Emma Grede: "Your kids don't need you to be their everything"

Motherkind

Zoe Blaskey

Kids & Family, Parenting

4.8 • 863 Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2026

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Your kids don’t need all of you. They need a fully expressed version of you.” What if the pressure to be everything to your children is actually the thing making motherhood harder? In this powerful conversation, Emma Grede (entrepreneur, co-founder of SKIMS & Good American) shares a radically honest take on ambition, guilt, and what it really means to be a “good mother.” This episode is a permission slip to stop doing it all and start doing what actually matters. 💡 What You’ll Learn in This Episode Why you don’t need to live up to anyone else’s version of motherhood How to let go of guilt (without letting go of your ambition) Why life isn’t about balance - it’s about seasons How to stop micromanaging everything (your kids, your partner, your life) Why putting yourself first is not selfish - it’s essential You don’t need to do it all. You just need to decide what actually matters and let the rest go. Watch every full episode on YouTube and subscribe. Loved this episode? Follow or subscribe so you never miss an episode of Motherkind. It helps more mothers find the show and keeps our community growing. If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy Zoe’s conversation with The Squiggly Career Experts - Success isn’t linear: 5 Steps to finally start defining your own path Feeling like you’re carrying it all? Download your FREE Mental Load Cheat Sheet and learn how to start feeling lighter, even if nothing in your life changes. Zoe’s favourite Aspire episode with Emma Grede: “Don’t Let Anyone Control You With Money” with Reese Witherspoon Connect with Zoe: Follow Zoe on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok Get Zoe’s Sunday Times bestselling book, 'Motherkind: A New Way to Thrive in a World of Endless Expectations’ This Motherkind episode is sponsored by: Headline sponsor Wild Nutrition, the brand raising the bar for women’s supplements. Want to feel the Food-Grown difference yourself? Get 50% off for three months at wildnutrition.com/motherkind. Ts and Cs apply. Start your children’s reading journey with Usbourne Books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's been one of the single biggest unlocks of my life that I made a decision that the only
0:06.9	standards I needed to live up to as a mother were my own. After my first kid, I just felt completely
0:13.2	exhausted. And so I just decided that there must be a better way. Motherhood is teaching me.
0:20.2	Don't like be living in this place of kind of guilt
0:23.6	and fear and frustration. You can't have it all right? No, you got to have the trade-offs. Do you
0:28.6	have those guilt feeling? Where do you put them? I don't make my decisions based on that. I make
0:34.2	my decisions based on my vision. I am not here to parent my husband and my kids.
0:38.6	You're a partner, not a parent. But I do think we've hit a place where parenting has gone
0:43.5	bananas. What lesson keeps repeating for you? That is the most important question that you can
0:50.1	ask yourself as a woman. Hello and welcome to Mother Kind. It is me, your host, Zoe Blaskey.
0:55.6	We are proudly sponsored by Wild Nutrition's Women's Supplements.
1:00.1	My guest today is Emma Greed.
1:02.5	Emma is the co-founder of Skims and Good American,
1:04.7	a shark on shark tank, a dragon on dragon's den,
1:07.1	and a mother of four.
1:08.8	She is also the author of her new book, Start With Yourself,
1:12.5	which has sparked a global conversation about women's ambition. But in this conversation,
1:19.9	I wanted to know about Emma the mother, her matressence, how she deals with guilt, how her own
1:27.1	childhood has informed who she is today, what kind of parent she is, how she deals with guilt, how her own childhood has informed who she is today,
1:30.1	what kind of parent she is, how she manages the mental load with her partner, who's also a CEO.
1:35.4	I wanted to know if she holds the same ambition for her kids as she does for herself and how she
1:40.5	makes decisions about her priorities without overthinking if she's a good enough mother all the time.
	...

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