On this episode of The Bespoke Parenting Podcast, host Julie Gunlock talks to author, blogger, and mom of two Ericka Anderson about her own parenting style, her faith, and her road to recovery.

The Bespoke Parenting Podcast is about and for parents who are tired of being told how to do it. There’s no one way to parent—there are as many ways as there are kids. Parenting styles, strategies, and philosophies should be bespoke—tailor made to fit you, your family, and most importantly, your kids! Discover season 1 by clicking here.


TRANSCRIPT

Julie Gunlock:

Hey everyone. I’m Julie Gunlock, host of the Bespoke Parenting Hour. For those new to the program, this podcast is focused on how parents should custom tailor their parenting style to fit what’s best for their families, themselves, and most importantly, their kids.

So today I’m going to be talking to my friend Ericka Andersen. Ericka is a freelance writer, podcaster, author, and a mom of two. She’s living with her husband and her two kids in Indianapolis, Indiana. Ericka is also a contributor to the Independent Women’s Network. Her writing over there is fabulous. Check it out at iwnetwork.com. Ericka has many hats, as I’ve already said. She writes about faith, culture, motherhood, politics, and the intersection of all of those issues. Her articles appear on the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Washington Post. She’s also a columnist for World Magazine Opinion, and she’s a freelance contributor to Christianity Today. She also has her own podcast as well called Worth Your Time. That’s another great podcast for you all to listen to. And she’s the author of the book, Leaving Cloud Nine: The True Story of a Life Resurrected From the Ashes of Poverty, Trauma and Mental Illness. She has another book coming out this year. We’ll talk about that. So Ericka, thanks for joining me.

Ericka Andersen:

Thank you for that very large introduction.

Julie Gunlock:

Well, it’s very impressive. Very impressive. And it’s always great to talk to you, Ericka. You’ve been with sort of the IW family for a lot of years and now, as I mentioned, you’re working or contributing over at IWN, so we appreciate that. You know, I always try to, or love to talk to my guests. I mean, I love to get into their stories, but the first thing I like to do is I like to ask my guests a little bit about their parenting style. And this podcast is all about — you don’t actually have to have a style, and you can just sort of be winging it every single day, which I feel that’s a little bit of what I do — but is there a parenting person that you follow, a style, or someone you really look to that inspires you?

Ericka Andersen:

Oh goodness. There’s probably a lot of random people. I think someone that I’ve been really looking to lately is, I’m going to not remember her full name, but it’s like her name is Becky, and you may follow her, Becky at the Good Mom or something like that.

Julie Gunlock:

I think I know it. Yes.

Ericka Andersen:

She has a huge account. Oh wait, I just saw, Dr. Becky at Good Inside. Yeah, that’s who she is.

Julie Gunlock:

Okay. Okay.

Ericka Andersen:

I really just love her practical advice in dealing with behavioral issues and just things that every parent deals with on a regular basis. She’s very relatable, so I do follow her. And then I also follow people like Mama Bear Apologetics, which is more about teaching your kids to be grounded in faith and making sure that they are learning how to think and not just what to think and sort of those aspects of parenting.

Julie Gunlock:

Oh, that’s great. That’s great. And faith is so important to parenting. You write a lot about that, and I want to get to that in a bit, but tell us at first, and I think this is a good way to segue into that, about your first book, which was so inspiring. Tell the audience about that.

Ericka Andersen:

Sure. Yeah, it was an amazing experience to be able to write it. Lots of credit goes to people other than me, including God and my husband, because the book is really a story of my husband’s life growing up in trauma and abuse and poverty, and sort of how he overcame that and had this redemption story, becoming an adult, coming to Christ through our family. Really beautiful story in the end that we were able to write and tell and publish in a way that was really able to connect with so many people that related to his story. So that was… I’m hearing a lot of feedback. Are you hearing that Julie?

Julie Gunlock:

No. Tim, are you hearing it? Let’s wait for Tim to come on. You can… Tim?

Ericka Andersen:

I don’t know if it… Well, it’s kind of stopped. I don’t know what that was, but okay, I can just keep going.

Julie Gunlock:

Oh, keep going.

