The Secret to Raising Joy-Filled Kids w/ Dr. Marcus Warner | Ep. 56, Pt. 1

Episode 56: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

This episode introduces Dr. Marcus Warner’s concept of relational happiness as joy, explains how trauma and underdeveloped emotional maturity hinder parenting, and outlines how building emotional capacity helps children face difficult emotions without fear so their world doesn’t shrink. Dr. Warner then presents the first of his four habits—attunement—as briefly reading the room and starting with the child’s emotional state. He warns that failing to attune can parentify kids, and contrasts this with gentle parenting that often neglects correction and discipline.

Episode Transcript

Janel Greig (00:00):
One of the biggest fears parents carry is this: Am I doing enough? We want our kids to know and love God, but between school, sports, screens, friendships, and the endless pressures of modern life, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and outmatched. What if one of the most important things your child needs isn’t another lesson or gadget, but joy?

Today’s guest, Dr. Marcus Warner, has spent years studying the connection between relationships, emotional health, spiritual formation, and faith that lasts. In his book, The Four Habits of Raising Joy-Filled Kids, Marcus argues that joy isn’t just a feeling; it’s something that can be intentionally cultivated in our homes. And it may be one of the strongest predictors of a child’s long-term resilience, identity, and faith.

In this conversation today, we’re talking about what joy actually is, why it matters so much for parenting, how connection shapes character, and practical ways parents can help their children develop resilience, healthy identity, and deeper relationships with both God and others. Marcus, thank you for joining Matt and I today on the Upside Down Parenting Podcast.

Dr. Marcus Warner (01:11):
Oh, yeah. I love the title, Upside Down Parenting. That’s great. Reminds me of when I got parenting.

Dr. Matt Jones (01:19):
We would like to take credit for it, but there were minds that were working on that before we got involved. So I am curious, just kind of to start the conversation before Janel jumps in with a much tougher question. What do you perceive as the difference between joy and happiness? Because a lot of parents will say, “I just want my kid to be happy,” and I am guilty of not saying that. So what’s that difference there? And should I have been saying to my kids, “I just want to make you happy?”

Dr. Marcus Warner (01:49):
It is an excellent question. So in the evangelical world, it’s really big to separate those and say they’re totally different things, but the reality is in Greek and Hebrew, they’re the same word. So it’s joy, the way I use it, I sometimes call it relational happiness. In other words, it’s the happiness that I feel because of a person, because of a relational connection with somebody. And in that sense, it’s not a choice that I’m making. It is an experience that I’m having.

And so for example, if you’re a grandparent and your grandkid walks in the room, you’d go, “Oh, it’s the grandkid. I better choose to be happy.” There’s this instantaneous lighting up and you get this twinkle in your eye and it’s like and you’re not choosing it. It’s happening because you’re making space for it. So the choice was, “I’m going to get together with my grandkid.” It wasn’t, “I’m going to choose to be happy that they’re here.” And you put this into everyday, kind of thing.

(02:45):
If your cell phone goes off, you notice that sometimes you look down at it and you go, “Ooh, not that person.” And other times you look at it and you go, “Oh yeah.” And you’ve got this joy reaction. And so what we find is all of us, our relationships are either going to be fueled by fear or by joy.

And so that’s kind of where this all came from. It was this brain science discovery that all of our relational connections are either fueled by fear or joy. And joy is this. And there are things that we can do to increase the fuel of joy in our lives. So that’s what we’re talking about.

Dr. Matt Jones (03:22):
Great. That’s a great start. Thank you for that clarifier. Yeah.

Janel Greig (03:26):
Yep. Well, Marcus, you opened the book by acknowledging a reality that every parent feels. Parenting is hard. Whether it’s the fear of failing our kids, feeling unequipped for the challenges that we’re facing, or carrying unresolved pain from our own childhoods, most or many parents feel overwhelmed before they even begin. In your experience, what’s the biggest obstacle keeping parents from becoming the kind of joyful, connected parents that we all really want to be?

