Remaining You While Raising Them: The Secret Art of Confident Motherhood with Alli Worthington

Hey Friend!

I am excited to bring you this fantastic interview with Alli Worthington, a wife and mother of five sons. We discuss her book Remaining You While Raising Them, motherhood, and how to raise incredible Kingdom children.

This book discusses modern motherhood, why it’s broken, and all the myths that moms face. It is an incredible book, and I know that you will love it and this conversation.

Writing About Motherhood

Stef: Hello friend. I am so excited that you are here.

Alli: I am thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Stef: I have been reading your book and loving everything about it. What inspired you to write this book?

Alli: I’m a mom of five boys and one stepdaughter. I didn’t want to write a book about parenting. I thought, ‘I want to make sure my kids are grown before I tackle that.’ 

We’re all parenting experts until our kids get a little older!

But a church where I used to teach asked me to do a Mother’s Day sermon. They told me not to do a sermon like I thought a Mother’s Day sermon should be. Instead, I was given free rein to be funny and honest. So, I gave an ode to realistic mothering. I dove into the state of motherhood we are in, the brokenness of motherhood, and how it is breaking us. But I also mentioned that it doesn’t have to be like this. Motherhood does not have to make women die on the vine.

I talked about how if we as mothers are not emotionally and spiritually healthy and have healthy relationships, we can’t expect our children to be either. We put everything into our children, withering away and wondering why we are so tired, resentful, and lonely.

I gave that message and just thought this was a fun, one-off thing. But the congregation asked if they could please have it in a book! Could they get more of it? So, I said, ‘Ok, Lord. Let me see if this is what you have for me.’

It started a journey of figuring out exactly what has happened to get moms into this position where we know we want great things for our kids. We want them to have boundaries, love Jesus, and be emotionally healthy. We want them to be able to give and receive love and take responsibility for themselves. But at the same time, we aren’t taking care of ourselves at all. Self-care has been reduced to bubble baths and pedicures.

So, how do we make sense of this world? What is a better way? What does the Lord want us to know about how He created our children and His role in our lives? To some degree, we have taken on that responsibility and the weight of that responsibility in our minds to help us step back and realize we aren’t God.

The Brokenness of Motherhood

Stef: Wow! I have so many questions! The first thing that you talked about that I wrote down was that you said how did we get to this broken space in motherhood? Can you define that for me?

Alli: I think that for every woman, it’s a little bit different. But it’s all broken similarly. All of our stories are different. For some of us, we are just overwhelmed with mom guilt. Every time we open up Instagram, we’re bombarded with everybody else who seems to be doing it better. In a survey of over 1,000 women, social media was the single most significant cause of mom guilt, more than ourselves, our mother-in-law, or our spouse.

One thing I constantly remind women is that many of the family pictures you see on social media from influencers and people with a large following are curated. There is a business strategy behind them, and there are photo shoots and wardrobe changes. It’s not real.

We look at it and think, ‘Oh, my goodness. She grew wheat in her backyard, and now she is making organic wheat sandwiches for her child, and I am cleaning the dog’s throw-up off the carpet, and I feel terrible!’ They are wracked with mom guilt.

Motherhood Doesn’t Have to Be Our Greatest Calling

Alli: Many women have heard explicit or implicit messages growing up in Christian culture that a woman’s highest calling is to be a mother, and everything else is just a side note, if she should do anything else at all. There’s a lot of guilt and mixed feelings about that. I’ll tell you the greatest joy in my life is being a mother. I love it. My heart explodes when I think about my children.

But my greatest calling in this world is not to be a mother. It is to be a follower of Jesus. And that looks like helping women in my business, writing books for other women, being a great wife, and being a mom. But being a mom is not my greatest calling. It’s one of my callings.

There’s nothing wrong with working. Women have always worked. It used to take women 10 hours to wash clothes every day. There’s never been a time in history when women just sat around and braided their children’s hair and taught them Latin all day. Women have always been busy working. One thing I found in the research for this book is that women now, compared to 50 years ago, spend way more time actively engaged with their children than they ever did before.

