5: Invisible Inheritance | Walking Through Part 4 - Creating A New Emotional Legacy

Dr. Nicole closes her limited Legacy Work miniseries ahead of the April 21 release of her debut book, Invisible Inheritance, sharing that she has spent about 10 hours recording an audiobook read by her that will be available on Audible. She focuses on how to create a new emotional legacy by parenting from “enoughness” rather than anxiety, perfectionism, and control, emphasizing that kids need emotionally available parents who repair after mistakes. She frames parenting as “nervous system leadership,” where children borrow a caregiver’s regulation, and explains how unhealed anxiety can leak into control, overprotection, emotional reactivity, outcome-based parenting, and hypervigilance. She highlights “good enough parenting,” secure attachment, and the scaffolding analogy for raising independent humans, then invites Atlanta-area listeners to a Roswell launch event with a bring-a-friend-free code.

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• Episode Transcript

  Disclaimer: Transcripts are AI Generated.

  [00:00:00] Welcome back to Legacy Work with Dr. Nicole . I'm Nicole, and today is our final episode in this limited miniseries leading up to the release of my debut book in Visible in Inheritance. And honestly, I cannot believe that we are less than one week away from lunch as I'm recording this today. This book has lived in my head and in my heart for so many years, and now we are so close to placing it in your hands.

  If you have not pre-ordered yet, you will be able to get invisible inheritance on Amazon on Tuesday, April 21st, less than one week away. As I'm recording this, I have just spent the past several days, really the past week, two days over the past several week, recording the audio book for Invisible Inheritance.

  So if you missed it on socials or you're not getting my [00:01:00] weekly newsletter with those announcements, invisible Inheritance is getting an audio book and it is read by me. I've spent about 10. Hours in studio with my friend Jake, who was recording the audio book. It was emotional. It was really hard. It was hard on my voice, but it was also just such a challenge going back, reliving these stories and speaking them.

  'cause I realized, I was telling Jake, I wrote this book, I wrote these stories. I've edited them, I've read them, but I always read them in my head, you know, so reading them out loud, having Jake witness that and go through that process over the past week. It was an incredible process and I'm really, really glad that we made the decision to do that.

  So you will be able to listen to Invisible Inheritance soon. I'll keep you posted on when that will be available. It will be on Audible. Stay tuned. So today I wanted to close this series with one of the most [00:02:00] important conversations in the entire book. How do we create a new emotional legacy through the way that we parent, live, love, and lead, not by parenting perfectly, not even by becoming endlessly self-sacrificing.

  But our goal is also not to eliminate every possible hardship from our kids' lives. 'cause I think in our anxiety, we often want to do that. But we create a new emotional legacy by learning how to parent from what I call enoughness instead of anxiety and control based parenting. If you are a parent or hope to become one someday, there is a good chance that you know this fear very intimately.

  What if I get it wrong? What if I pass down my anxiety to my kids? What if I repeat what was done to me or repeat these cycles that I am trying to break? What if my own wounds become theirs? So many thoughtful parents live under the [00:03:00] crushing pressure of trying not to mess their kids up. And ironically, that fear itself often becomes the very anxiety that shapes a home and a family legacy.

  So today we're gonna talk about what it looks like to release perfectionism and begin building something healthier instead. I've talked about previously how this book lived in my head for many, many years as a book about anxiety, and it is, it is a book about anxiety and healing anxiety. But what I didn't realize until having my girls in, I had my girls.

  Two under two very, very quickly became a mom. I was already a stepmom, which stepmom's count. Shout out to all the stepmom's, but becoming a baby mom, two kids in two years, it really hit me. This book just hit me one day and I thought, this is a book about anxiety, but as I started writing it, I realized it really was more a book about legacy.

  So that is what part four is all about. One [00:04:00] of the most common things that I hear from parents, either in my office or out and about is some version of I'm trying so hard not to repeat my childhood. And while that intention is beautiful and well-meaning, it can quickly become fear-based. Because many of us are not parenting from confidence.

  Okay? This is our first rodeo. This is our first time parenting our kids. Whether we are parenting little ones, toddlers, we're parenting teens for the first time, a whole nother rodeo. Or we are grandparents, you know, we're parenting adult kids, we're raising grandparents. We're thinking back on what our legacy is, right?

