Hello , my dear friend , welcome back to another episode of the curious neuron podcast . My name is Cindy Huffington and I am your host . Today I don't have a guest and I'm not talking about science .
I want to do something that I've been wanting to do for a while , because I do get a lot of questions about my personal life and some decisions that I've made , like leaving research , homeschooling , my schedule , my daily schedule , and I thought it would be nice to address everything by getting you to get to know me or helping you get to know me a little bit
. I'm not the kind of person who talks a lot about themselves . As you might have noticed , I don't do the small talk and I don't chat much about my life .
When I have solos , I just get right into it and talk about the topic and on social media , I'm not the kind of person to jump on every day and show you what I'm doing or where I'm going or what's happening in my life . I'm not comfortable with that .
It's the same reasons why I also don't show my kids and talk about them as much and talk about or share their names . I believe in their privacy and I believe that I'm allowed to have my own as well , and I share my knowledge and use that with my kids to give you examples .
But today I just want to share a little bit more about myself and some decisions that I've made , because I know a lot of you have questions and also we've grown quite a bit with the podcast over the summer , as well as Instagram accounts .
So if you're new here , welcome , and today is a good day to be here if you want to get to know me , or just stop listening to this podcast . If you don't care , I'm okay with it , no hard feelings . But today I will cover three things that I've learned the past few years and integrate my life and how parts of my life had led to this learning .
But we're going to talk about three things , including how I've learned that you need to trust your gut and your passion and kind of let that guide you , embracing failures which is something I never did before when I was much younger and not neglecting yourself . So those three things kind of mark the past 10 years of my life .
I turned 40 this year and I think there were lots of learning moments in my 30s and lots of growing in my 30s , and I'm happy where I am today . I think there's still a lot of learning to be done , which is normal . I think it's an ongoing process .
The work never ends , and I think that what I've learned in my 30s is really helping guide me and who I am today , as a 40 year old mom of three . Before I begin , I do want to take a moment to thank the Taninbaum Open Science Institute for supporting the Kirsten Rohn podcast , and I also want to thank you , the listener , for listening and subscribing .
If you're not subscribed , make sure you do , because this helps the algorithm know that you care about this podcast , and if you haven't done so yet , please take a moment to rate the podcast and leave a review , if you can , either on Apple podcasts or Spotify .
It really helps the system and all those people out there and the computers know that you care about the podcast and it pushes the podcast up on the charts and more people get to discover it . So it would really mean a lot to me if you can do that and if you do so , send me an email at info at kirstenrohncom .
I love getting to hear from people that are listening , because you know I am here in my basement by myself and I don't get to see you . So those emails really mean a lot to me because I get to know who's listening and who you are and how old your child is and what your story is . So you could send me an email at info at kirstenrohncom .
Let me know that you left a rating or a review . You could send me a screenshot and I will send you a free PDF called Meltdown Mountain . It's available on Kirsten Rohn Academy on our website , kirstenrohncom , but I'll give it to you for free because I want to thank you for taking that time to you know . Leave a rating and a review .
You can also follow us on Instagram at curious underscore neuron , and I share something new every day , little snippets of research in a way that is applicable to you and in bite size pieces so that you know .
I know you don't have time and I just want to make it quick for you to learn something new about your child's emotional health and , most importantly , yours as well . So , for those of you who don't know , I was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in science education many years back and that's when I got pregnant with my first child .
I have a PhD in neuroscience where I studied schizophrenia and the first episode of psychosis and how this impacts your cognitive skills and your emotions . That's how I got involved in this whole emotions and development kind of thing .
So when I was doing my PhD , I volunteered in a program called brain reach and this is where students graduate students for neuroscience would go into grade three classrooms and secondary two classrooms and would teach these students about the brain .
I got involved in this program and I remember telling the director of this program I think it was after the first presentation I hadn't even taught yet , it was just a presentation showing us what we would be teaching these kids telling her that I wanted this to be my job . I wanted to do this the rest of my life . And I remember her smiling .
I had never met her before and Josephine was amazing in kind of guiding me into what felt good and what my career should be . I had always , before that moment , envisioned myself being a researcher and I had applied as well into a program called Mind , brain and Education at Harvard .
I got accepted with a professor there and I was supposed to move for my postdoc and start this research there . And things changed .