Ericka Andersen:

Where was I? Okay. Oh, yeah. So we wrote that book, and we were able to publish it and get it out there and it’s led to… It really is what launched me into a lot of the writing I’ve been doing since then. There were a lot of topics that I hadn’t really explored, but as I dug into the research about childhood poverty, about the foundation of the family, about how important mentorship is, about things like the opioid crisis, it really branched out into so many different aspects of life that I just got very interested in writing about them. And I thought, “Hey, I’m going to go out there and try to make it happen.” And I’ve been able to do that and write and research about topics that I think are really important to be talking about more.

Julie Gunlock:

So you’ve got a second book coming out. Is this a sequel? Is it a follow on, is it… How does it relate to the first book? Or is it on a completely different subject?

Ericka Andersen:

Well, it is faith based, so it’s related in that way, but it is a really different audience. So this book is called Reason to Return: Why Women Need the Church and the Church Needs Women. So the target audience is obviously women, and essentially, I’m just speaking to an audience of women who maybe grew up in church, maybe grew up as Christians or call themselves Christians today, but they’ve really lost sight of their faith, they feel like they’ve fallen away, maybe, and they want to have a stronger relationship with God again; they want to get their kids back in church, they want to make faith a core component of their family, but they’re sort of feeling lost and feel like they need some guidance and instruction. And so I just am there to say, “Here’s how I’ve done it. Here’s how you can do it, and here’s how you can overcome some of the barriers that are keeping you from having this holistic faith life that you really envision for yourself and your family.”

Julie Gunlock:

So your book is geared towards women who maybe had faith and have fallen away or things have just gotten too crazy, but they have this sort of desire to go back. How do you reach out to people who maybe didn’t grow up in a faithful family or don’t really see faith as an important component of parenting? How do you convince… Because, look, we’ve got a lot of people on this podcast, this is not a religious podcast, this is not a… I actually rarely talk about the role of faith in parenting, which is a oversight, because for me it’s an important aspect and that’s why I wanted to have you on and I’m going to be having other guests on, but there’s a awful lot of people here listening who maybe faith isn’t really a part of their family.

Why is it an important part? And again, this is Bespoke Parenting, we’re not lecturing anybody, but I’d like to hear why faith has been an important component to your sort of parenting. I hate the word parenting journey. I hate all that talk. I sound like Oprah. It’s gross. But why has it been important to you, and why might it be something for people who don’t necessarily have a history in the church or with a church to maybe consider it?

Ericka Andersen:

Sure. Yeah. Well, for me, obviously personally, it stems back to my own personal relationship with God and that being a very important factor in my life. But what really convinced me, honestly, to get more invested in this and to begin and really incorporating it as a core part of my parenting is research and statistics, as boring as that sounds. But as I started to do research and see that people of faith, specifically those who attend church regularly, it’s very interesting that the statistics always skew positive towards people that actually go to a place of worship on the regular. That can be a church, or it could be a mosque, it could be a temple; it’s really not the religion that matters, it is the consistency of gathering in a faith community.

Now, of course, most Americans generally fall into the Christian bucket, so it is a church for the most part. And so as I started to see, hey, people that go to church are happier. People that go to church have less anxiety, they have better marriages, they have healthier bodies. It’s really like this, almost like magic elixir to improve your life. And I mean, I’m putting that very simply. That’s a reductive way to say it, but that’s one reason to consider getting in there. But secondly, when it comes to children, studies show that children are less anxious, they’re happier as adults, and similar kinds of statistics when they grow up believing in God and they grow up having a faith community around them. It provides a solid foundation.

And also, what you’ll find for families that are part of a church is that children tend to have a really great set of adults, solid adults, around them. And so that safety net, that network of people, what do they say, that social capital that’s so important for people for their success in life, that is expanded and improved when you’re part of a faith community. And so outside of the fact that I want people to have a stronger relationship with God, because that of course also improves your life, there are so many other reasons as well to consider why you might be invested. And I talked to a guy the other day that I’m friends with and I was actually kind of surprised, but he told me that he actually is an atheist, but that he and his wife take their daughter to church because they believe so much in the benefits of the faith community and they want their daughter to grow up in that.

