15- Why Education Feels Like Protection For Families Of Color

The phrase “just relax” can feel like a dismissal when your entire body was trained to scan for risk. We unpack why the mental load for many parents of color isn’t about perfectionism or control—it’s about protection shaped by history, bias, and love that remembers. From late-night worry loops to the impulse to track every assignment and social cue, we explore how vigilance forms, why it persists, and what it really tries to keep safe.

We dive into the deeper story of education as protection in East Asian and immigrant families. Grades aren’t trophies; they’re proof of effort against systems that misread, under-protect, or punish difference. For refugees and marginalized communities, academic excellence became a portable asset in unstable worlds—a survival strategy rather than a status goal. That lens reframes “overparenting” as ancestral pattern recognition, built from generations who learned that safety must be earned and documented.

We also talk about what happens at home when partners hold different realities. A white-identifying partner may default to trust in institutions, while a partner of color reads risk in the fine print. Using Internal Family Systems, we map the protector part that handles calendars, advocacy, and the invisible workload—not to shame it, but to honor its data. Then we outline steps to build shared vigilance: naming the history behind the planning, co-owning domains of safety, and creating agreements that make the load feel held instead of invisible.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Why “Just Relax” Misses The Point
• 0:40 Safety As Lived Experience
• 1:15 Vigilance And The Mental Load
• 2:01 When Partners Hold Different Urgency
• 2:35 Education As Protection, Not Prestige
• 4:18 Ancestral Survival And Academic Pressure
• 5:00 Hypervigilance Or Pattern Recognition
• 6:15 Kids Aren’t Always Fine
• 7:35 The Gap Between Understanding And Embodiment
• 7:55 Safety Over Control
• 8:42 The U-Turn Toward Inner Protectors
• 10:21 Fears Rooted In History
• 11:56 Witnessing The Tender Part Beneath
• 13:03 Sharing Vigilance And Responsibility
• 14:06 Building Trust Through Shared Realities
• 15:04 Softening Vigilance, Not Silencing It
• 15:24 Q&A Invite And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