Dr. Marcus Warner (03:54):
Well, the biggest. I can answer it in one word, right? It’s trauma. And that is most of us have trauma in our background that interrupted our maturity development. So I need to define trauma. And that is, trauma is anything that severely limits my maturity development. So for example, we all think of trauma, we think of bad things that happened to us or of abuse. But there’s another kind of trauma, and it’s the absence of good things that we need.

Sometimes I describe it this way. If you think about a plant and I say, how would you kill a plant? If I asked you to kill a plant, how would you do it? The number one answer I get everywhere I go is I wouldn’t water it. Number two is, wrong kind of soil, not enough sunlight. In other words, what you don’t do to a plant can kill it.

(04:43):
In the same way, what you don’t get growing up can kill your maturity development. And so you had good parents, but they never said, I love you. You had good parents, but they just didn’t know how to handle anger. And so you didn’t grow up knowing how to handle anger. Or you had a family system where it was run on fear and you to this day run your life on fear because it’s how you were raised. It’s the way you’re kind of programmed.

What happens is that these traumas, whether it’s the bad things that happened to us or the good things that we miss out on, they interrupt the natural maturity development that’s supposed to happen. And so the result is, a typical marriage in America has a male stuck at infant level maturity, married to a female stuck at child level maturity. So you have an infant and a child married and trying to raise kids. And so as a result, everybody’s overwhelmed all the time.

(05:41):
And when I’m overwhelmed, I avoid things. I get angry more easily. I get addicted to things because I’ve got to soothe myself more regularly. And it just creates. And so you kind of give yourself a little test. How overwhelmed am I? How avoidant am I? How addicted am I? How easily do I get angry? When I do get angry, do I just lose it completely? What’s going on? So how we handle our emotions. So I’d say in a nutshell, trauma interrupts the maturity development process. And maturity development is all about my capacity to handle emotions.

Janel Greig (06:18):
So how do we identify that as adults? What stage we’re at or what we’re lacking? What’s the best way for people to identify, where am I at?

Dr. Marcus Warner (06:29):
So there’s two things you can do. One is you could kind of run through the. I just listed off a few A words and that is, am I addicted? Because if I am addicted to work, addicted to alcohol, addicted to porn, addicted to anything like this, that’s a sign that I have not reached adult level maturity in my development that I’m stuck at either infant or child.

I’m avoidant, which means I avoid hard people. I avoid hard situations. I avoid hard tasks. I go do what I have to do and then I zone out in front of the screen or whatever it is, but I’ve got an avoidant lifestyle. And three has to do with, I’m anxious regularly because I’m always on the edge of my capacity. It feels like I’m always one straw away from having too much. Those are all signs that I lack because maturity could be defined as capacity and specifically the capacity to handle emotions.

(07:24):
So that’s the first thing. The second thing I could do to kind of assess is that when I need to recover from emotion, do I need somebody else to recognize what’s going over and to just take care of me? That’s infant level maturity because an infant’s really good at letting you know they’re upset, but it’s somebody else’s job to figure out what’s got them upset and to do something about it and to help them be okay again. And so some of us feel like all I’ve got to do is let you know I am not happy about this and the rest is your job. That’s infant level maturity.

Child level maturity says, “I need help with this. Can you help me put a name to what I’m feeling because I’m having trouble putting words to this? And I don’t actually know what the steps are I need to take, but if you’ll help me, I’m open to getting some help.”

(08:11):
So I’m asking you for help. So a child knows enough to ask for help, but they don’t necessarily know how to do it. And then at the adult level, I become well-practiced on naming my emotions, recovering from those emotions, regulating my emotions so that I’m not perfect at it, but I do it on a pretty regular basis.

Janel Greig (08:33):
Thank you.

Dr. Matt Jones (08:34):
Yeah, I appreciate those A’s there. And so whenever we think about joy, I appreciate the definition you gave us earlier. What are some misconceptions about what joy is?

