DEEP DIVE: Kelly Corrigan on Letting Big Kids Go

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0:37Today, I am so excited to be talking to Kelly Corrigan. She is a four-time New York Times bestselling author. She is the host of PBS's long-form interview show, Tell Me More, and the podcast Kelly Corrigan Wonders, which just crossed 13 million downloads. O Magazine calls Kelly the voice of a generation and Huffington Post says Kelly is our poet laureate of the ordinary. I am so excited to be talking to Kelly today about some of the lessons she's learned along the way from parenthood. Welcome, Kelly. Thanks. Hey, Amy, how are you? I'm good. I'm excited to be talking to you. And I'm wondering, as I was preparing for this interview, what it's like, because I admire your interview skills so much.

1:21and I wonder like, what's it like for an interviewer to be interviewed? Do you approach this with trepidation? It's relaxing. Okay. I mean, you're doing all the work. So I'm very empathetic to what's happening in your mind because you're listening and you're connecting and you're also wondering how much longer on this topic before I should bump to the next question. And maybe I should drop that whole section and just go all the way to that question I had that I thought I would ask at the very end. And like the multitasking that happens in the mind of the interviewer is kind of miraculous. It's not unlike I taught for a summer at Yale at your alma mater where you knew my husband.

1:59And I thought it was the most exhausting intellectual exercise of my life because I was tracking so many inputs second by second. Like that girl over there in the third row just pulled her phone out and that guy's looking out the window and this person's raising their hand for the fourth time, which is probably irritating the whole rest of the class, which is going to make them not tune in. Should I repeat it using different words? Should I try a new example? Who's with me? How many people should I take a break? Is the room too hot? Should I open a window? Like if you're doing it with great conscientiousness, you, it is the most exhausting amount of tracking.

2:42And that's what I sort of compare interviewing to, which is that you are at once your normal self who loves conversation and likes to meet new people and has tons of curiosity about whatever subjects the person might be fluent in. And also you're managing this improv that we're doing. But what you're so good at in your own interviews, I mean, you make it seem very organic. And I think that it is, but you're very interested in the thing behind the thing. And do you have a method of getting there? Or do you think it's just really active listening? I think the thing I would flag is just like, let it breathe.

3:21So there's a beginner's mistake, I think, where you're kind of rushing through your questions, and you're trying to cover a lot of surface area. And it won't be nearly as interesting as it would be if you went another question deeper, and then another on top of that, and then another on top of that. I'm sort of a fan of tell me more what else go on in all facets of my life. Like I love saying that to my kids. I like saying it to Edward, my husband. I like saying it on the air because I feel like there's an arrogance that we all practice when we too quickly understand one another. And I think everybody listening probably can recognize this in their own lives with their own children, which is your kid comes home and says, you know, what's for dinner?

4:11And they're in a terrible mood and you think, oh, they're hungry. And it's like, probably not. Probably that's like a safer place to start is like, yeah, I have this superficial need for some pita and hummus, but really I'm in a bad mood for something much different. And if you want to know, you're going to have to ask like three to seven questions to get there, which is like, how was your day? How'd that test go? What are you guys doing this weekend. And then you find out, oh, like somebody's having a very small party and you haven't been invited and you don't understand why that is because you had invited that person to your small party two weeks ago and you had the best time and ended up sleeping over.

4:50And so it's not even just that they didn't get invited. It's that they're confused. The emotion isn't rejection. It's confusion. It's like, I thought we had a friendship and now I feel like we don't. And I don't understand why that is. But that's like, you know, seven questions in, that's not the sort of quick take, you know, your sort of single flash assessment of what's really going on with them. Like, assume you don't know, assume you're wrong. Or yeah, oh, they'll tell you you're wrong. Like, I feel like I've been in that position that you say to your, the same kid, right? Like, oh, and there's a party and oh, and you have that problem with Samantha.

5:28No, I don't. I don't have a problem with Samantha. If you rush too quickly to circle the, oh, and here's what's really going on. I feel like my kids are very happy to tell me that. I think you're lucky that your kids will tell you that you're wrong. I think the worst outcome is that they sort of pretend to listen to you and they give you this cheap satisfaction of knowing the answer and coming up with a great response. And then they walk away and think she has no idea. Like that's really the danger. Just get me out of this conversation. Right. I'm so sick of listening to her like solve every problem so easily.

