 How do we heal the parent-child relationship and become a safe place again when it's impossible to avoid making demands on a daily basis? Life is one big demand. We already unschool and make very few traditional demands but it feels like we're stuck in the mud and don't know how to move forward. That's really hard, really hard. So I look at the fact that demands look like different things to everybody. Healing those relationships, the parent-child relationship takes a lot of time. For me it took a lot of working on myself. The relationship of healing takes a really long time and it is incredibly challenging when we still have to ask our children to do things. So something that I find helpful is telling stories about my own experience. Are there any parts of your child's experience that you relate to? I show empathy and compassion for my child and myself by sharing my experience. So if one example would be around asking them to clean their room. Insights a huge response from them. Oh no, I can't do it and they get really distressed. So now it's something we do together and I hate it and I'm not going to lie about it with them. I'm totally transparent and I say you know what? We have to clean your room. I might even jump up and down and I know I hate it too. Yeah let's punch the air. You can say oh my god yeah I hate it. I absolutely hate it. Hate its guts. So let's see what's one percent. Let's do a one percenter. We call it a one percenter and it might be get the rubbish out and that's it. Let's bring in a garbage bag, chuck the rubbish in and that's all we do right now. Sometimes that's all we can manage. I end up putting more pressure on myself because I'm a perfectionist. I find that the problem for me with cleaning is that I do one thing and I go oh I could have done that better and so I put more pressure on myself and I do another thing and then I go oh if I could do that I could do more. Sometimes I'm relentlessly demanding toward myself so I might say to my child you know what let's just throw your dirty clothes in a basket and put it outside your bedroom door that's the one percent. That's the one percent and we work on that maybe every day we do one percent. I encourage my child to write letters to me or to have conversations with them around how can I be safer? What is it? What's reasonable here? How can I work on being safe for you? What can I do around that? Having honest conversations sometimes we're going to have to clean. It doesn't make me unsafe. Just means that I want to live in a house that keeps us both safe. It's going to look different for every family. It is possible to repair that relationship. I also want to say that sometimes there'll be pressure on us as parents to work toward encouraging our children to be independent. Now a problem with that with our children in burnout is that we're not allowing them the time and space they need to recover. So sometimes doing things for them allows the reparation of relationship. Doing things for my child who could not leave their room taking her food and leaving it there without saying anything. I just make a plate take it in there and walk out. Acts of love that I could manage repaired the relationship because it meant that I was saying you don't have to meet me halfway all the time. I see that you are struggling and I will come all the way to you. That helped to build capacity. Building capacity is not putting pressure on our children to be independent. It's meeting them where they're at and also treating ourselves with compassion as well.