Dr. Marcus Warner (08:48):
Yeah, I find that especially again, in the Christian church, there’s a couple of misconceptions that are common. One is that it’s sort of almost like a spiritual gift that God zaps you with. And some people get it and some people don’t. And that I’m sitting here helpless, just waiting for God to give me joy. And it’s not really a gift. It’s a fruit of the spirit.

So if you think about fruit of the spirit, that means as I am relational with God because walking in the spirit. The Bible doesn’t actually have a word for relationship. So it uses metaphors like walking. So walking with God simply means I have a relationship with God. And if I’m walking in the spirit, that means I’m being relational with God, being relational in the spirit, and joy should come out of that. Now, when that doesn’t happen, it means I might have a fear relationship with God, but not a joy relationship with God.

(09:44):
And so that’s a first misconception is it’s just something you kind of get zapped with, some spiritual experience. The second misconception is that they so want to differentiate it from happiness. It’s the idea that happiness comes and goes, but joy is always there.

(10:03):
I think that’s a misconception. I think that joy is always available is different than joy is always there. Joy reacts just like happiness. Two different people, two different situations, two different things. So part of what we’re doing is trying to put the things in our lives that help us grow our capacity to experience joy because some of us aren’t as good at being happy as we think we are. And that is that it’s actually a skill you’ve got to develop to learn how to enjoy things in life and how to enjoy the experiences of life.

And so we’re looking at this like there are skills that you can develop that will grow your capacity to enjoy life. And if you don’t, what will happen is fear will fill up all of the void that joy was meant to fill. So when you come to parenting with your kids, for example, a child, we’re not talking about a child being happy all the time.

(11:01):
My goal is for my child to be happy all the time, I will spoil that child rotten. My goal is for a child to be able to have the capacity to really enjoy life and also the capacity to face difficult emotions and still be okay. And the way that we face big emotions and we’re still okay is I’ve got to have enough joy in my life to give me the capacity to do that. Because if I’m not afraid of emotions.

I heard Dr. Wilder say one time that, and my co-author, Chris Corsey, who’s also wrote the exercises of the book, gave a lot of the input on this content. Chris and Jim have both said that what happens is the only thing that we truly fear is an emotion that we can’t handle.

(11:53):
And so you think about kids, so you’re thinking about yourself. It’s like who are the people you avoid? And the reason you avoid them is because of the way they make you feel. And you don’t want to have to deal with that emotion. You think about the tasks you avoid. And it’s not just the pain it’s going to cause you. It’s the way that pain makes you feel. It’s like there’s so much fear of the pain. It’s the fear that you’re actually afraid of.

Or there’s so much anger. It’s actually the anger you’re afraid of because you don’t know how to recover from that. You don’t know how to be yourself with that. And so with this idea that emotions are the only things that we’re actually afraid of, then you begin to understand that with every emotion I have to avoid because I don’t know how to deal with it, my world gets smaller.

(12:41):
Because I know I can’t deal with that person because they make me scared. I can’t deal with that person because they make me mad. I can’t deal with this event because it makes me sad. I can’t deal with this because it makes me feel shame.

And so you take that into parenting in your child and you’re like, the goal and the beauty of a joy-filled child is not that they’re happy all the time, it’s that they’re not afraid of any of these emotions. They can do things, not worrying about the emotion they’re going to experience because they know they can get back to joy. And that’s what we’re after here, is resilient kids for whom life becomes an adventure because their world isn’t shrinking due to a lack of emotional capacity.

Dr. Matt Jones (13:21):
So I’m curious, and that’s some reframing for me to consider. I’ve been working with college students for 20, 25 years, and a lot of times it’s teenagers and sometimes middle schoolers, but they just seem lifeless or maybe even joyless. What do you think contributes to that? And obviously fear is going to be part of that response there, but their eyes are just so without light many times. And I’m just curious what the connection may be unless I’m misperceiving that.