Julie Gunlock:

It’s so interesting that you say that. My father was not religious. My mother… we were raised Catholic, and my mother was cradle Catholic, obviously I am too, but she grew up in this big Catholic family. But my father was not religious at all, did not belong to a church, but he agreed with my mother. He wanted us to go to church because even though he wasn’t particularly interested in attending church, he knew it was good, and he knew it was good for him growing up as a child. He wanted us to make that decision later on, but he wanted us to have the understanding and sort of the upbringing with the church. And so it’s very interesting how my father had a very similar kind of experience, but he recognized that that is an important component of a child’s upbringing. And you could also joke around and say he just never got in my mom’s way. But he really did view that as an important element. Were your husband and you on the same page as far as this, as far as raising kids and attending church and being part of a church community?

Ericka Andersen:

Yeah. And I was just going to make one note. I would point people to the work of Erica Komisar. She is a research… I believe she’s a psychoanalyst, but she has done… she wrote this great piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple years ago where she basically said, “I tell parents that don’t believe in God to lie to their kids.”

Julie Gunlock:

Yes. Yes.

Ericka Andersen:

And I think I quote that in my book because she said, “If you just look at kids that are told that God doesn’t exist versus kids that are told there is faith, there is something to believe in, their mental health is better.” And so she’s like, “I’d rather you lie to them, because…” Of course I don’t think it’s a lie, but I thought that was super fascinating information. And then, yeah, so for my husband and I, yeah, we both find that to be a really important part of our family, we want our kids to grow up with a great foundation, for that community aspect, for those mental health benefits, but also because we really believe in this faith. We believe it’s true. And for me, I grew up in the church and I credit my mom so much with being so consistent, it has been the foundation of my life everywhere I’ve gone. I move somewhere, I go somewhere new, the first thing I do is try to find a church, knowing that I’m going to have fellow believers there and people that I can trust.

But as a mom, I just kind of thought, “Well, I’m going to do it just like my mom did. I’m going to take us to church. No big deal. It’ll be fine.” Well, it turns out we’re living in a little bit of a different world than we were in the eighties, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. And it’s not quite as easy to just assume that your kids are going to go to church and turn out okay and yada yada. There’s a lot more ideas out there that are being planted in their heads. There’s a lot more doubt out there. The internet has really transformed things because things that were once obscure academic theories and things are now blasted to them on TikTok. And so they’re asking questions, they don’t realize the questions have been asked for a long time, and people are not grounded in the truth and the foundations of their faith.

And so I think for children, they need to know that stuff before they go out into the big bad world, till they go to college and someone’s like, “hey,” and asks them a question they’ve never heard before. So it’s really important to me to ground my kids in the theological truth of our faith and just to know why we believe what we believe instead of just telling them like, “Hey, this is what we believe.” Because I want them to know how to think. I want them to be able to ask questions and discover the truth for themselves. And that goes not only for faith, but for literally everything. I want them to know those things. So that is how I approach it.

Julie Gunlock:

It’s such a good point, Ericka. And you know, it’s funny, I hear from a lot of parents now who say, “I raised my child to be a conservative… We were a conservative family and I don’t know what happened. They go off to college and they just, they come home liberal.” And I do wonder sometimes how much people are actually talking to their kids. You mentioned the not just “this is what we believe,” but “this is why.” And I sometimes think that second part is missing because I feel like, when we sit around the dinner table, and I’m sure you are like… Well your kids are a little, they’re much younger than mine, but certainly I have one preteen and two teens, and at this point we aren’t just talking about why we believe… as they watch the news, right? For instance, Governor Youngkin here in Virginia just passed this new rule, which would basically ensure that parents are aware of any attempts at gender transition or gender confusion with their kids.

And as it is now… And this only happened the last six months of the Northam administration, who was the Democrat in charge of Virginia before Youngkin took over, and the Northam administration’s last six months shoved through all these incredibly radical gender ideas in our schools. And one of the rules that they… policies that they changed was basically kids can have secrets from their parents. They can tell the teachers and school administrators, for instance, that they want to transition. The school can help that child along, and the parents will never know. And it’s sort of… we —

Ericka Andersen:

Crazy.

Julie Gunlock:

— can joke at this point, we can insert the “what could possibly go wrong?” So Youngkin has reversed that, and there’s a lot of confusion out there. But we didn’t just tell our children about it, and really, this was only my older child who asked, because I try to keep some of this stuff from my children. They’re in a Catholic school, they’re protected from all this totally wacky gender stuff. But I talked to my older son and I didn’t just tell him, “This is the rule and this is why it’s good,” or “this is the rule and hooray.” I told him why it is good, why parents need to know of these things, and I’ve talked to him about the statistics on these things and really dug into it so he has a full picture.