6:04And I just not even worth talking to her about it, because she doesn't get it. So your book, Tell Me More, talks about that as one of the things you have to get better at having to say in order to be in intimate relationship and true relationship with somebody with the people you care about. And the other thing that you talk about in the book that really spoke to me is to saying I know is a full response to when your kid really does come to you and sort of unload something difficult that you don't have to get into how. Yeah, I think it's the most lovely response. I had this friend in Piedmont where I used to live right near Oakland, California, and that's where we raised our kids.

6:44And I walked with this woman, Arielle, once a week, and she is a therapist and she knows a lot of things. I mean, I learned so much from her over the 10 years that we walked together. But the thing she did that I was so grateful for is that I would unload something on her. And instead of using her expertise, which was vast in the subject matter, she would say, I know. Like she would flip from a professional who spends all week talking to young people and has all that corollary insight. She would flip to the parent who's like, yeah, I know. I never know what to do then either. And that's so aligning, you know, then you're just right there next to each other, climbing the same mountain, instead of somebody way at the top, like with their little fancy bullhorn being like, come on up.

7:35Yeah, great. It's just, it's only a mile away, which, you know, is not, it's interesting, but it's not company. I feel like I'm getting better at that as I get older or maybe just more experienced living is the sitting in uncertainty and letting something not have an easy solution, particularly when it's your kids, I guess, bringing it to you like that sounds hard. Full stop, long pause. right i mean my other friend tracy tattle who's my college roommate who five years ago maybe became a therapist after having a successful business with her mom for 30 years she says that really like 95 of every situation that's brought to her from a parent's perspective the answer is the same which is that sounds really hard i know you're gonna figure it out now if i said that to my kids when they were like weeping with some problem i think they might want to like give me the flip me the bird.

8:29Like it'd be like, what? Like, thanks. Thanks a lot. Like, I think it's a lonely making feeling. And it also might sound like you're, you're kind of like wrapping up kind of done with this one. Like, let's not ruminate too much together. You know, I'm ready to move on. So I think it has to, the timing of it is something to be carefully considered, which is to say like I would put the tell me more what else go on ahead of that and then when they're really finished like putting the whole thing out on the table all the considerations and circumstantial elements and all the characters in the story and you know like putting the whole case in front of you that's then and only then could you say that sounds really hard because then and only then do you know that it sounds really hard otherwise it's cheap it's a lie it's like, I don't really know it's hard, but like I heard on some podcast that some lady said, all you have to say is that sounds really hard.

9:27I bet you'll figure it out. You know, scrolling Instagram. Right. So you really have to believe it. Exactly. Yeah. You saw it in like a little post and now that's what you're trying today. I mean, my kids are see through me so much that they like, I'll say something that feels more carefully phrased than my usual parlance. and they will say, oh my God, are you reading a new book? You know, because it's like, you're trying something on me. You know, like, I don't want to be your guinea pig. Yeah. I have a kid who tells me I have a pretending to listen face. This is just my listening face. No, it's your pretending to listen face.

10:05And I brought this to Lisa D 'Amour. And she, to my chagrin, her response wasn't like, well, that's how kids are. She was like, well, you probably do have a pretending to listen face. and you should really think about that, which is not what I wanted to hear, but she was right. Right. And you've been busted. I was busted in that our kids have really high BS detectors. And of course, they want us to be wrong about stuff so that they can individuate. But yeah, it makes it hard to give them what they want in the moment and to read it. Yeah, and you're just not going to, it's like baseball. Like if you get a 500 batting average, like that's great.

10:41Like you're just a person. And it's not like we become a mother and then you have like doubled your interpersonal skills and you have twice the patience like that's naturally comes flooding into you. Like you're just another Joe Schmo trying to do a good job. And half the time you might not be really listening, you know, because you have a life, too. And you have other things on your mind and you're trying to create your own circumstances and work through your own list of worries. And I think looking back, I think I would say to younger mothers is you don't take it quite so seriously. all the way around.

11:14Don't take yourself so seriously. Don't take them so seriously. Don't take the circumstances so seriously, like a lot of things resolve. And there's a lot of elements at play that are well beyond you and what you're saying while you're cutting their apple. You know, like you're not, there is like a humility that could service young mothers, which is, you know like you're forever waning in your influence like day by day like that's the trajectory that you're on and the peer influence is getting stronger and stronger and yours is getting weaker and weaker and that's just an immutable fact so you might as well relax a little bit in your heart that if you kids come out of their childhood with you and think like my mom was a good listener that that would be like an a plus yeah that that would be like enough I think sometimes it's hard because we feel like we have to fix things.

