Ep 3: Single Parents, You’ve Been Lied To—You Are Enough

If you're a parent looking for practical, sound, solid advice in an ever-increasing dangerous world, then this podcast is for you. So here's your host, Richard Ramos.

There's one parenting myth that I like to contradict. And that is this notion that it takes a village to raise a child. And I say that it does not take a village to raise a child; it just takes good parenting. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Parent Whisperer podcast. I'm Richard Ramos, your host. Let me tell you the reason that I like to contradict that it takes a village saying. Very popular saying, um, is because that saying, in my opinion, was meant for a different time and a different culture. And also, I believe that it sends the wrong message to mom and dad today. It sends the wrong message, especially to single parents, because basically what it's saying is you're not enough, parents. Mom, you're not enough. Dad, you're not enough. Single mom, single dad, you're not enough. You need the whole village to raise your children. And I say that is not the case. Being a son of a single mother, the youngest of 5 children, growing up in the barrio of Northeast Los Angeles, I was raised by a single mother. And I just have to tell you, That although my sisters and brother, we all got off track for a time here and there, maybe like most kids do, especially growing up in an environment like that, we all turned out pretty good. And it's not true that a single parent can't get the job done. But the other thing I want to say about that is in my classes or Parents on a Mission trainings, A lot of times I'll ask parents, well, okay, if that's true that it takes a village to raise a child, how many of you are willing to turn your child over to the village? Well, nobody ever raises their hand because the truth is we don't even know who we can trust, from the White House to the church house. To the schoolhouse, there's been so many scandals and so many things going on. I, I'm sure I don't have to tell you, we don't know who we can trust anymore. And so, um, it's not that we need the village to help us raise our children, but what we want from the village is we want their support. Yes, that do— that we do want. But we do not want their control, and that's what seems to be happening by government and schools that are undermining the authority of parents. Now I want to talk before I go on in this episode today. I want to give you a little bit of backstory about my journey and. Helping parents and developing Parents on a Mission, the program that I developed to help parents that are raising children and dealing with all kinds of issues. And this goes back to when I was a counselor at a junior high school here in Santa Barbara, and I was the at-risk counselor. And on my caseload, I had 50 of the worst kids in the school. And that was my job, to try to help them. These are kids that were dropping out of school, not going to class. Some of them were gang members, some of them using drugs, abusing alcohol, teen pregnancy, you know, all of the things that no parent wants their kids involved in. And so I would meet with them, you know, as much as I could, and I'm counseling them, I'm building them up, I'm talking to them, and You know, after a while, I built relationship with them to the point where they began to really trust me, and that's when I really began to make progress with them. And I would begin to ask them, you know, why don't you just tell— I want to know what is going on with you. Why are you doing these things? Why are you destroying your life? In other words, well, I was a young parent at the time, and I knew that I couldn't just, you know, believe everything they were telling me. So, I decided that I think I probably need to hear from the parents, and I decided to do home visits. And when I did that, that's when everything changed for me. That's when the light went on, when I went to their home and I knocked on the door and introduced myself and who I was and what I was trying to accomplish. And what I saw there The dysfunction, the lack of respect, lack of communication, lack of control, you know, all of those kind of things. That's when I realized that I was fighting a losing battle, an uphill battle, because everything I was doing with my students at school, you know, trying to build them up, encourage them, things like that, was being torn down at home. And it caused me to realize that if I really wanted to help my students, that I needed to put youth mentoring on the shelf and start helping their mother and their father. And that's how Parents on a Mission got started. And I decided that I would start mentoring parents the best way I could. Now, this was many years ago, of course. but the best way I could to just start teaching just some basic principles about parenting. Now, at that time, I had a reputation for helping gang members out of gangs, and one day I was at a birthday party of one of a friend of mine, and the grandfather of the, the child came up to me and he said, Richard, look at what's going on in our community. He was Upset because a gang member had recently been killed in our, in our city. And so he was, you know, upset about it. And he's saying, Richard, you need to get these kids together and talk to them. They listen to you. Look at what's going on. And I said, well, you know, I have done that and I will always do that, but I don't think that's the best way to deal with this issue, this problem. And he looked at me a little funny, said, well, what do you mean? I said, well, let me put it to you in a way that I know you'll understand. If you were to walk down the street here in your neighborhood and you looked at all the yards and the flowers in all the yards of your neighbor, and you saw that their flowers were dry and wilted and dying, who would you rather spend time talking to?

The flowers.

