Raise | Receive Your Kids — Don't Just Shape Them (w/ Christina Watka)

5 Big Ideas, 3 Reflection Questions, 1 Practice

🎧 In This Episode

In this episode of our Raise series, we explore what it means to parent the way a great artist makes art — by entering the space without a rigid plan, paying close attention, and letting the work lead instead of forcing it into a pre-existing vision.

Our guest is Christina Watka, an installation artist and a mother of three who has built her life around a practice she calls “noticing.”

You’ll learn why the practice of noticing might be the most important thing you can model for your children, what solitude actually does for your capacity to show up, and why receiving your kids — rather than raising them — changes everything.

Listen Now

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🖐 5 BIG IDEAS

1. The Art Project Leads

We open with a note written after Patrick spent time with Christina: “A bad artist would spend years trying to keep the art project as closely aligned with that initial vision as possible. But an evolved artist knows that the art project leads and the artist follows.”

The same is true of parenting. Most of us bring a picture of who our child is supposed to become — and then quietly spend years trying to pull them toward it.

The alternative is harder and more rewarding: show up, pay attention, and let the person lead. Your job is not to sculpt the child. It’s to see them.

2. Noticing as Practice

Noticing, as Christina defines it, is not passive observation — it’s meeting life as it actually is, without judgment, without “this is good or this is bad, this is right or wrong.” It is simply: this is.

When practiced consistently, noticing levels the peaks and valleys of life — making the hard things less catastrophic and the beautiful things more visible.

It also requires almost nothing: a willingness to exist where you are, to feel what your body feels, to hear what’s around you. As Christina says, “Noticing often begets peacefulness.”

3. Listening to the World

Mary Oliver wrote about listening to the world, and Christina has made it her life’s practice. To listen to the world is to filter everything around you — through an open heart, without agenda — and let it speak.

Christina’s father modeled this for her as a child: dragging the family out to the porch during summer thunderstorms, counting the space between lightning and thunder, rooting in new places instead of filling a calendar with activities.

She does it with her own kids now. It is, she says, a way of practicing presence so deeply that it becomes the wallpaper of a life.

4. Solitude as Foundation

Christina describes her life as a pyramid: the foundation is herself. Not her marriage. Not her kids. Herself. Her groundedness is what makes everything else possible — and that groundedness requires solitude.

With twin infants born at the start of COVID and a three-year-old at home, she discovered that even an hour at the beach — completely emptying herself out — refilled her in a way nothing else could. She’s built on that ever since, now going away quarterly for several days alone.

The key insight: solitude isn’t a reward you earn after everything’s handled. It’s how you show up for everything else.

5. Receiving vs. Earning

Late in the episode, a single word reframes the entire conversation. Christina’s friend told her: “Why are you talking about your studio as if you have to earn it? Why don’t you just say you’re receiving it?”

Receiving. An open hand, not a closed fist. You can’t receive something you’re trying to grip.

We extend the reframe: can you receive your children? Not fix them, not steer them, not carry them toward a destination — but actually receive who they are, as they arrive? Because they’re in there. They’re already becoming. The parent who knows how to receive them is the one who helps them get there.

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🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Where are you trying to force the “art project” to match your original vision?

Think about one area of your life — your kids, your work, a relationship — where you arrived with a clear picture of how things should go, and have been, consciously or not, pushing back against how they’re actually going. What would it look like to release that picture and follow the work instead?

2. When did you last practice noticing — and what does that tell you?

Try to think of the last time you sat somewhere without a task, a phone, or a purpose — and simply observed what was around you. How hard was it to get there? Christina suggests using your answer as a diagnostic: the harder it is to watch ants cross the sidewalk without reaching for something else, the more noise you’re carrying. What might five minutes of noticing change for you today?

3. What would it mean to receive your children instead of raising them?

Here’s a powerful reframe: an open hand, not a closed one. If you received your children the way you receive a gift — something placed in your palm, allowed to take whatever form it needs — how would that change the way you show up? Where are you gripping instead of opening? What are you trying to prevent or produce that might not be yours to control?

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🎯 1 PRACTICE

Set a five-minute noticing timer.

Pick one moment today — morning coffee, a walk, a few minutes before the kids wake up — and set a timer for five minutes. No phone, no task, no agenda. Simply exist where you are.

Notice what your body feels. Notice what you hear. Notice what’s in front of you without labeling it as good or bad, important or unimportant. When a thought comes — and it will — just acknowledge it. “Hi, thought.” And let it settle.

Christina says this is like working a muscle. The first few sessions are awkward. The noise keeps arriving. But the more you practice, the more space opens between you and the spinning. Five minutes is something most people can commit to. And five minutes of genuine noticing is more than most people get in a week.

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