Your Emotional Growth Builds Their Emotional Safety

By LaBrita Andrews, Ed.M.
Founder of EVO 50™ | Creator of Team-Based Parenting™
 

Becoming a parent changes everything you thought you knew about yourself. It shines a light on how your own emotional growth isn’t just about you—it shapes the world your child grows up in, leaving a lasting mark on who they become.

You’re raising a whole person, but what about the person you’re still becoming?

It’s natural to focus on your child’s milestones, but it’s your own growth that shapes how emotionally safe, seen, and supported they feel.

When parents grow emotionally, it means they take responsibility for their feelings, heal past wounds, and create space where their children don’t have to carry adult burdens or step into roles they shouldn’t—breaking the cycle of parentification.
(Morris et al., 2007; Jurkovic, 1997; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000)

If You Missed the Crisis Blog

This article builds directly on my previous piece:
“The Adult in the Room Needs to Act Like One”

It explores the emotional crisis our children are living through—anxiety, depression, emotional burden—and how parents often (unknowingly) pass their pain onto their children through emotional parentification.

What is Parentification?
Parentification happens when a child feels responsible for managing an adult’s emotional state. They become the comforter, the peacekeeper, the one who says, “I’m sorry,” just to keep the parent calm.
They carry the adult's weight because the adult won’t.

What Emotional Growth Looks Like in Parenting

“Growth” isn’t a buzzword. For parents, it means developing emotional responsibility—owning your feelings, managing your reactions, and choosing not to pass down what you haven’t healed.

Here’s what emotional responsibility looks like in practice:
• Taking ownership of your emotional reactions
• Regulating before you respond
• Speaking from your feelings without blame
• Creating a home where children aren’t responsible for your emotions

When parents develop these skills, children build better stress responses, healthier brains, and stronger attachments.
(Eisenberg & Spinrad, 2014; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000)

Table 1: How a Parent’s Unprocessed Pain Becomes a Child’s Emotional Burden

Table 2: What Happens When a Parent Grows—The Benefits Passed to the Child

Why I Created EVO 50™

I didn’t build EVO 50™ because I got everything right.
I built it because I lost something.
I lost the emotional connection with my firstborn daughter—not her life, but her light—trying to parent from pain instead of presence. That heartbreak taught me this:
Unhealed pain doesn’t stay in us. It spills into our children’s silence.
That’s why Team-Based Parenting™ starts with you—not them.
When you take emotional responsibility, your child is emotionally free to be a child—not your emotional caretaker.

Begin Your EVOlution

You don’t need to overhaul your life. You just need the right tools, the right mindset, and one intentional step at a time.
That’s what EVO 50™ offers:
• Practical lessons you can use right now
• A growing emotional vocabulary
• A Masterclass and Membership Community to keep you going

👉 Explore a Free Lesson in the Masterclass
👉 Read my parenting guide. Conversations at the Table: Raising Kids Who FEEL Heard 
👉 Join the EVO 50™ Membership for monthly growth + tools

The Team-Based Parenting™ Framework

Team-Based Parenting™ is my signature, research-backed approach for raising emotionally safe, resilient children—and it starts with the parent’s own growth.

Unlike traditional parenting models that focus on control, compliance, or even just “gentle” responses, Team-Based Parenting™ centers on emotional responsibility. This means parents take ownership of their own feelings, reactions, and healing, so their children are never asked—directly or indirectly—to carry adult emotional burdens.

Key Pillars of Team-Based Parenting™:
• Emotional Responsibility: Parents model self-awareness and self-regulation, showing their children that it’s safe to feel and express emotions without blame or shame.
• Co-Regulation: Parents and children learn to navigate big feelings together, creating a home where everyone’s emotions are acknowledged and respected.
• Repair and Growth: Mistakes and ruptures are seen as opportunities to reconnect, repair, and model authentic growth.
• Shared Problem-Solving: Families work as a team to solve challenges, fostering trust, autonomy, and lifelong resilience.

How It’s Different:
Team-Based Parenting™ isn’t about perfection or never getting triggered. It’s about building a family culture where:
• Adults do their own healing work so children can be children—not emotional caretakers.
• Emotional safety is prioritized over appearances, achievements, or keeping the peace.
• Every family member’s voice and feelings matter, and the parents model this by example.

The EVO 50™ Connection:
EVO 50™ is the practical toolkit that brings Team-Based Parenting™ to life, offering lessons, conversations, and community for parents committed to EVOlving for their children’s sake.
Created and developed by LaBrita Andrews, Ed.M., this framework offers a new model for family connection, resilience, and true emotional safety.

Why EVO 50™ and Team-Based Parenting™ Work

EVO 50™ and Team-Based Parenting™ are grounded in a robust body of research that informs their evidence-based approach to emotional responsibility and collaborative family dynamics. This framework draws on foundational theories and findings from scholars including Lev Vygotsky, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, and Daniel Goleman.

About LaBrita Andrews, Ed.M.

LaBrita Andrews, Ed.M., brings over 40 years of parenting experience with five college-educated children alongside her husband, Shang, including 23 years as a stay-at-home mother. She holds a master’s degree from Harvard Graduate School of Education and is currently a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University School of Education. Her work integrates lived experience with rigorous academic scholarship to support parents in creating emotionally safe and resilient family environments.

Learn More

For more information, visit www.evo50now.com

References & Further Reading

• Morris, A.S., et al. (2007). The Impact of Parenting on Emotion Regulation During Childhood and Adolescence
• Jurkovic, G. (1997). Lost Childhoods: The Plight of the Parentified Child
• Shonkoff, J.P., & Phillips, D.A. (2000). From Neurons to Neighborhoods
• Eisenberg, N., & Spinrad, T.L. (2014). Emotion-Related Regulation and Parenting
• Deci, E.L., & Ryan, R.M. (2000). The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits
• Luthar, S.S., & Becker, B.E. (2002). Privileged but Pressured? A Study of Affluent Youth
• Masten, A.S., & Cicchetti, D. (2010). Developmental Cascades
• Institute for Family (2023). Emotional Safety and Family Systems