Dr. Marcus Warner (13:57):
No, I think you’re onto something. There’ve been plenty of studies and even presentations to Congress and things on how we’ve got one of the most anxious generations ever and the role of screen time in that, the lack of relational connection. Because what brain science has shown us is that joy is a relationally driven experience. And so the more non-relational things that fill my life, the less opportunity I have to grow the parts of my brain that are good at joy.

And so, I think, for a lot of today’s youth have grown up isolated. They went through the whole pandemic thing. They are online a lot. They’re in front of their screens a lot. Their relationships are often texting. And it’s essential in growing joy for there to be eye contact and not even just over the internet eye contact like this. Because one of the reasons stuff like this could be so tiring is that your eyes want to make a connection faster than the screen can give you data.

(15:00):
And it just gets tired trying to catch up to the lag that is happening. And so I think that you’re absolutely right. And the reason for this is that our world has become less social, has become less relationally connected. There’s especially less multi-generational interaction and connection, which has always been key. And that is kids spending time with not only their parents, but their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, their cousins, their neighbors.

The skill of neighboring has kind of been disappearing as we just drive into our garages and walk into our house and don’t interact with our neighbors. And then it’s school. Oftentimes school becomes a scary place where you’re just trying to survive the experience or school can be a place where you have to wear a mask all day and to pretend to be somebody that you’re not in order to be liked. And so school doesn’t always create the best relational environment.

(16:05):
And so what’s happening is we’re constantly trying to grow our capacity by watching other people. So the main way that we grow emotional capacity is by watching people do it well and hearing stories from people who do it well. And so if everybody in my life is bad at it, where am I going to learn it? And I can’t just take a class or watch a YouTube video and go, “Oh, I see it now. All right, I’m just going to go.” It can be helpful. It’s better than nothing, but I need to see it in action. And that’s where the parenting piece really comes in.

Janel Greig (16:38):
That’s great. This is framing this next part so well, Marcus, so thank you. We’d love to start to unpack the four habits that you discuss in depth in the book. Attune, build, bounce, correct with care, and developing discipline relationally. The first habit that you discuss is attunement, the ability to enter a child’s world and understand what they’re experiencing. In the midst of busy schedules for parents and just the natural tendency to jump straight into fixing problems, what does attunement actually look like in everyday parenting?

Dr. Marcus Warner (17:11):
So first I’ll just say attunement is just a few seconds worth of activity. So this is not a huge time-consuming thing. It’s like, read the room, read the body language, notice what’s going on.

Dr. Matt Jones (17:24):
Rely on your wife to read the body language. I struggle with this, Marcus.

Dr. Marcus Warner (17:29):
Well, and again, this is part of why we all have to practice it. It’s like nobody comes into parenting perfect. And nobody comes into parenting with all of the skills. And so no one’s going to do this perfectly. All we’re trying to do is lay out kind of the goal of what we’re after here, what the ideal would be.

And so what I’ve found is that not only do most parents, though, not attune to their child. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say that you ask your kid to clean up the room and you walk into the room and it’s a mess and he’s watching TV.

(18:05):
A typical reaction is, “Do you see how angry I am right now?” And what you’re doing is you’re asking the child to attune to your emotion. We’re going to start with my emotion and how I feel about what I’m seeing right now. And I need you to attune to me right now. Instead, we need to flip this around and go, “I see you’re happy and enjoying the TV right now.” I said, “Yeah. So what’s wrong with this picture? What did I just ask you to do?”

And so all I had to do was start with where they’re at. “I see you’re happy right now watching the TV. Good, but what did I just ask you to do? Let’s deal with this. “And so attunement doesn’t take long. It’s just recognizing what’s actually going on in the room. And too many parents walk into a room with their emotions and they lead with their emotions and how they feel about what’s going on and expecting the child to attune to them.

(18:57):
But it’s the job of the more mature person to attune to the less mature person. And so in a sense, what you’re doing is you’re setting them up for upside down parenting where they have to. It kind of creates parentified kids after a while where they feel like they’ve got to take care of your emotions rather than the other way around. And that’s why we start with attunement because that script needs to get flipped for a lot of parents and say, now let’s actually start with your child’s emotions and go from there rather than starting with your emotions.

