386. How to Talk to Kids About Hard Things: Sonya Renee Taylor Sonya Renee Taylor returns to help us talk to kids about hard things like climate change, racial injustice, and sex. -The three rules to keep in mind when talking to kids about sex or any complex topic -Why sharing reality with your kids protects their self-esteem long-term -How to buy yourself some time when your kid asks you a tough question -The best way to become a reliable narrator and guide for your child Sonya Renee Taylor is one of many hands currently called to midwife the new world. She is a guide, poet, storyteller, vision holder, intuitive astrologer, and evangelist of radical love. She is the author of seven books including the New York Times bestseller The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love and her most recent offering for young readers The Book of Radical Answers. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Sonya Renee Taylor and what is her mission?
Sonia Renee Taylor is one of many hands currently called to midwife the new world. She is a guide, poet, storyteller, vision holder, intuitive astrologer, and evangelist of radical love. She is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Body is Not an Apology, The Power of Radical Self-Love, and her most recent offering for young readers is The Book of Radical Answers.
Today, we are Learning from Sonia how to talk to our kids about the hard stuff, money, sex, the planet, the things that we want so hard to get right with our kids that we often freeze up and don't try at all. Sonia's going to help us try.
This conversation is so important, not just for parents or anyone who has a kid in their life, but just for any adult who's trying to get any clarity around these incredibly nuanced but important human issues. Let's go. How are you? Are you in LA? Yes. Yeah. So we, Sonia, are right outside of LA. It's a beach town that's 15 miles outside of where everything's happening.
So we are both in it and out of it. We have people staying with us. We are feeling it and seeing it in the sky. We don't know anyone who hasn't been evacuated. Yeah.
Yeah.
And also we're safe. It's a very confusing time. And this morning we're talking about how sometimes it just feels like the universe is just like really hooking us up. I can't believe we're talking to you today. This is just, we're in it now. We're in the climate crisis, the Armageddon, the apocalypse situations that we have been warned we would be in.
You know, that idea that you will see climate change happening on your phone until you see it in front of you, and that's the way this goes. We have been talking about our dear friend Adrienne Murray-Brown and how she's been telling us to, you know, gather your people, get your go bags, and I've been like, okay, Adrienne, like, it's just… Settle down.
Let's not be extreme.
And now I'm texting her like, fuck, what was I supposed to put in my go bag? I know you said it was going to be too late. Extreme has happened. Sonia, the reason why I am so grateful that you're here is that we are also people who are watching this all happen around us. And for many of us, the most important part of this is how on earth we literally, do we speak of this to our children?
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Chapter 2: How can parents talk to kids about complex issues like climate change?
How do people who are of the consciousness that we're in speak to a generation who we love so much, whose reality is completely different than we even experienced? And you have written, of course you have, written a beautiful book about, it's behind me, the book of radical answers.
And it's like, if you struggle with how to talk to your kids about everything that's important, sometimes the most important thing is not the what of what you're saying, but the who is saying it. And you are a person that if I was like, okay, kid, I don't know what the fuck to say to you about sex because I don't get it.
So, but I'm just going to put you in this room with Sonya Renee Taylor and I feel confident that whatever you say will not put them in a rigid dogmatic box that they will spend the rest of their lives trying to fight their way out of, but that what you will say will allow them to be that acorn you talk about that is just returning to self-trust and self-love and not a cage, but sort of like a
Fertilizer, if you will. Yeah. Yeah. So, Sonia, can we just start by how do you talk to children about the planet right now?
Yeah. You know, well, first of all, I'm just delighted to be back with you all. It's really warming my heart and remembering just like, yeah, what a kinship I feel in this space. And so thank you for having me.
It's truth telling time is really what it is that I'm experiencing is like, there's a way in which we have based on our own traumas, based on our own fears, based on our own conditioning, have thought that we were doing young people a service by lying to them. And we haven't. And what that actually has done and what we've seen it do throughout history is it
makes them ill-prepared for the world it is that actually exists. And it is possible to say to young people, here's what we have been doing and here is what it's created. Here is where we got it wrong. We have overvalued consumption. We've overvalued stuff. We've decided stuff was more important than the actual physical world we live on.
We've decided that new phones and new iPads and new skyscrapers and new companies are more important than healthy soil and a lot of trees and good water. And our decisions have impacts. And we are living in the impact of our decisions. But the other thing that we get to remember is that we get to make new decisions. Just because we didn't make a great decision before
doesn't mean that we are forever stuck inside of the cycle of bad decisions. We get to say, oh, we can change and pivot. Now, does that mean that we don't have to live in the consequences of our decisions? No, we do. And we're looking at that right now. We're looking at the consequences of some really poor decisions that we made.