And to some degree, I don’t think parents do that as much, and it’s not just on political issues, but as you say, on religious issues. This is why we are faithful people. This is what our church believes. This is why. And so I think conservative parents, I think there are many of them, like us, like you and me, who talk to our children, but you really have to talk to your children I think in a much more aggressive way now because of what you mentioned, all the influences out there. And so if you don’t give them a full explanation or really discuss these things, their knowledge and probably confidence in this stuff, is very shallow and they can’t defend it.

Ericka Andersen:

Yeah, I think sometimes we kind of forget… We kind of talk around our kids. They’re there, be like, “Oh, they’re not listening, or they’re not paying attention,” especially when they’re little — mine are four and six. But I have been very aware of these topics and culture, and I have been very straightforward and not really my four year old so much yet, but my six year old and I have talked about a lot of things that I never expected to be talking to a six year old about because I was listening to the Mama Bear Apologetics podcast one day and basically whoever their guest was was like, “It’s really never too young at this point, especially if they’re in public school.” And so that night I just decided to ask my son a couple questions about a couple of things, and it turned out he had heard of something that I didn’t realize.

And so then we were able to have that conversation, “Well, what do you think that means? And here’s why we believe what we believe,” and things like that. And so I’m trying to be very conscious of having those conversations and also not just big conversations. I’m a big believer in the one-minute conversation, just always talking about it and bringing it up on a regular basis at dinner, when you’re walking — I do this with faith and with other things. I’m always trying to… I’ll pray out loud, for example. Or I will just mention, “Hey, isn’t that a beautiful sunset that God made us?” In the same way that if an issue comes up or something on a TV show, I’ll just maybe make a comment about it or say it. I’m not saving up. The saving up the big talk days, those are over, I think.

Julie Gunlock:

Yeah. You know, Ericka, I know you have a hard stop here in about 10 minutes, and I do as well. So I want to pivot over, and honestly, I would love for you to come back and talk more about this. Maybe when your book comes out, we can delve into that. But I do want to also talk about something that I think is really important for parents to hear, and maybe we’ll even come back to talk further about this one. You have been very upfront about your struggles as mom and your struggles with alcohol and as using alcohol sometimes as a sort of stress release and other things. But you really had quite a battle. I wish you could… if you could delve a little bit into that and tell us how faith also helped you sort of recover from the alcohol abuse that you were struggling with.

Ericka Andersen:

Sure. Yeah. I mean, alcohol was always something that was sort of an unhealthy… What is the word I’m looking for? I don’t want to say addiction necessarily, but it was —

Julie Gunlock:

Habit.

Ericka Andersen:

Habit. It was an unhealthy habit. I had an unhealthy relationship with this substance. I used it in ways that it shouldn’t be used basically most of my adult life. And as you become an adult, and especially as you become a mom, I mean, that’s normal. No one would’ve told you that I had a problem. I would even try to say I had one and I’d have friends —

Julie Gunlock:

Well, it’s not even just normal. It’s encouraged.

Ericka Andersen:

Right.

Julie Gunlock:

I mean, the term mommy happy or mommy’s sippy cup. You get all this… Yeah, so go on.

Ericka Andersen:

Yeah. And so I would constantly be going, “Well, this is fine. Look at this commercial or look at this reel or TikTok or whatever.” It’s constantly out there being normalized. And so I thought, “Well, I am normal. I don’t have a problem.” And I would even say to a friend, “Maybe I have a problem.” And they would be like, “No, you don’t. You’re fine.” Cause it wasn’t disrupting my life. I was perfectly fine, had a profession, yada, yada. But it was a huge mental struggle for me, and it made me depressed, and yet I kept back to it as this numbing mechanism, especially in the evenings when you’re dealing with crazy children, when you’re trying to cook dinner and all the things, and you’re just like, “Oh, if I could just have this.”

And that’s not always bad. I’m not saying it’s bad to have a glass of wine, not saying that. But for me, it always went too far, or I felt like it would take me to a dark place. And so I finally got to the point where I was like this is… I don’t need to live like this. So I got what they call sober curious and I didn’t stop drinking, but I just started looking into it and kind of investigating. And I read a book called This Naked Mind, and it really was life changing and brought me into a community of people that wasn’t AA, which I felt there was no way I was going to go there. Cause I was like that’s way too intimidating. But it brought me into a group of people that have been there, that are there and ultimately… I’m actually about to celebrate two years. So two years of not drinking.