  We often parent from hyper-awareness, from fear, from overcorrection, from trying to avoid mistakes, and we become consumed with not creating harm. But that parenting starts to feel like a test that we could fail at any moment. And I want you to hear this, and I write this all throughout the book, [00:05:00] but our kids don't need perfect parents.

  They need emotionally available ones. They don't need parents who never make mistakes. They need parents who know how to repair after mistakes to apologize. They also don't need a flawlessly regulated and calm home. Although I do write about creating a calm family culture, our kids need a homework.

  Emotions are allowed, navigated, and made sense of. And perfection is not the goal here, but presence is, and you'll see that all throughout the book. Okay. The next part that I wanna talk about is parenting as nervous system leadership. I am known to say when I am speaking from a stage, when I'm giving a keynote, when I'm talking to a group of leaders, I always say that everyone, I believe everyone is a leader.

  So even if you're not leading others, or you're not leading a team or supervising, you know, parenting is leadership. And even if you're not a parent and you are literally solo, [00:06:00] you lead yourself. So everyone is a leader. Okay? And one of the most important shifts that I hope this book helps people make is understanding that parenting is not just about behavior management and what we pass down, it is nervous system leadership.

  Children borrow our regulation, our calm, our peace, our emotional states before they build their own. They don't learn emotional safety because we tell them to calm down or stop worrying. They learn resilience because someone helps them survive hard moments safely. So much of anxiety driven parenting sounds like, stop crying.

  You're fine. Don't be nervous. You need to calm down. We don't act like that. I need to fix this. But anchored, grounded parenting sounds more like I'm here with you. That felt big, didn't it? It makes sense that you're upset. We can handle big feelings here. Your child doesn't need you to erase their discomfort.

  They need you to model what it looks like [00:07:00] to stay steady inside of discomfort, and that is what I call nervous system leadership. So the truth is, if we do not address our own anxiety, it will show up in our parenting, and that is what the book uncovers. We're not bad parents, okay? Unhealed anxiety doesn't make us bad.

  It's just that it always leaks out into our family culture. It looks like these things that we explore in the book, number one is control. Trying to manage every detail of your child's life to reduce uncertainty. Number two is overprotection mistaking safety for never allowing any discomfort. I talk about how this can stifle a child's distress tolerance when everything is overprotected or project managed.

  Number three is emotional reactivity becoming dysregulated by your child's dysregulation. And I talk about co-regulation but not codependency. So codependency is being [00:08:00] dysregulated off of your child's dysregulation. So we need to have separation there. Number four is outcome-based parenting, treating your child's success or behavior or achievement as proof of your own worth.

  We all know those parents. I'm not calling anybody out who are just living, you know, through their child's. Accomplishments this kind of second time around. You know what I mean? And then lastly, hypervigilance constantly scanning for signs that something is wrong, waiting on the other shoe to drop, being on edge.

  And many parents think that anxiety and parenting only looks like worry, but it can look like over-functioning. It can look like micromanaging, or as I call it, project managing your child's life. Fixing, controlling, or even over accommodating. And while it may be motivated by love, children often experience this type of parenting as pressure.

  They experience this as mistrust, and it's the subtle message that we give our kids. I don't believe you can handle [00:09:00] hard things. We certainly don't wanna pass down that message. So there's this concept in psychology, and I even talk about this in the book called Good Enough Parenting, and I think it is one of the most freeing ideas that we can embrace as parents.

  Good enough parenting means that you are attuned more often than not to your child. You repair when ruptures happen. You provide emotional safety that's consistent enough. And you don't have to get it right every time because children aren't harmed by our imperfection or our mistakes, but they are harmed by chronic emotional unavailability, by avoidance, by unpredictability, by shame.

  Good enough. Parenting teaches our kids that our relationships can with withstand mistakes. Conflict doesn't equal abandonment. Emotions are survivable and love is not withdrawn when things get hard, and that is what builds secure attachment, repair, consistency, presence, [00:10:00] enoughness. I write about this all through part four.

  It's really such a good, such a good section of the book. So one of the hardest truths for anxious parents to accept is this. You can do everything, quote right, and your child will still struggle. This is so hard for so many parents because parenting is about influence. It's not about control. You are not raising a project.

  You are raising a messy. Human being who I believe God has created with a unique purpose. For a unique purpose. You are raising a separate human being. They have their own temperaments, their own stories that are developing their own wounds and strengths and choices, and sometimes anxious parenting becomes outcome based parenting.