12:10We were just answering a listener question about like my one year old, my two year old don't share and they're fighting all the time on what should I do. And I think the real answer is one year olds and two year olds can't share yet. They can't. And I think where you can get stuck when you're in it is so I have to correct this. I have to fix this. Right. I'll have 20 year olds who don't know how to share if I don't address this in the moment instead of just this won't still be a thing in five years. but that's not enough of an answer when you have a one-year-old and a two-year-old who are, you know, scratching each other all the time.

12:40But the answer might be have patience and figure something out for the next six months that doesn't involve you're correcting it. It's going to just change. Yeah. Like context is a powerful force in all of our lives and the world is loud. So your two-year-old is going to be in preschool eventually, and then they're going to be in kindergarten. And there's gonna be a whole set of forces at work where there's going to be natural feedback loops about those very things. And so there's just a lot that we put on our plate that might not really be entirely ours to solve. Like I just read this incredible book by Alison Gopnik.

13:22Do you know her at UC Berkeley? Yeah. So she's a developmental psychologist. She's brilliant. and she wrote a book called The Carpenter and the Gardener. And you can almost infer what it's about from the title. So either you're like making children or you're watching them grow. And of course, her advice is watch them grow. Like, first of all, you can't make them anyway. You can't like build them like a house. So it won't work. But also it is not to their benefit. It's disrespectful of their awesome individuality, almost, you know, like it's you're missing it. You're missing the opportunity to like watch something come up from the ground and become its full, the full expression of itself.

14:11And I think it's so easy to worry to death that something you see now is it portends a future where they can't share or they can't love other people or they can't be in relationship. And I totally did it. And I really, really overshot it. Like there's a lot of pieces to the puzzle and only a couple of them are the parents. And I just kind of think that like 90 % of the time it straightens itself out. Yeah, I really do. I mean, you know, yeah, it's a long game. But yeah, we'll be right back with more of my conversation with Kelly Corrigan. Amy, let me tell you about a magical place that is so exactly designed to be in closed space year round fun for the whole family, that I bet you already know what I'm going to say before I even say the name.

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18:16We'll put the link to Lachi's album, Magnificent, in the show notes for this episode. Just click the link and it'll take you straight to the album. Or search Magnificent by Lachi, spelled L-A-C-H-I. I write in journals all the time. And if you read my journals from when my kids were one and two and three, like the things that we expected of them were just ridiculous. Ridiculous. And it was constant. And my like deep consternation and fear was just really to the point of absurd fear that what that you needed to get them on the right path. Like if they didn't say thank you now, they were never going to say thank you.

18:59They were ungrateful. They were spoiled, you know, or if they didn't want to go to practice of some kind that they weren't a good teammate or they were lazy or they had like a bad work ethic. I mean, I don't know what, I mean, I guess my only explanation, I have no defense, but my explanation is I took the work seriously. You know, I took them seriously and I wanted to give them a great childhood and I wanted to set them up for a great life. And so I have, like most people, very strong opinions about what the component pieces of a great life are. And for sure, like gratitude is one of them. And for sure, like being a great member of any team you find yourself on is one of them.

19:50And so when those baby steps started to reveal themselves and it wasn't matching this critical life skill that I felt like was make or break for their long-term happiness, I took it really seriously. But then what you learn over time is that it's coming. It's coming. They're figuring it out. They're observing it in the world. They're seeing how the social dynamics work. They're seeing who coach is like. They're seeing who gets rewarded. They're seeing who smiles when someone's talking to them. They're seeing coaches roll their eyes when a kid is late or when a kid doesn't have their cleats on.

20:30Like there's so many cues that don't need to come from you. that will teach them the larger set of values that make a society work and that make the lives of people in that society more or less enjoyable and connected. We try on this podcast to give some of that perspective in a lot of our episodes because Margaret's kids are in junior high and high school, and I have two kids out of the house and just one more left at home. And you've written a lot in recent years about the empty nest and the emptying nest and what that's like and life on the other side. And I feel like the first thing I always want to offer to people is that it's not all bad and that it can, it will, of course, transform your relationships with those young adult children, but it's not always for the worst that you're not involved in their daily lives and their daily decisions anymore.

21:26How did that change for you in ways, good and bad? okay so i just cried so much i cried so much like i'm really not projecting like my my best self in this podcast conversation but i am being completely transparent like i cried a lot i cried in anticipation and then i cried like on those days on those two days that i dropped those kids off i cried i mean edward my husband said you're crying as much as when your dad died and i was like, I know. And that's what it feels like to me. It feels like this very clear ending of this part of my life that I really looked forward to. Like I wasn't a young person who couldn't wait to work.