But we feel guilty about being distracted and not spending time with our kids. Fifty years ago, we spent less time engaged in active child care. Fifty years ago, kids were locked outside their houses and told to come home when the light came on.

Permission to Care For Ourselves on This Journey of Motherhood

Alli: Research shows that it is good and essential for our children to have our care and attention when they are tiny. But then we get into this process that psychologists call differentiation, where we and the child, instead of just being that one unit, start to differentiate from each other psychologically, and that’s healthy. As the child ages, we dote on them less. They are becoming more independent and their person. They can go to school. Or if you homeschool, they can do things away from you and won’t feel anxious when you’re apart. That’s healthy.

In that differentiation process, we also have to look at ourselves and say, ‘I can permit myself to take care of myself. I will go for a walk or work on my business and feel guilty about it. I will work today, and I know things are okay.’

But we live in this culture where you’ve got to do everything all the time. You have to spend this time with your kids and teach them Latin. Spend that time with them, grow wheat in your backyard, make sandwiches and knit socks for the poor, and do all the other things we put pressure on ourselves. It’s no wonder that women are withering on the vine and wondering why we’re lonely and sometimes slightly bitter about things.

Moving Out of Guilt

Stef: That is so powerful, Alli!

I know that awareness is the first step—noticing we are feeling guilty. But getting free from that guilt is where it becomes so difficult. How do we do something about it and not just want to do something about it? For example, I was with my sister-in-law yesterday, who was feeling guilty about taking counseling clients while being at home with her two-year-old. How could she move out of this?

Alli: One of the healthiest things to do is to look at what success would look like for you in that situation. Regarding your sister-in-law, does she realistically think that her two-year-old needs her to be actively engaged with her for 12 straight hours? It’s generally a no. We know that they have nap time. We can bring people in to play with them while we work. We can decide how many hours we want to spend actively engaged with our children. And then, if, like in your sister-in-law’s case, she wants to treat four patients daily, she can do that during preschool hours. Or bring in a sitter.

With my first son, I thought he shouldn’t go to preschool because I felt I should always be with him. At that stage, I didn’t actually have the research and data that showed me how healthy it was for him to go to preschool or to have a sitter come in and play with him because it was good for him to engage with other adults, not just me.

When you put it into perspective, it’s probably not harming them for this to happen. They are probably having a great time playing. We forget that it is sometimes as simple as ‘Do I want to burn myself out in childcare activities all the time? Or do I want to step back and do some of the other things God is calling me to do and come back fresh to my child?’ This worked for me.

God is God for Our Children

Alli: The other things to remember are that God is God for my children and that I am not God. When they are babies, every little thing we do does matter. We have to take care of their every need. But they don’t need as much care and attention as they age. We don’t have to worry that if we make the wrong decision, it will be the end of the world.

God has created each of our children individually, with a plan for their lives that we can’t mess up. He knows if your child will have a bad influence in second grade or if the neighbor will be rude to your child. God knows if your child is going to have a developmental disability or problems down the road. And no matter what we do, we can’t mess up God’s plan.

One of the coolest things for me was having five boys in a row and realizing how different they all are. Some of my children are athletic wonders, others are great with people, and some can’t do any of those things. But they have this other skill. It has nothing to do with what my husband and I did. It is who they are, and God has a plan for them that I can’t mess up.

Parents Are Important but So Are Genes

Alli: The other part of this is that God chose me to be their mother; my job is to love and disciple and make sure I set some boundaries for them. When you start looking into research, it is very liberating. I delve into the Minnesota twins study in my book. In this study, they have been studying twins for decades. You can see twins separated as newborns, grew up in completely different families, and who, in adulthood, have been compared by scientists and are so similar it’s scary.