My grandfather became terminally ill with his cancer and I stayed here in Montreal did my postdoc in science education , and the reason why I switched from neuroscience to science education is because I was really interested in how most of the people that we saw that had had a first episode of psychosis were young men , mostly younger than 20 or in their early 20s ,
and they were still in school , whether it was high school or university , and they were going to school and trying to learn , obviously struggling , but that's because they had some cognitive issues and struggles . But I was curious as to how the education system , what it was and how we learned and so on .
So I left neuroscience to go into education and see how methods of teaching impacted a student and so on . I ended up not finishing that and I left after giving birth to my first child , my daughter , and that's when I realized I just wanted to stay home .
It wasn't that I didn't like research , it was just that something came over me when I had my first child and I realized that I just wanted to be her mother and be home with her and do lots of things that I wouldn't be able to if I was working , because the hours were pretty crazy in the research lab , not to say that there aren't parents out there that
continued doing research with a very young child ? It was just something inside of me was saying that I wanted to stay home , and so I did .
Every single moment after I made that decision not to go back to work was a moment where I was doubting if I should go back to work , and I remember just thinking that it was a failure , that not wanting to go back to work means I had failed something .
And I remember family members telling me but you wasted this whole life getting educated and doing a postdoc and a PhD , and a postdoc , like I , was 32 at the time . So it was just really hard in that moment to be so confident that I was making the right decision . But I knew in my gut it's what I wanted to do and I enjoyed it .
And I continued to enjoy it after the first year and the second year . Then I got pregnant after the first year with my second child and then I had my second one . So I had three kids in under four years and to this day my kids now are four , six and eight . I do not regret leaving .
I don't think that I wasted my education because I created Kirsten Aron from it . I was still interested in reading the research and still very passionate about the brain and emotions , and I created something that made sense for me . It was just a hobby at first , to be honest , and I created the blog after my second child .
Although I had started little bits and pieces of Kirsten Aron before by giving workshops in schools and working one on one with kids , I didn't really find my way until I had my second child , and then I created the blog or the website and just started writing about the research , and that's when I found my true calling , which was science , communication , taking
something that is quite complex and turning it into something that is so short and to the point and understandable to anybody , regardless of the fact that you have a PhD . And to this day , that is what I love doing . That's my passion . However , kirsten Aron sort of evolved over the years .
It started off by me summarizing research focused on children and their development and broader than emotions , because I felt that I couldn't just focus on emotions .
I really felt like I needed to talk about the entire aspect of , or all the aspects of , child development , but then I came back and narrowed , narrowed it down the past year and said , no , I need to come back to my roots , like what feels right , which is talking about emotions , and that's what I know at my core and I've been doing that .
And then I was talking a lot about your child's emotions and realized that I can't talk only about your child's emotions , because how you manage and cope with your own emotions will impact how your child does that with their own emotions , and that's when Kirsten Aron sort of evolved .
So if you've been going on our website the past year , you'll notice that the title and the first heading changes probably every few months because I keep realizing that it needs to be about the parent . And now I'm still talking about your child's emotions and helping you understand your child's emotions .
But it starts with you and that's how Kirsten Aron evolved over the years , and it's truly parental well-being and your wellness . The better you are , the easier it is for you to nurture your own child .
But you need to nurture yourself first , and all of that has to do with our emotional health , emotion regulation skills , emotional intelligence , all of that and more . So that's what has happened with curious neuron , and through all of this I learned that I needed to .
Really it's not just about following your gut , really , because in that moment it felt right when I left research eight years ago . But it was also about doing what you like first , right , like following what your passion is and trying to figure out how you can mold that into something .
And I am fully aware that it's not everybody that can do that or have the opportunity to do that . I don't want to be naive about that and that I was very lucky that I was able to do that , but I did , you know , try to figure it out and it took a long time , which brings me to my second point embracing failures .
The curious neuron that you see now in our website and that I talked to you about now here on the podcast is , I don't know , curious neuron 12.0 maybe , but it's true , and I want to share that because I think it's very easy for somebody to go onto somebody's Instagram account and see 140 something followers , 140 something thousand followers , or listen to their
podcast and think , hey , this person's made it . I don't think I don't think I've made it . This is just , to me , aesthetics . What is important to me is that I change the way that you do things or see things and that that influences how you change your or how you support your child and that these changes protect your child's future emotional and mental health .
So to me , it's not about the numbers and the numbers don't mean success . To me , the success is the impact .