Julie Gunlock:

Two years?

Ericka Andersen:

Which is shocking. I would’ve told you that would never happen. And of course I still struggle with thinking, “Oh, it’d be nice…” But I’m really to the point now where I can look back and see that was not contributing in any positive way to my life. And I think for us in our home, too, we really don’t have alcohol in our home, and that to me is really good because I have alcoholism all through my family, so does my husband. So it’s in the genes, and the most that I can do to keep that away from my kids and keep them from seeing us drink all the time, I think that’s going to go a long way for them as well.

Julie Gunlock:

So let me ask you about…. And I remember reading one of your blog posts when you had decided to like… this is it. And you had an actual moment where you’re like, “I’m done.” And it was overdoing it with a group of girlfriends; the night before, you’d had too much wine or something, and the next day you said, “I got rid of all the bottles and I cleaned out all the alcohol and I was done.” What does that do socially? You’re in the thick of mommy world with a two- and six-year-old. I mean, that is like… You’re in the weeds, and there is a culture of like you deserve this. This is what makes you relax. This is like, you work so hard with your kids and then finally they go to bed, this is your time, and you get invited to the neighborhood’s, the happy hours, blah, blah, blah. You get it. What’s it done to your social life? Because that is an important thing, a mommy’s social life’s important. What’s it done to yours?

Ericka Andersen:

Well, I’ll tell you when I first started thinking about quitting, that was terrifying to me. I was like, “Well, I can’t just say I’m not drinking. People think I have a problem.” And I was very worried about all the social situations, and this was before I really was talking publicly about it, but slowly but surely, as I began to be a little bit more open about what was going on, starting with my Bible study from church and then with friends and then other people from church, yada, yada, it began to be more public. And as I would just go to events and things, like yes, it was hard, like a concert, whatever, I would kind of feel uncomfortable, but honestly, the discomfort would only last like 10, 15 minutes and then it kind of just wasn’t there anymore and I could just relax. It was sort just getting past that first apprehension of being there.

Julie Gunlock:

Which is funny because, honestly, you go to a party stone cold sober, you feel the same way. It’s just that you usually immediately go to the bar and that’s almost like, “Okay, you can calm down now,” which you calm down eventually anyway, right? Just like you say, you just have to… Yeah.

Ericka Andersen:

It’s so funny because I find that many times people use alcohol and they “need it,” but really it’s other things that are happening that are actually doing the thing that they think alcohol is doing. I went to a concert and I said… I wasn’t drinking, I was like, “This is so weird. I feel drunk.” And then it just kind of dawned on me, I was like “no you don’t, you just feel like you’re at a concert.”

Julie Gunlock:

You’re having fun.

Ericka Andersen:

Yeah, you’re just having fun. It’s a weird mental thing. And so nowadays I really don’t have much of a problem. I mean, sometimes I will crave… I like the taste of some alcohol. I miss certain things, but for the most part, I really don’t feel uncomfortable. I have no problem telling people I don’t drink at all. It’s not uncomfortable for me. And honestly, no one really pays that much attention. And they say, if someone really cares, they probably have a problem. So I find that it hasn’t been a huge issue for me.

Julie Gunlock:

Well, I would love to explore this more with you and have you to come back on and especially talk about your new book when it comes out. And I’m really… I love following you. I think you have a great story. I think you’re very inspirational for other parents out there and, again, I look forward to continuing these conversations and checking out your podcast. Tell us a little bit where people can find your writing and your podcast.

Ericka Andersen:

Yeah, my podcast is called Worth Your Time. You can find it on iTunes. So just Worth Your Time with Ericka Andersen. I talk to lots of Christian women, leaders, authors, all the things. It’s got like four years of archives, so you can definitely binge, and you can find my work at erickaandersen.com. I also am a writing coach if anybody’s looking for that. So hit me up.

Julie Gunlock:

Awesome. That’s awesome. And of course, she’s over at iwnetwork.com. Go over there and get your membership and check out her really inspiring writing and also just fun musings on parenting. So thanks again for coming on, Ericka.

Ericka Andersen:

Thank you, Julie.