  We unconsciously believe that if my child is struggling, I have failed As a parent, if my child is anxious, I must have caused this, or I should have done something to stop this. And if my child has mistakes, I didn't prepare them enough for life. But [00:11:00] healthy parenting says it's not my job to guarantee outcomes.

  It's my job to provide relationship safety, including emotional safety. Guidance and repair your child's struggle is not always evidence of something that you did or didn't do. Sometimes struggle is simply a part of them becoming a human being, right? So I wanna tell this quick story, and I share this with so many clients over the years, but it's a concept in psychology that we call scaffolding, and it has to do with.

  Learning. Okay. Social learning theory and basically that the way that we learn things, whether you're a kindergarten teacher or you're teaching, you know, astrophysics or something is kids and teens and adults, we have to have a scaffold. We can't learn things that are outside of our, we call it in psychology, zone of proximal development.

  So as we're learning things, we have to have them broken down into bite-sized pieces that we can understand. You're not gonna [00:12:00] teach a child who doesn't know the alphabet, how to read Lord of the Rings, right? You're gonna read that. Hop on spot.

  So often what I tell parents and what I tell clients is that as parents, we are the scaffolding to our children's growth. Think about a building that's being built and the bricks are being laid. If the scaffold. That the brick layer is standing on is too far away from the building. You're not gonna be able to build the building.

  You're not gonna be able to lay the bricks. You have to have the scaffolding up close enough, but it's not the building. Okay? It's not a part of the building. Eventually, the scaffolding will be taken down and it will go away. And that's what we're doing when we're raising children. We are the scaffolding that is helping them grow and laying bricks and learning lessons and learning how to regulate.

  But eventually that scaffolding will need to be gone, right? We're not gonna be there forever. And I write in the book for parents of teens and parents of young adults, they find it so hard [00:13:00] when their kids set boundaries with them or don't need them anymore like they used to. And I say, well, if it isn't the consequences of your own actions, right?

  You've been raising these kids to become adults, and now that they're setting boundaries with you, or they're individuating and. Exerting independence. It's like, oh no, what have I done Right as a parent. So I like to use that analogy of the scaffold to think about what we're doing when we're raising our kids.

  We're there for them. We're study, we're sturdy, just like a scaffold. If there's one thing that I hope you carry with you from this conversation, and honestly this entire mini series, it's this. Healing legacy work is not about being perfect and getting everything right. It's about becoming conscious, aware, intentional, which is RJs favorite word, my husband, rj, intentional is his favorite word.

  It's about willing to pause, willing to repair, willing to choose differently. You don't have to continue living the way that you always have. The emotional legacy that your children [00:14:00] need most is not a parent who never gets overwhelmed, never misses something, never raises their voice, but it's a parent who can say, I'm sorry.

  Let me try again. This wasn't your fault. Your feelings make sense. You don't have to earn love here. And that's how generational patterns shift through relational safety. Through Enoughness that parenting is not about performance. It is a relationship that we're developing over time. And with that, we are officially less than one week away from the release of Invisible inheritance.

  I can't even believe that I'm saying that, but if this many series has resonated with you, I truly believe that this book will meet you even. Deeper in the work Launch day is April 21st, and if you're local to Atlanta, I would absolutely love to celebrate with you at Launch Night in Roswell for an evening with Dr.

  Nicole Thaxton. It's going to be a really special evening. We're going have a interview conversation. I'm gonna be interviewed by my good [00:15:00] friend Jenny Boyette. We'll talk about behind the scenes stories from the book, and there will be some time for some q and a signing. Books, photos, all of it. You can grab your ticket online, nicole faxon.com.

  And because we are in the final week of launch, I'm offering if you are listening to this today, that you can bring a friend for free to the launch event. So register this week. Use the code free pass, one word, free pass. For your guest at checkout, so we can keep an accurate RSVP list. But I would love for you to bring a friend for free.

  And one quick final announcement, which I already shared, is that Invisible Inheritance is getting an audio book. It truly has just been the most surreal experience of my career writing this book, publishing this book, launching this book over the last several months since I announced that this book was even coming.

  And then now putting together this fantastic launch event at Social House in Roswell and recording the audio [00:16:00] book, which is just absolutely mind boggling to me that this is all happening in the next week. So thank you so much for being a part of this journey. Thank you for listening to this series.

  Thank you for caring about the work of healing and creating emotionally healthy legacies. Until next time, keep doing the work. And I'm so thankful for you being here. Invisible inheritance. We'll see you soon. 

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