God made parents necessary, but God made genes very important, too. As long as we support, guide, and give them a healthy home in which to grow up, their genes determine a lot of the details. This is powerful because this bit of research helps us to say, ‘Hey, what God has designed is going to happen. And I don’t have to worry about everything I do.’ It is absolute freedom and allows us to trust God instead of, out of fear and genuine love for our children, thinking we must be God in their lives.

This doesn’t mean that parents are not important or that we don’t need to maintain boundaries, but it does mean that every little decision I make is not the end of the world!

Motherhood And God’s Plans

Stef: Knowing that God has a plan, I am interested in your take on the decisions we must make that can impact that plan. We want to protect them, but how do we feel about making the right decisions around God’s plan and not becoming obsessive?

Alli: I will use the choice of schools as an example here. I always planned to homeschool my kids, and I had so many! So, when it came time for my oldest to go to school, he needed to go, but there was no money for private school. I remember praying about it and saying that this wasn’t what we wanted but that this was where we were financially and in our life circumstances.

Within a couple of years, we had taken a new job, and the Lord clearly led us to the fact that it was time to homeschool. We did that for a few years, but then the situation changed financially, and we decided it was time for a private Christian school.

When we make a decision, we think that this is forever. When my oldest started school, I thought all my kids were attending public school. And this wasn’t where I had hoped they would be. I thought I was going to homeschool. But most decisions are not as impactful and life-altering as we believe they will be. No matter what decision we make, if it’s not the right decision, the Lord will step in in six months, a year, or two years.

It may seem like a big deal at the time, but when we have a little bit of age and wisdom, we can look back on some of those decisions that seemed huge at the time and see that they didn’t really matter so much! And if it is huge and you are really going to mess something up, God is going to make that very clear.

Alli Worthington’s Decision-Making Strategy

Alli: My strategy in life is to say, ‘Lord, I am going to go in this direction. If this isn’t what you want from me, please stop it.’ And you have never seen doors be slammed so much! But if it is God’s will, He will make a way. He will open doors. If we are confused about what God wants for us and it’s a big deal, God will clarify it. He will let us make the decisions if it’s not a big deal. But when it is time to change things, He will open doors and push us in the right direction.

Stef: Yes! Most decisions aren’t life-altering. Maybe the reason He is not giving us clarity is that we are supposed to take the first step and learn some kind of lesson. Then He says, ‘OK, now is the time’!

Thank you. That is a blessing, and I am sure many women are listening.

Mothering Ourselves With Self-Care So That We Can Mother Our Children

Stef: Let’s talk about emotional health and self-care, which you say make such a difference in avoiding this dry, unhealthy place. Can you unpack this for us?

Alli: I define emotional health as a combination of spiritual, mental, and relational health. We know that we want to raise emotionally healthy children, but the revelation to me was that I can never expect my children, while they are in my house, to be emotionally healthier than I am. It is like trying to teach your children to eat broccoli, sweet potatoes, and chicken for supper, and you are in the corner eating pop tarts.

I went on a journey to ensure I was the healthiest I could be because if more is caught than taught, they are watching everything I do. So, how is my relationship with the people I love, be it my spouse or friends? How is my relationship with Jesus? How is my relationship with myself? Am I beating myself up all the time? Am I putting my needs on the shelf and then wondering why I am so miserable?

I looked at how I could live healthily, how I could live an abundant life that Jesus is calling me to live so that I can give my children the best chance to live that life, too. When we think about self-care, we think about bubble baths and getting our toenails painted. But sometimes self-care is going to counseling, learning to walk and get outside and breathe deeply, or drinking enough water.

Our Own Self-Care Teaches Our Children Valuable Lessons

Alli: One of the most powerful parts of self-care my therapist taught me is asking, ‘What do I need right now?’ Sometimes, we need a nap, a sitter, or a new software program for our business. We are so used to not checking in with ourselves and taking care of everybody else that generally if we ask ourselves what we need right now, we don’t even know. 

Just making that self-care habit a habit teaches our children that, yes, we too are worthy of care and love, not because of what we do or our achievements but because we, as moms, are also daughters of God. We’re teaching our daughters that they are worthy. We are teaching our sons that this is the way we carry ourselves.

