And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols and today you'll learn a little bit about parenting.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

Good day, people. How are you all doing? Have you got your Christmas decks up yet? Don't blame you if you have. Don't blame you if you haven't.

You do you. I was chatting to my son last week. He's away at uni in a young one's type house with a

lovely group of folk. And they've had their decorations up since probably mid-November.

And I did question the need to put them up so soon.

And he said, well, we're all going back to our parents for Christmas and New Year.

So if we didn't get festive here now, we wouldn't at all.

And I thought, oh yeah, of course.

So then driving around my town, seeing so many people with their lights on outside of the house, even though it was still only November, I was able to push away any judgment about it, because you never really know the reasons why people want to do the things the way they do. We don't know

other people's stories, do we? And whose opinion is that really anyway? Is it yours? Is it your

parents? As with so many things in life, often what we think of as our own ideas and opinions, there's nothing

more than hand-me-downs for my parents anyway. That's just what we do as children. We absorb and

respond to everything that we experience. It's no surprise that a huge majority of people that come

to therapy have issues relating to their childhood,

and in particular the way that they were treated by their parents, who, in some cases, genuinely thought that they were doing the right thing.

Over the years, I've had a lot of emails asking me to talk about parenting, but as there are

already so many specific parenting podcasts already out there, I've tended to avoid the topic.

I think I've only spoken about it once on here, because it seems a bit preachy for a parent

to talk about parenting, like I must be the perfect dad or something, as if I know

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