The Spiritual Parent: Mindful Tools for Raising Spiritual and Conscious Kids

How to Use Heart Centered Parenting to Connect with Gifted, Spirited, and Sensitive Kids

• Carrie Lingenfelter • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Can traditional parenting rules stifle the unique needs of sensitive and gifted children? Join me, Carrie, on Heart to Heart Parents as we redefine what it means to nurture and connect with our kids beyond conventional wisdom. As a former teacher and speech therapist, now mother to two exceptionally spirited children, I've discovered the transformative power of heart-led parenting. This episode shares the journey of breaking free from traditional constraints to foster a community where parents can raise emotionally intelligent and purposeful children together.

Holistic parenting isn't just a buzzword—it's a way of life that nurtures children on emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental levels. From personal battles with postpartum depression to the transition into intuitive parenting, I open up about the challenges and triumphs along the way. We'll explore how a multicultural upbringing and spirituality have shaped my approach, and why questioning traditional advice is crucial for raising highly sensitive and gifted kids. This conversation is a heartfelt invitation to trust your instincts and create a nurturing environment that respects your child's individuality.

Ever struggled to find healthcare providers who truly understand your parenting philosophy? In this episode, we discuss the importance of holistic and functional medicine in aligning with your family's values and needs. Learn how to advocate for your child's unique health requirements, like managing eczema through diet, while balancing the demands of self-care. By sharing personal experiences and defining terms like "crunchy" and "holistic parenting," I highlight the benefits of being part of a supportive community. This episode is all about parenting with heart and purpose, helping our children develop social and emotional skills while preserving their spirit and individuality.

Read more on our blog post here:
https://hearttoheartlife.com/2024/08/22/episode-1/?preview_id=69&preview_nonce=c1a4ce44c1&preview=true&_thumbnail_id=77

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**Please remember that the information shared on this podcast is educational in nature and does not constitute licensed mental health advice. If you need such advice, you should speak with a licensed professional about your unique situation. Thanks so much happy listeners.

© 2024-2025 Heart to Heart Life LLC

Speaker Names: Carrie Lingenfelter

00:00
This is what brought me to my knees to say, hey, I am powerful, I'm a mom and I can sometimes say no If it doesn't sit right with me, I move on to the next strategy. I try something new and when we break free of these boxes that we've created, trying to understand what each human needs, it can feel powerful. It can feel healing Our kids, my kids healed from it when we broke free of these rules that we thought we needed to put in place. So it felt enlightening as a parent. It felt enlightening to connect with my kids, to understand with my heart what they really needed. We parent with our hearts. We can truly parent our whole child. We can parent these emotionally talented, gifted coming with a purpose. Woo, my kids have a purpose man. Do they want to adult now? Welcome to Heart to Heart Parents. Let's connect with our kids and learn together. 





01:05
I'm Carrie. I was a former teacher and speech therapist. I'm also a parent of two spirited, gifted, highly sensitive kids. I was quickly brought to my knees as a parent when I thought that I would see a rosy lens version of parenting, just as they present on Instagram, but I quickly learned that's not real life. I will provide real life experiences and transform them into moments for connections and change for you to use in your house, with tips that worked for our family and how to implement them in your family. Connect to heart to heart with your child, with your partners and other parents, as we learn that we are not alone, we have a community. And parents, as we learn that we are not alone, we have a community and although maybe we feel different from other families, there are many of us out there and we are creating the next era of deep thinkers and change makers. Come along with me on this journey with Heart to Heart Parents. Hi there and welcome to our first episode of Heart to Heart Parents. 





02:08
I'm Carrie. I'm here to introduce myself and tell you a little bit about my goals and my perspective, as well as you continue on your parenting journey. Maybe you're starting out, maybe you're about ready to start out, or maybe you've been a parent for a while and you're here to review. Maybe you're a grandparent. I know grandparents. My mom always loves to hear the new things that I'm doing as I continue on my parenting journey as well. So I wanted to introduce myself. I'm Carrie. I am a highly sensitive introverted, yet with extroverted tendencies. Right, I don't know what that is, but that's fun, bag of fun. I'm an introverted, highly sensitive wife and mama to two highly sensitive, spirited and gifted children. So I've been a mom for almost nine years. I guess you could call it nine years, 10 years, because once that baby is in your tummy you're really starting to think like a mom, already trying to figure out all the gear you need, and that's another story. But I wanted to share that. 





