Play therapist Ashlie West went into children's mental health because, in her words, kids are easier than adults. A graduate school mentor asked her one question that changed that: what happens after the session, when the child goes back to the same world?

In this conversation, Ashlie and Elizabeth talk about what that question taught her. They get into what constant screens are doing to children's attention and mood, why behavior change often gets worse before it gets better, and why a dysregulated parent cannot parent a dysregulated child into calm.

Ashlie explains how play works as a child's first language, what a single sand tray can reveal that a child cannot say out loud, and why she brings parents into the work from the second appointment. Along the way, both women admit how hard it is to put the phone down, to play without an agenda, and to apologize to a kid.

The takeaway is steady and hopeful: if parents can accidentally teach a child something unhelpful, they can intentionally teach something better.

Lee Anne is a fundraising consultant, a stand-up comic, and a woman who spent years believing she had to handle her hardest moment alone. In this conversation, she shares publicly for the first time the story of a miscarriage at six weeks, just after moving to North Carolina in 2014.

She describes telling her husband to stay at work, driving home alone through a KFC drive-through, and going back to the office on Thursday as if nothing had happened. She did not tell her mother until after her son was born. Looking back, she names what she was protecting: the belief that she was good at everything, and that this was a personal failure.

The conversation moves from grief to anger, including a very sincere apology to Carrie Underwood, and then to the difference between being private and being secretive. Lee Anne makes the case that the people who love us have earned the right to worry about us, and that shame cannot survive in community. If you are carrying something no one knows about, this episode is an invitation to let someone walk with you.

What does it actually feel like to love a foster child you may have to give back? In this episode, Loren shares her journey from a late-night application as a single woman to adopting her son, welcoming three siblings on a couple hours' notice, and learning to love both the children and the parents who needed her.

Host Elizabeth Porter and Loren talk openly about attachment, grief, and the idea that someone always loses in foster care. Loren explains why she was completely attached to her first placement, how she supported a grieving three-year-old through nights on the floor, and what it meant to be a real person cheering on the biological parents rather than a threat to them. She also looks back on what she would do differently, especially in preparing her adopted son for reunifications, and why she still believes the hardest parts of fostering are worth it.

If you are a foster parent, thinking about becoming one, or supporting someone who is, this conversation offers a rare and honest look at what it means to live in tension.

If this episode meant something to you, subscribe so you never miss a conversation, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

For more adoption and foster care resources, reach out to NOOL Counseling.

Learn more about our show sponsor, Porter Law Group, here.

Dawn was eight years old when a friend pulled her aside and told her that what was happening in her own home wasn't normal. It would be years before her family said the words out loud, and even after her abuser's arrest, the family's response was to stay quiet and move on.

In this conversation, the trauma nurse and author of Nursing the Wounds talks about growing up in the same small Mississippi town as her abuser — a man who was also, ironically, her first introduction to church — and about separating the God she was taught from the man who taught her. She talks about founding Voice for the Silenced with a friend she didn't know shared her story, the ACEs research that shapes how she understands trauma as a nurse, and the forgiveness she found in an old Bible that changed how she carries her own history. She also opens up, for the first time publicly, about a road near where she grew up that still bears her abuser's name — and her fight to see it changed.

Click here to purchase Dawn's book.

Connect with Dawn on Facebook.

Payton was twenty years old, a college student in Hattiesburg, when a relationship that started casually turned dangerous. He was charismatic and magnetic, the center of every room, and slowly, systematically, he isolated her from her friends and family and convinced her she was nothing without him, long before he ever raised a hand. In this episode, Payton tells the full story: the red flags she talked herself out of seeing, the night the abuse turned physical, the split-second decision that got her to a hospital, and the prosecution that followed. She's candid about going back more than once, about the friends who finally pulled her out for good, and about what it took to rebuild trust in herself and in love. Today Payton is a chiropractor, a wife, and a mother, and she's sharing her story so someone else might recognize the pattern sooner than she did.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence: National Domestic Violence Hotline, 1-800-799-7233, text START to 88788, thehotline.org. Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence statewide hotline, 1-800-898-3234, mcadv.org. Domestic Abuse Family Shelter, serving the Pine Belt and Hattiesburg area, 24-hour crisis line, 1-800-649-1092, dafs.ms.

What's actually inside your kid's phone, and why the old 'stranger danger' warnings don't cover it anymore.

Lauren Street works in child advocacy, and for the past year she's led the tech safety program at Kids Hub Child Advocacy Center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In this conversation, she breaks down what's changed: the danger isn't outside anymore, it's inside the device already in your child's pocket.

We talk through Discord and why it worries her, the 11-to-13 age window she recommends for a first smartphone, the 20-20-20 rule for balancing screen time, and the warning signs — sleep disruption, secrecy, sudden emotional shutdowns — that something online may have crossed a line. Lauren also gets specific about how early kids are encountering pornography now, and why she believes this is as much a parenting crisis as a tech one.

She leaves parents with one real action step: have the conversation tonight, in the car if it's easier, and build a family tech agreement everyone actually helped write.

If you're raising a kid with a phone, a tablet, or a gaming console, or you will be soon, this episode is required listening.

Subscribe for more conversations on parenting, safety, and the people doing this work in our community.

To find the resources mentioned in this episode, please visit kidshubms.com/resource-library and https://culturereframed.org/.

Alexis walked into her divorce carrying two decades of unhealed childhood trauma — the kind that teaches a person to survive rather than feel. As a Licensed Master Social Worker, she had the clinical language for what was happening to her clients every day. She didn't have it, yet, for herself.

In this conversation, Alexis traces the slow unraveling of a life built on management instead of healing: the friend who saw straight through her defenses, the prayer that cracked open old faith, the night she looked at the sky and asked God, simply, to help. Less than 24 hours later, she was calling an attorney.

What follows isn't really about the legal process, though the process is in here too. It's about learning the difference between holding on out of fear and holding on out of love, about finding the people worth trusting with the highest stakes of your life, and about the strange grace of coming undone in front of someone who won't look away. Alexis and her attorney talk honestly about fear, faith, protection, and what it finally felt like to feel whole.

In November of 1999, Kelly got a 1:30 a.m. phone call that his wife hadn't survived a single-car accident — and in the disorientation of being shaken awake, all he could manage was, 'Would you repeat that again?' What follows isn't a tidy grief story. It's an unflinching account of raising three children alone, of a wife's addiction rooted in childhood trauma she'd warned him about from their first date, and of a line she said so many times before she died that he still calls her prophetic.

Kelly talks about the day he chose not to remarry, the biological father who gave up his own daughter rather than let her lose a sister, and the anger at God his own mother refused to let him wallow in. Twenty-five years later, three grown children and a career spent coaching, foster parenting, and mentoring, he's still working from the same instruction his mother gave him the week his wife died: get on that bad motor scooter and ride.