what you got done, what you achieved, what you produced just to see how much progress you made or how much growth you unlocked. And that’s important for your survival in the Hunger Games of Capitalism. But in this episode, I’d love to offer a more liberatory way to review your resilience. You and I are going to review moments when we made mistakes to see what those moments reveal about our tenacity, our sass, and our sovereignty. I know reviewing these tough moments might sound yikes on bikes. But we’ll do it together. We got this. And if you’re noticing that your cup is too dry and your bandwidth is too low to review and reflect, I got you covered. It might be really nourishing for you to recharge and refill your cup first with the previous episode (Ep 70: A Love Letter For Your Tough Parenting Days ft. Excerpts from Raising Change Agents Book) and then come back to this one when it feels right. If this sounds generative to you, let’s get started.

Okay real talk, what counts as a parenting win for you? A parenting win when you’re trying to survive the Hunger Games of Capitalism (or fascism), break generational cycles, and get to bed in one piece without universal childcare and paid parental leave. Across two-plus decades of working with families and children, parenting wins that many families in Thailand and in the U.S. have shared with me are often moments where they mess up or miss the mark and then they go, “let me try again.” You already know this deep in your bones. But in a culture that worships perfectionism and productivity, we’re taught to deduct points from our self-worth when we make mistakes. So, let’s resist white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy’s bland definition of success by reviewing your resilience within moments when you made mistakes.

When you made mistakes this year, how did you re-align with your values and return to practice? Instead of getting stuck in shame and collapse, how did you offer yourself maybe just 2% of the kindness you extend to everyone you love before getting back to whatever you’re practicing?

I know that all of my social identities have trained me to use excellence as a shield to protect myself from racism, transphobia, and xenophobia. It’s always been and still is very hard for me to be kind to myself when I make mistakes. I would always use a stick, not a carrot, to beat myself back into excellence even when I know that a carrot is a more powerful motivator.

If you’re like me and self-compassion doesn’t come automatically, I have another set of questions for you. How do you wish your child would talk to themself and treat themself when they make mistakes? How might you model that now by practicing it yourself? Just like all the research studies we covered in Episode 27: Why Your Child’s Resilience Needs Your Parenting Mistakes, the way you move through your mistakes teaches your child how to problem solve through theirs. You see we’re not policing ourselves into excellence to avoid making mistakes. Rather, we’re moving through our mistakes with accountability. When we’re not using the master’s tools to measure our worth, we can recognize how our resilience after making mistakes reflects all the healing and unlearning we’ve been doing. To me, that’s practicing abolition in a small scale or in a fractal way. That is certainly something to celebrate.

If you’ve reviewed your missteps this year and you’d like to hold space for your child to review theirs, I’d love to share two questions I used to ask my preschool classroom way back when. Please nurture what resonates. Compose the rest. More importantly, adapt them to fit your style and your child’s development.  

The two questions are: “hey, were there moments you wish you had handled differently this year?” Then, I follow up with “how can I be there for you and support you?” I had students who asked me not to rush them during arts and crafts time. And that I could support them by backing off a bit with a time reminder. Yes, I was that teacher who announced, “5 more minutes till it’s clean up time,” “4 minutes, 3, 2, and 1.” Yup, I mistook urgency for efficiency. But I’ve learned my lesson. I wonder how your child might respond to these questions or respond to you powering-with with them when they’re navigating through messy moments or missteps. When you power-with with your child, they know that they’re not alone when they mess up. That’s one powerful way to lay a strong foundation of shame resilience with your child.

[CLOSING]

Before I sign off, our podcast turned 4 years old this month. I started in 2021 when my one-on-one therapy caseload was full. I simply wanted to walk with you through practical ways that you can make social justice a verb with your child while promoting their development at the same time. I didn’t know how it was going go or who was going to tune in. All I knew was that every cell in my body at the time told me to get out there and do it. And from episode one to this episode, number 71, my heart just lights up with joy putting each episode together. Words cannot express how grateful I am for you, for your time, for your unlearning with me, and most importantly for you practicing liberation with your child…most of the time. Doing this podcast with you, I get to make healing accessible. I get to honor my ancestors. And I get to reclaim my voice. I hope that you get to reclaim yours too and remember how powerful you are.

Before I start crying, please know that I’m with you in solidarity and sass. Also please join our Come Back to Care Patreon or leave a rating and review on Apple Podcast. Until we’re back from the break around January 20th, please take care.