03:15
I was a educator before I became a mom. I was an elementary teacher in California and Las Vegas, so I have lived in several places on the west side of the US and I also was an early intervention speech therapist. I knew as an educator that I wanted to break out of the traditional education box and that led me into speech therapy, which I then wanted to break out of the regular speech therapist box, and I used a lot of the tools that I had, while also following my heart to figure out what children were needing in their early childhood experiences, to help guide parents and children. I used my heart to help understand what each child needed. So I had that gift and it's called a gift, but really all of us have it and it's just following our hearts and listening to what we feel like our children need. So I was doing that before I became a parent, without even realizing it, I worked in the child development fields because my passion is child development. I've always been really aligned with kids and understanding their needs, their wants and their family's social dynamics. It's been a gift of mine since I was a young kid. I started babysitting when I was like 10 years old and my husband always calls me the child whisperer, because kids always just connected with me heart to heart and they were interested in interacting with me and having fun with me, even before I was a mom, before I was a teacher, even when I was a little kid. That was something that was a gift for me and I don't really know how I developed this because I was an only child growing up. I was around adults my whole life and I wasn't around kids. So it was kind of interesting that I stumbled into this path of being really connected with children. I'm guessing it's because of my name, carrie. 





05:12
I care about everyone almost too much, sometimes just caring about the world a lot. So I love child development and I love to geek out on current parenting methods. Right now, that's one of my passions and child development things. We're currently learning about these kids that are born so gifted, so sensitive to the world, trying to understand how to come into their bodies, because life can be intense in our world. I mean, we've got random things, we've got pandemics, we've got changing of these different global climates and everything going on that's affected our house. I don't know if it's affected yours, but it's been in our world. So I love finding out the latest child development information and I love learning about holistic strategies for raising children, because I believe that we are as parents. We are here to help nourish our children emotionally, physically, spiritually, mentally. A lot of these kids are born gifted. They're born with a brain where they're thinking different than us. They may have a more dynamic version of the world than we previously understood. So when my children were born, they really opened my eyes to a new world of caring for these kids. 





06:37
It brought me back to my holistic roots that I had as a child. My grandmother was from Argentina and I grew up with Spanish being spoken in the home when I was really young, not as much when I was older, but it was a huge piece of how I was raised. It was just common to think about spirituality. It was something that was in my house and my dad would say we're not going to church this weekend, we're going to go communicate with nature and open our hearts, and that was something I grew up with. That was really important to me when I became a mom. At the beginning it really brought me to my knees. I had some postpartum depression. I worked through All of those hormones coursing through our bodies. It was a lot for me to go through, especially being a highly sensitive person myself, and then I didn't even know at the time. You know, you're really highly sensitive, sensitive to sensitive people. 





07:31
Here You're probably going to end up with a very, very highly sensitive kiddo, and he was as soon as he saw the sun, he would like turn his head and cry and didn't want to be in the sun. Or as soon as his tummy was hungry, he was wanting to latch on to mom and be latched on for the whole day, which now, as I look back, I'm like, oh, he was super sensitive and mommy was his comfort. It was the person that he understood as this, person that took care of him and fed him for nine months when he was in the tummy. Boy did he like to connect? He was my kicker as soon as he would hear all of the little kids that I would do therapy with. As a speech therapist. I was working with kiddos and I could feel him kicking every time I had a kid in the room. He really was excited to connect and I could sense, even when he was in my tummy he was connecting heart to heart with me and he was ready to connect with humans. That's how much he was coming into the world and so excited to connect with all of us when they were born. 





08:33
First I had my son and then I had my daughter. Later on, when my son was first born, I realized that traditional parenting was not going to work in our family. I had this boxed image of what it was going to look like. We've all seen the beautiful Pinterest boards of all of the beautiful nurseries and we've seen the beautiful Instagrams with that beautiful filtered lighting, of what parenting looks like when you give your beautiful hugs and the sun rays are shining down on your sweet, perfect child. But that's not what life looked like. It was raw, it was intense at times and I didn't know where to put my hands, like I didn't. I didn't know what to do. 





