Episode 2 ·
43:01
Where did your mind just go?
Parenting with hope, with Nicole Knutsen
Your host
Gabriel Lowe, PhD
Gabriel hosts conversations that follow a single thread of curiosity wherever it leads. Each episode starts from one idea and goes where the talking takes it.
What does it take to raise a child who can look at a difficult world and still move toward it with hope?
Nicole Knutsen has spent seventeen years as a public school teacher and is raising three kids of her own, ages eight, eleven, and thirteen. In this conversation, Dr. Gabriel Lowe sits down with her to follow that question wherever it wants to go: how you talk to a child about grief and injustice without crushing them, why agency matters more than control, and what it costs a mother to stay a whole person in the middle of it all.
This one comes from the archive. It was recorded nearly four years ago and never released, and listening back, Gabriel was struck by how little it had aged. Since the recording, he has become a father himself, which gives the conversation a second life it did not have the first time around.
I want them to see themselves as a blessing to the world and the world as a blessing to them.
Nicole does not offer a parenting method. She offers something closer to a working philosophy, built and revised in real time across three very different kids. She talks about treating her children as people who can teach her things rather than problems to manage. About the difference between rules and wisdom, and why she wants her kids reaching for the second one. About letting them make mistakes she cannot protect them from, and being the safe place they land when they do.
The conversation moves into harder terrain too. How she and her husband talked to their children about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, holding space for grief instead of rushing past it. How she draws a line between politics as engagement with your community and partisanship as identity-in-opposition, and why she refuses to let her kids opt out of the first one. How she teaches them to spot misinformation, because she sees that skill as one of the most important tools they will carry into the next few decades.
Running underneath all of it is a quieter thread about motherhood: the pressure to fold your whole identity into your children, and the slow work of unpicking it. Nicole is honest about being a low-capacity person in a high-demand season, about chicken-nugget-and-cartoon days, and about how letting go of control is less a parenting strategy than a way of staying sane.
This is the kind of conversation the show is for. Not parenting advice, not a clinical framework, just two people getting a little lost in a good question. If the themes here land for you, our Connected Parenting Group at Coastal Therapy Group works in the same spirit, and you can find more episodes on the podcast page.
If you like getting a little lost in a good question, this is a good one to get lost in.
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Footer credit line: Where Did Your Mind Just Go? is a production of Coastal Therapy Group. This episode was edited by Serena Rio. New episodes drop the first and third Wednesday of each month.