Debbie Reber from the TILT podcast shares her wisdom

That’s cool.

Hey, what’s up, everybody? It’s Seth Perler from the Stuff You Should Know podcast here. We’ve got Colin and Debbie Reber from the Tilt Podcast here. You can play—hello!

We’re here in Portland, Oregon. We are both at the World Domination Summit, which is a fantastic conference of creative game-changers, world-changers, paradigm-shifters, and awesome people.

We fortunately get to meet for the first time ever because we’ve known each other online, and we’ve done a lot of podcasts and other projects together. It’s awesome to finally meet Debbie.

So, I had a question for Debbie that I wanted to post for the vlog today. Debbie has had the opportunity to interview so many people about differently wired kids, and I think it’s really amazing when somebody gets to have so much experience exploring one question.

My question to Debbie is: What is one of the most important things you could ever tell parents of differently wired kids to help them support their children? What do they need to know? What have you learned from all these people?

Okay, so here’s what I would say.

If there’s a common thread through the conversations I have—at least something that sticks with me—it always comes back to respecting who that child is: respecting their timeline, respecting them as exactly who they’re supposed to be in this world, and respecting them as autonomous human beings.

Our goal is to guide them and help them become their best selves. It’s not to make them behave better. I mean, that would be great, but it’s not about controlling their journey or having it look the way we want it to look.

It’s about respecting who they are and accepting who they are.

I think that word—respect—is the thing for me that has become a guiding principle. When I think about all the people that I’ve interviewed, whatever tips they share, it really does come down to that word.

I think it’s such an important value, and it can really shift everything in our relationship with our child when we approach that relationship through that lens.