09:15
At times, I didn't understand why the hospital was sending me home with these children. How am I supposed to take care of them? And I started to listen to my heart. It was like the first or second night that my child, after my child was born. I realized, hey, I've got this in here, it's called my heart and I can listen to it. And my husband said how do you know things that are going to happen? I was like I don't know, husband, I don't know why I have this innate ability to say build the pack and play, because he's going to have a big poop. I don't know why that happened, but it was part of being a mom. We have our hearts and they can be loud sometimes, especially when we are needing to change something, especially when we are needing to support our kids, our heart is going to tell us, it's telling us how to support these highly sensitive, spirited and gifted little people that are coming into the world today. So my spirituality is what helped me to navigate this new world. It helped me to understand that I wasn't alone. I had my husband, I had my mom. I started to reach out to more moms, to connect, because that helped me to feel better and come out of my mom cave and my mom den. 





10:31
But as I started to parent in this new way, following my heart, questioning other parenting methods, questioning when the doctors would say, oh, you can eat anything, it's going to be great. Oh yeah, he's just spitting up, it's all right, it's just the positions that you're nursing him in, I'm like huh, no, I don't think he's spitting up just because of that. Like, it's a lot of spit up. And you know, I've had some speech therapy, feeding skills that I've learned with babies and this doesn't seem like the normal amount of spit up. So I started to learn hey, my heart's telling me, try not to eat cheese, try not to drink milk, and see what happens. And guess what? Huh, his tummy was a little bit better. He wasn't fussing in between feedings, especially right after a feeding, when he was probably getting some of that reflux going on, and we tried different feeding positions, which also helped as well. So I started to listen to my heart. 





11:28
One of the loud things that I had come in was that he needed to be gluten-free, and I had no scientific support for this at first and my husband, who is very science-based, so he likes to see the evidence which I get and at first he thought, well, my wife doesn't really have evidence for this, but I was able to show him as my son got older. When we eventually did try gluten, he ended up with eczema going right up his back 10 minutes after eating it and he also ended up with his first ear infection. So it was really interesting that, hey, you want the scientific evidence. Here's a little bit of some hard data that we all get to deal with now, as a former perfectionist and a former people pleaser, that sometimes I needed to not please the doctors, not please the husband at first Sorry, husband, you did understand how we connect and discuss things from our hearts better. 





12:27
I learned how to not try to people please everybody but to try to soften how I connect with people and to soften how I communicate my needs for my kids. So it felt like I was speaking a different language at first because I was a people pleaser. I was a perfectionist and I was raised in a traditional method of parenting is how I was raised. So it felt like I was speaking a different language of parenting is how I was raised, so it felt like I was speaking a different language and also I was learning as I went, which felt very uneasy. I was thinking am I doing this right? Am I going to break him Like he's this tiny little baby? Can I do something wrong? Are we going to need to go to counseling after this? Probably because that's just the end goal is like we're going to go to counseling no matter what. That's just us being humans, right, check in. I just want to try to reduce the amount of counseling he has to do one day for himself. But I followed my gut and I saw so many positive results that it started to emulate and I started to get stronger, more confident, and I really want to encourage everybody that's listening to think about trying this out, because as you do it, little by little, it gets easier and it can feel really uncomfortable at first, especially if you are a people pleaser, if you are a perfectionist. Also, if you were raised traditionally, it doesn't feel the same. It can feel like a bumpy road. 





13:50
As we continue to raise our kids and we started to understand as their development came along, we realized hey, my son, there may be some different pieces, our minds may function differently. He's so sensitive I'm noticing, like huh, this Montessori doesn't really seem to be the right fit for him and I had to pull him right away. We had to start doing like looking at counseling, looking at occupational therapy. When I first started to find these providers, I was in a tiny town and I did not have access to holistic providers. I did not have access to OTs that maybe understood how to work with sensitive kids like him. 