Or the gardener. And he looked at me with a smile on his face, and he said, wow, you know, I never thought about it that way. And I explained to him that the flowers in our yard are just like the children in our home, and the problem in this community was that everybody wants me to be their gardener. I mean, I just couldn't do it, and I told him, I can't do it. I need more gardeners, quote unquote. I need more parents. Parents who are going to take responsibility for their own yard, for their own garden, for their own children. And that's how Parents on a Mission got started. And that's what— that leads me to another myth that I want to dispel, and that is that parenting classes are for bad parents. And that is absolutely not true. Parents on a Mission is not for bad parents. It's for good parents who want to get better. Let me say that again. Parenting classes or Parents on a Mission is not for bad parents. It's for good parents who want to get better. Look at it this way. Think about a professional. Think about some of the highest paid professionals, whether it's in sports or maybe doctors or lawyers or carpenters or some, some kind of profession. And these are people that perform in their peak potential. They're, they're excellent. They're very good at what they do. And the reason that they're good at what they do is because they do not rest on their talent or their past Successes. They're always educating themselves. They're always improving. They're always trying to get better, trying to get an edge. They, they buy, uh, online courses. They read books. They invest in conferences. They invest in themselves so that they can always be getting better. They're already good, but they want to get better. And that's the attitude that we can have as parents. You know, why should our children expect or accept anything less from us since we have the most important job there is in raising children? And that's what we want to do. The, the reason that we continue to educate ourselves is because we want to stay relevant. We want to be up to date. Imagine going to a mechanic who's not up to date with the latest computerized electric cars or whatever kind of car you have. It's not like cars used to be before. We all know that. Imagine going to a doctor or a dentist or some other professional counselor who's not up to date. They're not relevant. That what they're saying and the things they're using today was back from the '70s or the '80s or the '90s. They're not relevant. And so as parents, we need to grow with our children and the world That they're living in, the environment that we find ourselves in. We all know as parents it is not the same environment that we grew up in. And so that's why I like to talk about parenting as a profession and to see ourselves as always getting better, always improving, always checking in so that we feel like we're growing. And as our kids grow, we're growing and we're staying, if not with them, a step ahead of them. So let me talk about the 3 different aspects of this idea of professional parenting. The first one is the personal growth in parenting. That's the first principle. And that— there's a lot to that that I will talk about later on in this podcast. But today I just want to mention these 3 things. So the first one, as far as personal growth, I talk about performing at peak potential. As a human being, we have an extraordinary amount of ability to perform at what I call peak potential. Think of an Olympic athlete who is, you know, the world-class, the best of the best. And that, as a parent, as a mom and a dad, that's what we want to be. We want to be the best of the best. But in order to perform at peak potential, that requires constant training, constant learning. You know, if you want to look at at it from a physical or sport kind of metaphor, it's always working out, staying in shape. And that's what I'm talking about. So that's what I mean by personal growth so that we can perform at peak potential. Because we know the pressures of parenting. We know things happen here and there. Our kids maybe get off the track or they get in trouble or there's just pressure at home. Maybe there's, you know, broken family, single parents, all kinds of different things. And in that pressure, we want to be able to respond to our children from a mature position rather than reacting from an immature position, which I call flatlining. And one of the things I say to parents is, you know, growing older does not mean we're growing smarter. Or more mature. We can't equate our age with maturity. And a lot of times what happens is that parents do what I call they flatline somewhere. I don't know what age it is. I don't know, 25, 30 years old, maybe younger, maybe older. We just stop learning. You know, we're just kind of existing with knowledge that we have and where we've been for the last 10 years or 5 years or 15 years or whatever it is. But basically what I'm saying is that we're not Growing, because growing old is automatic, but growing up is not automatic. Growing into maturity is not automatic. And so what's the problem with that is when you start having children and you're not growing, and you're thirty years old with a fifteen-year-old mentality, and now your children start to get in that twelve, thirteen, fourteen. age range, and then they start acting out. Now you have a 15-year-old mentality parent dealing with a 14-year-old girl, and those things don't go well. That just causes a lot of problems. So that's the first point about being a professional parent, is that we are always growing, maturing, staying relevant, staying in tune with what is happening. The second part is what I call the protection of parenting. And this is an awareness of the competition that is fighting for the loyalty of your children, and that we are protecting them from that. And that we're not trying to isolate our children from the real world and all that really goes on out there, but rather that we are inoculating our children and preparing them for all the toxicity that's out there, you know, drugs, gangs, violence, you know, just whatever it could be, social media influencers. And we are inoculating them. I call it inoculating them with integrity, with character, with family values. And we are preparing them to be immune to the community toxins. So when we send them out, out there in the world every day to school We're not afraid. We're protecting them. We're giving them ways to deal with the issues that are out there, having the character, the integrity, and having family values, things like that. And that's what I call the protection of parenting as a professional. And the third part of this is the prophecy of purpose. What I mean by that is that we are speaking to our kids about family legacy. We're talking to them about who we are, that we have a purpose, that we're predicting the legacy that we're going to leave. We're living for something as a family, even as individuals, but as a family, we have a purpose in the community. To serve the community, to give back to the community, to be good citizens in the community, to have values that are respectful, to, to, that teach us our children how to treat other people and be good neighbors and all those kinds of things. You guys know what I'm talking about. And so I look at that as kind of a prophecy of purpose so that our kids are not just existing and just kind of, you know, out there being tossed here and there by every wind that blows. But they, instead of being like a piece of wood in the ocean being tossed around, they have a rudder, they have a sail, they have a direction, they have a mission, they have a purpose. And so there's, there's a whole teaching on that, but I just wanted to introduce these ideas to you. I wanted to introduce myself a little bit to you so that you know where I'm coming from. The Parent Whisperer, that was a A title I did not give myself. That's something that somebody else tagged me with, that people that have come to my seminars or come to my teachings, and they gave me that title. I did not give it myself, but I'll take it because what it means to me is that if I can be effective, if I can reach people's heart, if I can help reconcile broken families, if I can bring ways of transformation for families that need to be healed and helped, then I will take that title. So that's what profession, the profession of parenting means to me: the personal growth, the protection of our kids, and the prophecy of purpose. And those are topics that I will be Expanding on as we go on in this podcast. And listen, I really appreciate your time. You're listening to the Parent Whisperer Podcast. I'm Richard Ramos. And remember this: Parents on a Mission is not for bad parents. It's for good parents who want to get better. See you next time.

So that's it for today's episode of the Parent Whisperer Podcast. Head on over to Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a $10,000 private VIP day with Richard himself. Be sure to head on over to parentwhispererpodcast.com and pick up a free copy of Richard's gift. And join us on the next episode.