Janel Greig (19:30):
That’s great. Thank you. I think that the incorrect approach to that too, not being attuned is a trauma that many of us, maybe, carry into parenting then. So to have to relearn that and not want to approach our kids in that way is important. And appreciate the example. Thank you, Marcus.

Dr. Marcus Warner (19:48):
I will say, yeah, attunement is not a word we throw around in everyday language very much. So it’s not something you hear talked about. So I just call it, I look at it as reading body language is really what this is. It’s actually a part of my brain, that its specialty is reading body language.

And so what happens when I skip that step, it pretty much guarantees the fact that I’m not going to act like myself and remain relational right now, which are two of the core characteristics of mature behavior is that I remain relational and I act like myself. If I don’t read the room and I don’t see what’s going on, I will tend to enter that room on the basis of where I’m at, what’s going on with me.This happens in marriage too. It’s like how often. The reason we have fear in our relationship is I don’t know what emotion’s going to walk into the room next.

(20:44):
And so it’s like, okay, is this the happy to see you wife? Or is this the why in the world have you not done what I asked you to do wife? And it’s like, which husband am I going to get right now? And so the kids wind up the same way.

And like you said, a lot of us grew up this way and we do have trauma in our past. And the only thing that’s been imprinted on our brains is this is how you parent. And that’s why we’re trying to stress this and say, look, this was hopefully the primer you wish you had had when you started the process to say, okay, let’s at least get some of the fundamentals in order.

Janel Greig (21:19):
Yeah. Marcus, can we go a little bit down a different path just before we come back to the second habit you discussed? One of the things that’s really paramount right now in parenting is the gentle parenting movement that’s going on, for lack of a better term.

And I think you defined your habit of attuning well, but how can maybe the process of attuning or being, I want to just be so emotionally, where are my kids at? How can we not go that far into the gentle parenting and being so careful about their emotions that balance that attunement reading? And you did point on this saying keeping it brief, but what would your thoughts be on that?

Dr. Marcus Warner (22:01):
Yeah, that’s an excellent point because this is where I’d say you take, there’s four habits and they don’t live in isolation. They all are related. So they spell, they go A, B, C, D. So A is attunement, B is build bounce. C is correct with care. That means you do have to correct. And D is discipline relationally. And that’s not punishment, that is teaching skills relationally to build some disciplines into their lives.

So the idea here is gentle parenting only does the first two. They attune and they build bounds. They attune and they build bounds, but they don’t correct and they don’t build discipline. And one of the things we’ll talk about when we get to disciplines too is that my freedom to treat life as an adventure, my freedom to just really experience all that there is in life requires skill and skills require discipline.

(23:01):
And so if I sit down in front of a piano and I have never developed a skill to do anything at that piano because nobody ever disciplined me to practice, I have no freedom in sitting in front of those keys. I can make a joyful noise, but my freedom to do stuff is directly related to my skill level. And skills require disciplining and sometimes correction. And that’s why you have to have all of these things working together and not just one or two of them in isolation.

Dr. Matt Jones (23:33):
That is really helpful. Yeah. And I’ll just say I’m looking forward to the part two or the second part of our conversation regarding these four categories or four habits of raising joy-filled kids. So Marcus, if you’ll stick with us, we’ll have a second conversation and go a little bit more in depth on parts B, C, and D. And we thank you for your time. And folks, we would encourage you to pick up the four habits of raising joy-filled kids because I’ve already learned and gotten some additional insight on that today.

So thank you for joining us, Marcus. And we appreciate so much that your work gives hope, that our kids can experience joy, especially if we’re able to model that in our own growth and development and relationship with God and others and even ourselves. So join us for part two where we learn more about parts B, C, and D. And we thank you for joining us today on the Upside Down Parenting Podcast.