14:30
When I first started to take my son to an OT, I had OTs that did not understand that our sensory systems may be overwhelmed by external stimuli and I had OTs that told me oh, you need to put him in timeout. He is challenging you when he does these behaviors and he is screaming because his eyes are getting wet in the water. He is challenging you because he does not want to go in a bathtub. Later, when I could talk to my child, he would tell me when he was like five years old, six years old, he would say mom, when I go in the shower, it feels like my eyes are on fire. When I get water in my eyes, it feels like my eyes are on fire. So I understood when he could communicate that I understood like, hey, this is a fear-based thing going on for him. It feels overwhelming and intense and that's a brain signal going on in his brain that's saying, oh, this is overwhelming, I need to run away from this, I need to fight to get away from this because this is not good for me, whereas somebody that was in the field had told me oh, he's challenging you, he's trying to manipulate the situation, he's trying to be in control. That was not what he needed. That was not what my kiddo needed. That was a lack of an understanding. And I started to listen to my heart. I said this OT is not the right fit and we moved to somewhere else. And I am in no way saying that kiddos don't need occupational therapy. I was implying that I needed to find a holistic occupational therapist that understood highly sensitive children. I just wanted to put that out there for all the listeners. 





16:07
We started to find holistic providers. We started to find a functional medicine doctor. We found practitioners, pediatricians, natural pediatricians that were looking at the whole development of the child, and counselors. Just so many counselors have wanted to put us in this box of how I'm supposed to raise my kid. We started with a counselor, a psychologist. That was supposed to be the best in this area, and we live in a pretty crunchy area, which has been awesome because my husband is gluten-free. Now my kids are gluten-free. I'm gluten-free by trait because I'm with them, which is great. It's good for my body. My body doesn't really need it. It feels pretty good without it. But we live in this holistic area and now we've been able to find these holistic providers. I don't even know what people do. 





16:54
When you're not in these areas, I think the best that you can do is follow your heart. Let your heart guide you to practitioners that are more in aligned with what you need, and if you, all you have is access to this one pediatrician. I've learned that it's okay to speak up and be like hey, I'm noticing that this kiddo has eczema when I give him gluten. I'm going to stay away from it for a little while for him and maybe I'll introduce it eventually, but I'm feeling in my heart that right now he doesn't need it. It's okay to be strong and say that and not be the people pleaser like, well, they're the medical professional, so they know the most right. They don't know your kid. Each child is different. 





17:35
You can find these right supports and when you can find these right supports for yourself and for your kids, it helps everybody in the family. Some of these support systems also look like supporting yourself with self-care, because as we're raising these intuitive, highly sensitive, highly gifted and spirited kids, we need to give ourselves breaks. We need that self-care for ourselves because these gifted kids, they keep us on our toes. So when we find that support for ourselves, we're better able to take care of our kids. We have more time and energy to relate and to connect heart to heart. When I'm so busy because I have a checklist of I got to clean the bathrooms, I got to get their homework done, I've got a mess on this kitchen table that I have got to clean because I don't know what is under that kitchen table that gets us in our minds and we cannot hear what our hearts are needing. So your kid is picking up that energy of when you are feeling. You're feeling that anxiety, you're feeling those nerves. They're picking that up and they know that you don't have that time for them right there. So maybe we can tone it down, maybe we can let the mess go for a day. Sorry, hon, my hon gets a little tired of it, comes in and cleans it once in a while. But I'm trying to do the best I can and that is keeping mom in the zone of being nice mommy and calm mommy that can connect with you heart to heart to see why your body is feeling out of place right now, to really ground myself, so I can help you ground kiddo and connect to what it is your body is needing in these moments. 





19:16
I had one other story I was going to share today, but I wanted to take a quick pause and share a couple of definitions of terms that I've been using. So when I talk about crunchy, what I'm meaning by that is the newer term for granola, or being supernatural in our house. So, like we are gluten-free, dairy-free, we try to do a lot of plant-based diets and such things like that. The other term has been granola that people have used, or I oftentimes say holistic parenting, because we're trying to parent with our hearts and also we're looking to build the whole child, which includes socially, emotionally, physically, spiritually and mentally. Another definition that I wanted to cover was when I'm talking about my children being gifted, spirited and highly sensitive. 