Laying Down Obligation and Resentment in Motherhood

Alli: When I was 8 years old, I remember going to Christmas at my Aunt Shirley’s house and seeing all the women who had been cooking for days, as was the tradition, complaining and looking for appreciation. So much obligation and resentment was built up with the sacrifice and the ‘job’ they had taken on. Instead, I have taken up the habit of asking myself, ‘Do I want to do this?’ before I pick up the weight and make it my own.

Stef: I love that question, ‘What do I need right now?’ and I love that you bring up that we have the definition of self-care so wrong. We have a gym in the garage, and we have such fun working out there. Taking time to meal prep, cook healthy food, and fuel my body well is important to me, but I have never defined any of these as self-care.

Alli: That is the best self-care. I can see your face light up. It makes you happy! Self-care is soul care. It makes us feel good. It’s how we live the abundant life that Christ has for us. That is authentic self-care. It is taking time to be with the Lord every day. These things help us live the life we want to model in front of our children.

We get so caught up in what we should be doing, what we think people want from us, and what everyone else is doing that we wonder why we feel lonely and exhausted all the time. We are mothering our children, but God also calls us to mother ourselves.

The Love It or Leave It List for Business and Motherhood

Stef: When it comes to obligation vs leaning into what’s bringing you joy in your life, there are certain things that I think we have to do and maybe those that we don’t have to do. I teach something called ‘the love it and then leave it list.’

This can apply to business and motherhood. What are you doing in motherhood that you love? And what are you doing that you can leave? Then, I will look at the leave-it list and see what can be outsourced. Is there something that someone can delegate?

We can look at the things we love to do and do more of them. We have to do some things that we don’t love. But we can develop a solution that works and feels good for us around these things.

Alli: Yes!  When my kids hit kindergarten, we bought dishes and glasses that wouldn’t break and taught them to load and unload the dishwasher. We haven’t unloaded or loaded a dishwasher we didn’t want to in about 22 years!

Stef: This is my last question for you, Alli. How can a mom be sure she is doing a good job raising her kids?

Alli: I want to answer this in two ways because this is the question all women want to answer. The first one is a little more vague, but stick with me!

Good moms ask this question, and bad moms don’t even question it! You are not accidentally messing your children up for life if you are the kind of woman asking this question. If a mom is praying, ‘Lord, help me to be a good mom. Help me not make big mistakes, ‘I promise you, you are fine! God is going to lead you, and you are going to be good.’

The second part is a little more practical. It is important to realize that if we constantly work on our emotional health, the overflow of that will naturally mean that we are going to be good moms.

You can’t work on your relationship with Jesus and loving other people; you can’t work on your mental health and then accidentally screw up your kids and be a bad mom. The natural overflow of those things is being a great mom. So, stick to your emotional health, and the overflow will be being a terrific mom to your kids.

Stef: It’s so true. We are in our heads so much!

This has been such a blessing for me as a mom, and I pray that it has blessed and sown seeds of wisdom in all of my listeners!

I know that your book Remaining You While Raising Them is available. Can you tell us a bit about the book and where we can get it? I know people are going to want to go deeper into this topic. And then, where else can everybody connect with you?

Alli: Thank you for asking! I’m so proud of this book. I feel like everything I have done in my career has ended here, and this is my love letter to moms everywhere. I hope that this is the book that moms buy themselves, that they buy for their friends, and that moms buy their daughters when they are pregnant. There is a better way for us to live out motherhood without all the guilt and all the pressure, knowing that we can walk confidently every day with this job that God has given us.

You can get the book everywhere, wherever you like books! If you like to listen to things, you can get the book on Audible, and I have my podcast, The Alli Worthington Show.  And I am just thrilled that you brought me on. Thank you so much!

Stef: You are welcome. I have been reading your book and can attest to how good it is. It’s got storytelling and research. So, you guys go and get that for sure!

I pray this blesses you!

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