22:08Although it turns out that I like love work and I want to work for a really long time. And I love all these projects that I got my hands in and I hope to do many, many more. But the fact is what I looked forward to was having a family in a house altogether. And when it ended, I was poignantly aware of it. Now I'm a person who also like I cried a lot at college graduation and high school graduation because I knew as the youngest of three, I knew that life changes a lot and these days will not come again. And so it was partly just feeling my good fortune at having had an experience that I didn't want to end.

22:49And, you know, I'm just that's just sort of my nature. Like, I don't I don't have a step up or a lip. And maybe you don't need to. I don't care. I've accepted this part of myself. It's fine. I thought, I think it's really something actually to be conscientious about. And it's of a piece of the whole motherhood project, which is how to position yourself relative to your children and their daily lives. Like, do you want to be a leader? Do you want to be an advisor? Do you want to be an observer? Do you want to be a consumer? Like, do you want to kind of just watch? And that the answer to that question, like, where are you relative to your kids lives?

23:29Are you out front telling them what to do? Are you behind them telling them they can do it? Are you to the side? You know, like I kind of like the potted plant theory where you, a kid can look over and see that you're there. Or the I think Lisa DeMoor calls it the side of the pool, which is like you swim anywhere you want. And I'm just the edge of the pool. If you need to come over and catch your breath. Here I am. But otherwise, go for it. And with college, like it's weird because they're the kids themselves are in these relationships with all their new buddies. And all those buddies have different ways of interacting with their parents.

24:03So Claire, when she went to Virginia, became good friends with people who talk to their moms every single day. And, you know, that's perfectly fine thing to do if that's your jam. That wasn't how we worked. and I wondered sometimes, do I look uninvolved by comparison? To your kid. Does your kid think you're not sufficiently involved, you mean? Or like who's checking that? Yeah, exactly. Like I wondered if Claire was like, huh, like why don't my mom and I talk every day? And then there's all kinds of comparisons. It's like some people give their kids money in college, like an allowance. And of course, those allowances vary widely.

24:42Some parents think their kids should work while they're in college. Some parents are paying for college. Some parents are using financial aid. Some kids are, you know, accumulating that horrible debt that we read about. So it's just interesting because you are definitely, and I vividly remember this. I remember being in college and looking at my parents differently every time I got to know another friend and how their family operated. It was like, oh, really? Like, that's a thing? Like you guys have family dinner every Sunday with all your cousins. That sounds awesome. I wish we did that. Or you guys go to a lake house for two months every summer and just hang out together and play cards.

25:23And there's not really other people there. Like, wow, that must be incredible. And then a lot of other things like, oh, wow, your parents are divorced and you're both your parents are remarried and they don't talk to each other. And, you know, like all sorts of exposure that's new and probably much deeper. You know, people are sharing way more in college. They just have so much face time with one another. They're not coming home at the end of the day. They're sitting in bed in dorm rooms, really letting it out. So that was sort of an interesting thing to have enter into our relationship, which is partly how a kid develops their own values independent from the values of their parents, is that it's a time to reconsider.

26:07Like, what is the received version of like, this is how a family works? And then what would you like your version? I remember being in college and having that experience of like, well, you do this and you do that. I would go on tour with my comedy group during college breaks, which was mostly just staying in various people's houses and performing at their old schools. But anyway, what a window into how different people lived. When you're a kid, you just think the way your house is, is the way family life is, right? Right. And so, I mean, it's that great experience when you go abroad and you're like, you guys eat dinner at 10 o 'clock at night?

26:42Like, what are you talking about? This is insane. And it's like, oh, duh. That your way of doing things is but one way of doing things, right? But I had never really thought about, I mean, I suppose I have done it, but never really thought about it. Looking back, like, am I calling too much? Am I not calling enough? Am I presenting to my kid when he starts to consider, huh, this is how my family life is? When he's looking back at us, is he happy with what he sees? Does he wish it was different? And again, I guess you can't there is no kid that would look back and be like my way of doing things or my parents way of doing things was perfect in every way.

27:15That's not going to happen. And of course, like the evaluation is ongoing and ever changing because like a 18 year old doesn't really understand money. They don't know how much sacrifice there is in putting a kid through college. They don't know about paying taxes. They don't know how much money you lose every April. And so, you know, they may think like, I can't believe my parents are so cheap. They don't give me anything for allowance. And then, you know, when they're 25 and paying taxes, they might think, oh, I guess I guess there wouldn't be that much left. And then when they're 35 and they're raising their own kids and they're trying to put money into these 529 so that somebody later can go to college without having too much debt, then they really reevaluate.