And the impact is when I get emails from you or DMs on Instagram , hearing from parents who share specific examples of how curious neuron has changed something within their home or how they communicate something with their partner about parenting and how that's had an impact on themselves and how they've seen the changes in their child's behavior . That is my goal .
The reason why the whole why behind everything that I do is because of how I was raised . I was raised mostly by a single mom . There was a dad present in my life till I was about 11 , 10 or 11 . But he really wasn't present . He was just physically there .
And it was really hard because now , in retrospect , I realized that I well , my father would drink a lot , and not only would he drink a lot , but he was just also very verbally abusive towards anybody in the house my mom , my us , my me , my brother . He just didn't care about what he said and he was cruel in his words and mean .
And I look back now and I think about his relationship with his father and I don't know what his upbringing was , but it was clear that there was some mental health issue within my father . It was either sadness that he hid through anger or he kind of just wasn't present and isolating himself , depression , I don't know . But I wish he would have addressed that .
He left our home and never turned back . He decided that he wanted to start a new life . I never addressed this with him . I've addressed this through therapy but I never really addressed it with him . But I'm okay with that now . You know , obviously there are days when it's harder , especially now when my kids are asking me like , why don't you have a dad ?
And I have to explain this to them . But it's part of the why that I have created Cures Neuron . I don't think children deserve to be in an environment where a parent is not managing or coping or handling their own emotional health and mental health . We cannot have this environment where we just pretend everything is okay .
We need to take care of ourselves and if you are a mom or a dad or a grandparent listening to this and you have questioned relationships in your life , like as if everything is going wrong and you don't know why people are distancing themselves from you , or you just feel like it's always you , you always , you know nothing goes right in your life .
I do I do , from a place of caring want you to take a moment to think about your life and your own behaviors and actions .
The same way that I talk about children and how emotions and thoughts impact their behavior , it applies to us as well , as parents , and we need to think about how our emotions are impacting our behaviors and if there are changes we can make towards our emotions like if you're always either happy or angry , what are the other emotions that you are perhaps scared to
express , and is it because of how you were raised ? And you need to address all of these for your child's sake , because the way that you are modeling emotions will impact how they learn to cope with their own emotions .
How to manage them could be externalizing them and being angry all the time , or internalizing them and feeling anxious and not being able to communicate their emotions .
And the reason why I spoke I'm talking about this is because that's part of the failures I spoke about failures of Kirsten or on like being at like 12 points , something right now and always reinventing and reassessing .
I think that we need to embrace failures as parents as well and reassess how we're parenting our child and if something is working , great , do more of it . And if something isn't working , then also great . Reevaluate . You know the way that you're doing things and is there anything that you can tweak to see an impact and a difference in your child ?
The third thing that has really marked me in the past 10 years was neglecting myself , and I talk about this a lot and I want to talk about it again because I know that there are parents out there in the same boat as I am , or I was and still am .
To be honest , it's so easy to kind of move on toward like through your day , and another day passes and another week passes , and you don't take the time to sit and really nurture yourself . It's so easy . I should have , in retrospect , taken care of my own mental health after having my second child , but I ignored it .
I ignored it , had a burnout during my pregnancy , worked a lot and thought , hey , all this is gonna pass . And while I was pregnant , was crying excessively and thinking , hey , this is you know , I have hormones and they're going nuts and I'm just crying all the time .
I'm just sad , not realizing that the amount of work I was doing was kind of impacting the way that you know my emotions and that I was falling into depression . I'll never forget the moment where I was in my doctor's office , my OBGYN , and he was like all right , that's it for today . Do you have any last questions ?
I was like nope , like I always did , I didn't really have questions . It was my second pregnancy and I got up to leave his office and started sobbing uncontrollably and he's like okay , have a seat . I sat back down and he was like what's going on ?
And through my crying and trying to control myself , I was like I don't know , I don't know , I just cry all the time and it's okay , you know ? Like I don't know why we do this , but we brush things off . And I was like I'm fine , you know , it's just a moment , it's my hormones . And he was like maybe , but maybe not .
And I didn't know that you can start this sort of prenatal depression and that there was something more than just hormones and that's what I was experiencing .
And he warned me that if you ignore this during your pregnancy , it could turn into postpartum depression , which can have an impact on your child because you're not well and it's hard for you to nurture your child . So I stopped working immediately and started taking care of myself and I saw a huge change .