20:12
What I mean by the gifted piece is knowledge has come quickly to my kids and they pick up things really quickly. So a lot of times they read a book and they learn that information, and so they really need a lot of challenge at school and that can sometimes be hard in certain typical school settings, so I've had to search for alternatives for my kids. What I mean by spirited is there's a spiritual piece that has really helped my kids as well, but there's also spirited in. I'm meaning that my kids were born with this zest for life. They were born knowing that they wanted to come out and conquer the world. They wanted to come out and follow their passion and they were born being these little mini adults as as soon as they came into this world, they didn't want me to tell them what to do. They wanted to make their own choices and sometimes they would even boss my husband and I around. 





21:08
Highly sensitive side comes from the highly sensitive person and I've been looking at it with my children and sometimes we talk about sensory pieces where the brain is understanding these signals from my environment. So I pick up other people's emotions and energy and I pick up things from the world, for instance, maybe something that wouldn't bother a typical person. If somebody gave me a strong glare, or maybe if somebody had a little bit of a tone in their voice when they were talking to me, I would feel like, ooh, what did I do? What did I do wrong? Is this person mad at me? That's what I mean by sensitive. 





21:48
I started to tell a story about when we live in this crunchy area that my husband and I live in, and we moved to this area right before the pandemic and it's been amazing. We feel like we were guided here because we have so many more pieces that we are able to help our children with in this place that we're in. We were in this crunchy area and a neuropsych had told us to go check out a certain provider to help us with some of the behaviors we were seeing in our house, and we were very it was new to us. We weren't sure how to help our kiddo and so we went to this provider and they said they were the best in the area, they knew the current research and we needed to put our kid in timeouts by himself when he was having these emotional outbursts and these energy buildups that would just like they would just come out in these giant outbursts and we weren't sure how to help him. So we followed along. For us it was like, oh, this sounds, this sounds like it makes sense, and you're the provider and you know your thing. So I'm going to, I'm going to try it, because we were new at this, we did not know that. 





22:58
It made the fits worse for our son. He wanted connection. He was scared, he was worried that he was going to overpower himself. He didn't understand that this buildup of emotion could calm down and he could ground himself and we could connect with him and bring him back into control. And then he could tell us what the root problem was. But he was not able to express this because he was probably like five, four or five at that time and he was not able to tell us what was going on. Once we figured out, hey, this is not the right thing for our kid, we felt so much guilt in our hearts. How long did we do this? We did this for a while and it felt awful. Did we go off path? Is he going to remember this? Did we scar him with some trauma and we realized no, it's okay, we're going to be okay. 





23:52
Part of parenting is learning to talk it through with your kiddo is learning to say I'm sorry that we went down this wrong path. We were trying something out and we realized it was not the best for your body. We now understand what is better for you, what's better for us. We're better to connect and we're going to work through it. One thing that we really need to learn and make sure we're thinking of is that all children are different. So when I'm telling these stories, this is what happened for me, this is what brought me to my knees to say, hey, I am powerful, I'm a mom and I can sometimes say no. If it doesn't sit right with me, I move on to the next strategy. I try something new, and when we break free of these boxes that we've created, trying to understand what each human needs, it can feel powerful. It can feel healing Our kids, my kids, healed from it when we broke free of these rules that we thought we needed to put in place. So it felt enlightening as a parent. It felt enlightening to connect with my kids, to understand with my heart what they really needed. 





25:05
We parent with our hearts. We can truly parent our whole child. We can parent these emotionally talented, gifted, coming with a purpose. My kids have a purpose, man. Do they want to adult now? Now, like you're not an adult I'm sorry, dude, you were nine years old and maybe you think like an adult in your brain. Our social, emotional skills are not quite there. So we got to, we got to mature and mom is going to help guide you. Mom doesn't want to take away that spirit. Mom just wants to help help you understand how to function in society. I got to teach you the basic rules, right, we're going to work on the basic rules and then we're going to get there. But all we need to do is help you to conform a little bit to society while maintaining your spirit and maintaining your heart. So join me on this path to understanding how we can better support our children when we parent from our own hearts. It's enlightening. Come on this journey with me. Bye. 


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