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Chapter 3: Why is it important to be honest with kids about difficult realities?
So our job is to be solid enough narrators of the experience that they're living, that they feel their own self-trustworthiness through the trustworthiness that's the foundation that they're interacting with through adults.
Yeah. They will not believe our what could be if they don't believe our what is.
Is absolutely. Because why would they? Like, you're not telling me the truth about life. So how could you be telling me the truth about me? So if you're saying I have the ability to do all this, but you're lying about everything else, then you're probably lying about that, too.
Yeah. Everything out of your mouth is bullshit.
Yeah. All of it's not true now. All of it's not true. That's what happens when we lie to kids. And so our job is to tell them the truth so that when we tell them the truth about themselves, they believe us.
Okay. What do you say to people who think that their kids can't handle it? And so they just don't talk about it because, or think like that's too much for kids. Cause I can barely, I grieve and I get so upset when I start thinking about the reality of the climate or of police brutality or of the administration coming in.
Like that you're just like, it's too much to saddle this poor kid with when I can't even handle it. What do you say to that?
I think the first thing that comes up for me is like, the truth is it taps into a bit of anger in me. I'm like, there are kids handling it right now. And the idea that your kid can't handle it is a position of deep privilege because there are children all over the world right now figuring out the most atrocious of situations and at many times doing it without any support or infrastructure.
And so your job as the adult in that young person's life is to create the conditions for them to be able to handle it, which means that you're loving, you're compassionate, you're present, you're willing to hear, and that you have checked enough of your own stuff because the thing we're really saddling them with is our stuff. That's right.
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Chapter 4: How should conversations about sex with kids be approached?
Actually, if we don't transform, then we beget all of our trauma and disconnection and fear and shame onto the young people who we are the shepherds of, the stewards of. So actually it's our job to transform first such that we demonstrate the transformation is possible for young people.
Because God, we can say the words. I think all the time about the amount of time that I spent teaching my girls and my boy about bodies and freedom while being anorexic. Yeah. It's just, it really matters, the actual work we're doing.
I had the word, Sonia. Reliable or an unreliable narrator. Yes. Really is the theme of this conversation.
I imagine the kids being like, thanks, mom. And when you're done with those six almonds, could you finish this conversation we're having about food and freedom?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, Sonia, a kid comes to you and says, sex, what is it? How does Sonia of the radical self-love of the acorn kind of wisdom talk to a kid about sex?
You know, I mean, my immediate thought was like, oh, it's this awesome thing that sometimes makes humans and then sometimes not. You know, it's like sometimes, sometimes, sometimes not depending on how we're having it. But I think, you know, for me, the first conversation is like, oh, our bodies were made to experience pleasure.
And part of the reasons our bodies were made to experience pleasure is because it ensures that humans continue because if something's pleasurable to do, you're likely to do it. And since sex is one of the things that makes humans, it usually feeling good in, you know, motivates us to decide to do that. And so part of it is just the biology of how humans continue. But part of it is about our,
right to pleasure in our bodies and our right to connection with pleasure in our bodies and to experience pleasure with each other.
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Chapter 5: What age should you start talking to kids about sex?
leaning up against your stuff and get quiet, get centered, get aligned so that you get to come to this young person from your most grounded, aligned self and not your reactionary, fear-based self. It's going to help all the like tricky conversations go so much easier. Absolutely.
And so chill out on the urgency energy and buy yourself enough time to come back to yourself so that, again, you can find your own reliable narrator and then bring that version of yourself to the young person.
I love that.
That's helpful.
I'm just wondering how we got to the place where we viewed these things as like, You have the sex talk and you have the whatever. It's so odd that these things are just omnipresent, that they're some of the most important things in life. And we're like, well, thank God we held our breath and got through that 30 minute conversation and never have to talk about it again.
How do we weave these things so they're just part of what we talk about all the time?
Yeah. Well, you know, if we're organized to these subjects through the lens of shame, then of course we don't want to talk about them. I'm ashamed of this. I'm ashamed of sex. I'm ashamed of money. I'm ashamed of what we've done to the climate. I'd rather ignore it or pretend like we didn't do it. So whatever it is that we are bringing our shame to, we know that it's inevitable.
