EP: 007 | Are You Parenting or Reacting From Your Wounds?
| Cy Wakeman

What do you do when your child’s anxiety feels like your failure—when every meltdown, mistake, or struggle feels like proof that you’re a bad mom?

Cy Wakeman, a bestselling author, therapist, and mother of four boys—practices a proven philosophy that will change the way you parent.

Cy teaches that “most anxiety is self-generated and parent-reinforced.” Her work blends emotional intelligence with radical self-reflection—and her message is clear: the more we fix ourselves, the more peace we create for our kids.

She explains how ego, fear, and over-involvement fuel parental anxiety—and how to replace them with calm, co-regulation, and compassion.

🌱 Key Takeaways

  • The Real Report Card: Stop grading your parenting on your child’s outcomes. Instead, ask—“Was I present, kind, and loving today?”

  • The Ego Trap: Most stress doesn’t come from our kids—it comes from the stories we tell about them.

  • Skill Up: Parents are under-skilled in managing their own anxiety. Learn to regulate before trying to regulate your child.

  • Love Up, Then Call Up: Love your child unconditionally first—then call them up to their greatness with accountability and grace.

  • The Call to Greatness: Clean up your thinking, find your place of impact, and
    co-create solutions instead of rescuing or abandoning your kids.

Time Stamps

  • [00:00:00] Vivian opens the conversation with Cy Wakeman on what it means to “feel like a bad mom.”

  • [00:03:00] Cy introduces her “secondary report card”—measuring parenting through presence and love instead of achievements.

  • [00:07:00] The ego trap: how fear, story, and self-judgment create anxiety in parents and kids.

  • [00:11:00] Why we must skill ourselves up before we can help our children become more skillful.

  • [00:14:00] The two key parental roles: Love your kids up, then call them up to greatness.

  • [00:17:00] The “check yourself before you wreck yourself” rule—how to calm your nervous system before parenting through emotion.

  • [00:22:00] Clean thinking: separating facts from stories, and co-regulating instead of reacting.

  • [00:27:00] How ego-driven parenting turns into enabling—and how to stop labeling “lunch money” as “drug money.”

  • [00:33:00] The three steps of The Call to Greatness: Clean up your thinking → Find your point of impact → Take the next right action.

  • [00:39:00] Co-creating instead of controlling: teaching kids to self-regulate, from messy rooms to emotional breakdowns.

  • [00:45:00] Parenting without abandonment—how to hold boundaries and stay present with love.

  • [00:49:00] Cy’s final reminder: your child doesn’t need perfection—they need your calm, regulated nervous system.

✨ Resources & Next Steps

✔️ Join the Bad Mom Community for more conversations like this here.

✔️
Share this episode with a parent who is looking for a reset.

 ✔️ Read Life’s Messy, Live Happy by Cy Wakeman.

🌐 Cy Wakeman's
RealityBasedLeadership.com
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