The Best Way To Communicate With Your Kids - Kristi Spence

About this episode

Vance Crowe interviews longtime friend Kristi Spence — a former dietician, college professor, and dairy-checkoff industry executive who recently left her career to write a personal Substack called "Noticing." The two former Monsanto/ag-industry colleagues cover an unusually intimate range of parenting and self-development topics. Spence describes her career transition as driven by an "itchy foot" restlessness and discusses reading Arthur Brooks's "From Strength to Strength" at exactly the right moment in her life, echoing Vance's own theory (borrowed from Carl Jung) about timing and receptivity to ideas. On parenting, they discuss values operationalization (Spence's family core values: kind, grateful, don't give up), the danger of forced apologies versus letting children arrive at genuine apologies organically, and a specific technique borrowed from Brené Brown/Harriet Lerner's research on apology — never including a "but" caveat when apologizing, and responding to apologies with "thank you" rather than dismissively waving them off. Vance shares his own parenting tool of storytelling through invented characters (e.g., "Silly Charlie") to instill values indirectly, which Spence connects to her husband's practice of sharing vulnerable childhood stories. They explore Spence's "box" metaphor for helping her sons stop making assumptions about each other's intentions, and the concept of "polychronic vs. monochronic time" (relationship-oriented "island time" vs. industrialized scheduling) as a lens for understanding why children resist time pressure. The conversation turns to diet and nutrition philosophy: Vance argues that rigid, near-"religious" rules work better for him than the mainstream dietician advice of self-compassion and flexibility, while Spence — drawing on her eating-disorder treatment background — defends a spectrum approach where some people need rigid rules and others need permission-based flexibility, illustrated by her own admission that she'd long denied liking potato chips. They close with Spence's theory (via the book "Braiding Sweetgrass") of reciprocity and multiplicative (rather than zero-sum additive) thinking about relationships and contribution within a family or ecosystem, and Vance's parallel theory that ancestral geography/latitude should determine optimal individual diets rather than universal "blue zone" prescriptions.

“The two things are, when you're giving an apology, you have to make sure that you're ready to apologize and that there's no caveat... the minute that you put that caveat in there, it puts it right back on them.”

“One of my sons is very quick to apologize... my other son doesn't apologize when he really should... I've worked with him a lot more on talking about ownership.”

“Polychronic focuses way more on relationships... but you can't run an industrialized society that way. But you can run a tribal society that way. And so we are teaching our kids the sort of time that they're gonna need to be successful.”

Key moments

• early ~5-20%: Career transition, "itchy foot" restlessness, Carl Jung/readiness-to-receive-ideas framing (windows, legacy).
• middle ~25-40%: Family core values exercise, storytelling-as-values-transmission ("Silly Charlie"), forced vs. organic apologies (trust, craft).
• middle ~45-60%: Apology mechanics (no "but" caveats, respond with "thank you"), polychronic vs. monochronic time concept applied to parenting (trust, windows).
• middle ~65-75%: "Box" metaphor for challenging assumptions between siblings; habit-stacking and heuristic overload in self-improvement (craft).
• late ~80-95%: Diet/nutrition philosophy debate — rigid rules vs. flexible self-compassion, genetics/ancestral-latitude diet theory, reciprocity and multiplicative family contribution model from "Braiding Sweetgrass" (craft, legacy).