And so, yes, we're going to Grant and Barrett suck it up and have the conversation, but we prefer to never have to have that conversation again because every time we talk about it, it touches our stuff. And this is why we keep saying that the work we don't do on ourselves impacts our young people. It becomes their template for how it is they move through the world.
And so if you find yourself with deep shame in these subject areas, then you're right. You're not going to want to weave it into light. Every time it shows up, you're going to be like, turn the TV off. You know, I remember when I was a kid, I think we were watching like Purple Rain or something. And I remember my mother putting her hands over my eyes over the sex scenes or something like that.
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Chapter 6: How should parents discuss pornography with their children?
We haven't talked about that in a while. You know what? I'm thinking differently about that. What are you thinking about that? You know, one of the things that I do in the book of Radical Answers is I really try to instill in young people that they have the ability to be critical thinkers and to ask questions and to be curious and to actually dissect the world they're living in.
Every time we as adults come and say, hey, I've changed my mind. We give young people permission to change their minds about things. Every time I'm like, you know what? I used to think this, but I don't think that anymore. Then all of a sudden there is a softening of the edges of possibility for young people. And they're like, oh, things shift. Things change. They shifted in my parent.
They shifted in my mom. Oh, that means they might shift in me. Oh, that's okay. So there's a permission giving in our own transformations for young people to transform, for young people to have thought a thing at one point and then think a new thing. Every time we demonstrate that, we say, it's totally all right, which means we cultivate the evolution of our young people.
And ultimately that's what we're here to do is evolve. All of us, all of us.
That's the success. It is not success to keep old software and stick to it and say, that's the thing forever. That is not success.
That's called obsolescence. That thing will no longer work. And then it will, like, this is the thing I think is fascinating is like, even inside of the, you know, imagination of the market, The things that we do with humans don't transcribe. You have to update the thing or else it becomes non-viable and then it goes off the market. Guess what? That might be true for humans too.
If you don't update the thing, it becomes non-viable and then it goes off market. So what does it look like to just create the space where change is inevitable? Because guess what? Change is inevitable. And the more that we try to create a world that pretends like that isn't the truth, the more we create suffering for ourselves and for young people.
And the other thing that is essential to survival and essential to evolution, like the updating, is what data we collect, what inputs. Another thing a guide does is just say, look, And points to something.
Our kids are being raised in a culture where it's very specific things that schools and government and whatever are pointing to and a entire universe beyond that, that they will never be pointed to unless we just say, hey, look, Huh. What do you think of that? Hey, look, look over there. And so I think for me, it's honestly been, I have a 12 year old and a 10 year old.
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Chapter 7: Why is it crucial for parents to work on their own issues before guiding children?
Yeah. There's an inner dialogue already happening. It's just now being expressed. And so... Again, affirming that that inner dialogue is allowed to exist, that you want to know what it is, that they should dig into it, that it is a fertile second ground that they should get into. That's what we want to do.
We want them to get connected to these things that are in here so that they don't just stay in here. And then they believe that no one really wants to know. And then they squash them down and then it gets tamped down and tamped down. And then they no longer hear what's in here. Then the only guidance is what's out there. right? We want to keep cultivating that.
I sometimes feel bad for, it's like you and I, and probably everyone on this pod does have a sort of literal love language with words. Yes. It makes me feel like it's unfair for people who are with young children who that's not their, sister, can you tell Sonia about what John, your husband does with music? Yeah.
Yeah, because he's not a big words guy. But first, I want to say that question about God. A couple months ago, it was my son just out of nowhere. I was like, it was the end of the night. And he said, do you believe in God? And I was like, wow, that is a huge, really good question. What do you believe?
And he said, I wrote in my notes section because I was like, OK, I want to document this for him in the future. But he said, yes, I believe in God. I feel God the most when I believe in something strongly, like rights for other people. I love that. If you feel something strongly, that is evidence of God. I was like, that is a great... I was like, cool, man. Yeah, let me think about it.
I was trying not to be like, react too strongly in any direction. Have you ever noticed that these little shits only ask these questions at bedtime? Because they know that they've got us.
Yeah. She's a sucker for this. I can ask her 47 of these. I'll ask her about sex at 11 p.m.
I'm not going to sleep no time soon.
My husband has a cool way of bringing things up. His love is music. And so he's constantly trying to think of like, If the kids will ask a question, he'll be like, I want you to listen to this song. And he'll give them his phone with the lyrics on it. And he doesn't say anything, but he just lets them read the lyrics and then ask questions.
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