But I also ignored everything and the overwhelm and the anxiety that was getting worse after having my second child . That point I had two kids under the age of two , two in diapers , two crying , two not napping , and I ignored it again .
I kept ignoring it , thinking okay , it'll get easier tomorrow , be easier , but still not taking care of myself , not taking the time to go for a walk , not exercising . I had diastasis recti after my second pregnancy and not going into physio getting pregnant with my third child .
And then the diastasis recti , which was that is when your abdomen protrudes a lot after giving birth because of the muscle separation . I'm not a physio so I can't explain it all . But diastasis recti you can Google it . It's . It's just really an extended abdomen because of the separation of the muscles , I believe , or tissue .
And just going into my third pregnancy and that's when everything you know got worse . After giving birth to my third , I couldn't handle three kids . I was home with three kids and I again thought it'll get easier . I'm just crying because I'm tired and and you know , nursing and my hormones and we can't do that .
I've only learned that now , but we have to stop doing that . If there's a week that's harder , take care of yourself , step away if you can , and if you can't step away , speak to somebody . And if you can't speak to somebody , write about it . Writing about it so nurturing . I spoke about this a week , a month into January .
Yeah , so at the end of January , beginning of February , I posted a podcast episode about journaling , and journaling , for me , was just so satisfying because sometimes you don't have somebody to speak to or you have really heavy things that you need to talk about or thoughts that are just wild to you , when you almost feel like you can't share this with a friend
or someone , so you write them down . And when you write them down , it's so satisfying and relieving that you've gotten it out there and you're kind of like thinking about these thoughts and saying , well , that doesn't make sense , something I've struggled with a lot , as well as taking the time to work out and exercise . I've gotten better this year .
However , it's still hard for me because of the schedule that I have . So I wake up around seven o'clock with my youngest and then , as you might know , I homeschool .
This is a decision that my husband and I made only because the pandemic hit when my oldest was supposed to start kindergarten and we decided to just keep her home , because we were home anyways , and that led to homeschooling the next year and then enjoying it and seeing how my sons were sitting down with their sister and really curious about what she was learning ,
and so we continued it . And here in Quebec we have to follow the Quebec Education Plan and we're monitored by somebody from the school board who makes sure that we are following the same curriculum that kids are learning in school . So we don't have the ability to or the freedom to kind of teach whatever we want .
We need to teach exactly what's being taught in that year , but do it the way that we feel is right for our child . And I love that , because if my child is really good at math , I can do that quickly and spend more time on English or reading or science if she likes that . So I like that flexibility .
But this just means that I'm running Curious Neuron and Wonder Grade , an app that I'm co-founder of , during weekends and evenings .
So I do have some meetings during the day , but then I'm alternating between an hour , an hour and a half of homeschooling , then a meeting lunch , a meeting , homeschooling , supper , and then working from 6pm-ish until about midnight around . So it's really hard to have this kind of schedule , but it works and it's possible .
And I know a lot of people ask me how I balance everything and that's the way that I do it . I'm very lucky that my husband works from home , so if I do have a meeting , my kids are upstairs , they could be working on an assignment and doing their work and he's beside them . So I have again .
I'm lucky and I know that this is not something possible for everybody , but it's been working for us Well . To those of you that are still here , thank you for listening to my story . I hope that these three lessons one being to trust your gut and your passion , two being to embrace failures don't be worried about making mistakes .
I always tell my kids about their schooling that when you make a mistake , you learn the right way of doing it . So you need to embrace failures same thing in parenting or in business , and please don't neglect yourself .
Like I said , it's still a work in progress for me , because I'm still trying to find the right balance , but it is important that we think about what brings us joy and , if it's reading a book or hot coffee , find ways to make it happen , and journaling has been something that really has impacted me .
I'm going to be talking a lot more about journaling because I've been writing specific questions that help me through , think through how I'm parenting , and that has improved how I parent my kids and how I respond to them , and I'm going to have an episode at some point about , like , some parenting questions .
I think I shared some one or two episodes ago , but I'm going to keep doing that because I know parents have been asking me online as well in terms of , like , what am I asking myself ? So that is all I have for today . I hope you have a beautiful and lovely week .
Thank you for subscribing and listening to the Cure Storn podcast , and I will see you next Monday . Bye .