I just want to talk about how, as a mom that's Chinese American, about how saying just relax is not really helpful. And why my carrying the mental load is not about overparenting my kids. I just want to say this clearly. If you're carrying the mental load because you don't trust that the world is going to keep your kids safe, there's nothing irrational about that. As we know, as if you are a family where you have kids of color, the world has proven to not be safe for our kids. And so there's adaptive mechanisms that we created in order to respond to that. And if someone has just told you, if someone has ever told you to just relax or lighten up or trust your partner more, and something in your body just immediately tightened, that response makes sense. Because for many of us, especially those raised as people of color in the West, in North America, or anywhere outside East Asia, safety was never abstract. Safety is concrete, it's measurable. And often it was earned. And let's talk about the pain beneath the mental mode here. So it's not about exhaustion, it's about how vigilance plays a role in how it creates and takes up brain energy. So it's the feeling, vigilance is the feeling that if you miss something, a deadline, a social cue, a teacher's aspectation, a role that you did not know existed, your child will pay the price of it. And it's lying awake thinking, did I prepare them enough? Did I advocate enough? Did I miss something? Or put them to put them behind? And when someone else doesn't carry that same urgency, it doesn't feel like a difference in style. It feels like danger. And that's how our bodies sometimes interpret our partner's lackadaisical attitude. If you're a person of color married to a white identifying person, this is a really common experience where one person is hypervision about someone's grades or your kids' extracurriculars or trying to get ahead. And the other partner who might be white identifying might not have that same urgency. And that might feel like an incompatibility and might lag in your mind as a reason to not trust your partner. So I want to provide some like East Asian context to how education is protection. In many East Asi families, education is never about success. It's never really just about image or about achievement in and of itself and the reputation that comes with that. I know that a lot of like media portrays, especially in the Golden Globes, as we saw the K-pop demon hunters' speeches, and we saw how proud people were about their success. And there's often like a panning to the parents. I don't know if I didn't see the panning to the EJ's parents, but a lot of what we see on television is about like how parents are proud of the success that we've achieved. And it doesn't start off that way. It doesn't start off as a desire for our kids to succeed for this, for the sake of achievement. It's about safety. It's primarily about safety. Grades aren't simply about feedback. They're proof that you're doing everything possible to protect your child's features. So whenever I brought grades back out, back home, my parents aren't thinking, oh, this is awesome that you got great grades. They, I think this is what they probably didn't verbalize to me, but this is now looking back, what I'm observing, is that they were just relieved that it was one more protection mechanism that ensured my safety and my stability. And academic excellence isn't about ego, it was about survival in systems that don't understand us, don't protect us, and often assumed that we were incompetent as like people of color in white dominant systems. And for many of our parents and grandparents, education was the only portable asset, the only thing that couldn't be taken away, the only thing to outrun discrimination, poverty, or political instability. And for them, war trauma. Especially my parents, my parents are refugees of the Vietnam War, and they're trying, they're Chinese identifying. But for them, my their investment in my mother's education as the oldest child in her family meant that they had a chance to outrun their in poverty and their political disability. So of course, a mental load shows up around school. And my mom has learned to track assignments, teacher expectations, extracurriculars, enrichments, social dynamics. And I'm and I know now, and I see this too, this hypervigilance within me about tracking whether or not my child is being misunderstood, overlooked, or stereotyped. And this isn't helicopter parenting, although it looks like helicopter parenting, it's an ancestral pattern recognition. And the reason why we feel so misunderstood for going the extra mile is that this is where that loneliness steps in, right? Like when you go the extra mile for your extra it's on your child's emotional to ensure that your child's emotional well-being and physical well-being and education is a met, you're often seen as excessive or overparenting. People say, oh, they'll be furring, you're worrying too much about your kids. Kids are resilient. But what they don't see is that for many of our families of color, kids are not always fine. They are emotionally erased, sometimes disproportionately physically hard and punished for being different and forced to assimilate quickly to survive. So when you prepare more, plan more, hold more, it isn't because you don't trust your child, it's because you remember what happens when adults don't intervene. And so now there's this relationship layer and how it impacts your partnership with your partners, who may or may not be people of color themselves. They might be male-identified, they might be white, they might be raised in a system where safety was assumed rather than earned. And that they genuinely might not understand what you're tracking. And if they're like woke enough, they can understand it to a degree, like an intellectual sense, but not in an embodied way. So when they say you're overthinking, we don't need to worry about that yet, or you're doing too much. What your body hears is that they don't understand and see the rest you see. And that makes letting go of the mental load feel completely impossible. Because the mental load isn't about preference to you, it's about safety and protection. It's about keeping your kids safe in a world that doesn't prioritize your kids' safety. So I'm going to incorporate a deeper lens into thinking about this using something called internal family systems. Internal family systems would say that we have developed protective mechanisms as we're doing a tremendous amount of work here. And as parents who are carrying the mental load for kids who we perceive are not going to be safe in the system. And this protector and protective mechanism or protective voice in your inner group chat is going to help you track school details, anticipate bias or misunderstanding, pushes, preparation, and resist delegation. Not because it wants control. Again, it's not about control, because control implies that you are wanting more power. And it's not about control because it's about safety. And it this voice, this inner group chat voice, that's uh protective voice, believes that if I stay ahead, my child will be safe. And so this protector is not the problem. And it's uh helicopter parenting ways are not the problem. It's responding to historical data. So this is where I want to invite you to notice this protector if you resonate with it. If you resonate with what I've shared with you around education, around, and I didn't even get to like parents, Asian parents um being so afraid of kids getting cold that they are religious about layering on warm clothing, and that being historical data reflecting poverty that we went through just one generation ago. I want to invite you to do a U-turn if any of this resonated with a U-turn is a look inside and not outside to see that you're that there's something going on inside that's activating and that your partner isn't necessarily the problem or your partner's lack of urgency isn't the problem. And this U-turn and booking inward is not necessarily to help you stop protecting your kids, but it's to notice what that protection is guarding. So I want to invite you to ask yourself what is that protective voice afraid of that would happen if you rested and you stopped going above and beyond and ensuring your kids' safety through this helicopter parenting. That's not really helicopter parenting. What is this part or this voice afraid that would happen to you or your kids if you stopped going above and beyond with your kids? If you could just pause and just notice what that voice might be telling you, maybe they're afraid that your kids will not be safe. Maybe they're afraid that your kids will be left vulnerable. Maybe their kids, you're afraid that, or this voice is afraid that your kids be left impoverished. And if you're a black-identified parent and you have this voice that really wants your kids to practice discipline, maybe you're afraid that your kids will be harmed or killed by police enforcement because of your neglect or your restfulness. And if that resonates with you, I want to invite you to notice how old that fear feels. If that fear feels old, it's probably rooted in historical intergenerational narratives. And also, if that fear feels old, it probably doesn't only belong to you, but it was inherited and given to you by your ancestors. And often beneath the vigilance is a tender part that really has seen other adults being harmed, or that has learned that worth is conditional, and that it learned that safety needed to be earned through excellence, that safety wasn't just a birthright that you got to have just by being a human. And that protective voice that is very hypervisional and that goes above and beyond, doesn't need to be argued with or reasoned with, but really needs to be witnessed and supported. So instead of telling your partner, or instead of hearing just relax, what you can do is block that imperative out to just relax, which doesn't make sense, and to actually witness yourself and look inward and care for this tenderness that's living beneath the hypervigilance. And you don't actually want to hold the mental load forever. What I imagine we all want is to share the vigilance, share, have meaningful, shared responsibility for safety, not just in our tasks, but in our domains, in the different departments that we operate in our household. And you want to know that if you loosen your grip on the hypervigilance, that someone else will understand why the grip existed in the first place. That's really important, is for someone to really understand and not misunderstand you. Understand why the hypervigilance that I want to invite you to, that relief doesn't come from forcing yourself to trust your partner or to trust the world, because that isn't realistic. The world is not changing. We saw how with Renee Good, a white woman, how a white woman was harmed or killed at the hands of ICE agents because she was acting out of her integrity and just existing. But it comes from letting your partner see the history, the stakes, and the tender parts beneath the planning, the tender parts that you have beneath the hypervigilance. And it's not used as an explanation to justify yourself or to validate your worries, but it's a bridge to connect. Because trust is not about being cone cool and collected, it's about shared realities. And you're not worried, you're not wrong for caring deeply about your child's education and well-being. That care comes from love and lineage and intergenerational narratives. And with the right support, language, and partnership, vigilance doesn't have to disappear, but it can soften. So you don't have to stop protecting your children, but you can stop protecting your children alone. If that made any sense to you, please let me know through the comments and feel free to ask your questions in the comments too, if you have a chance to. And thank you so much, wellness storyteller, for your feedback. I'm grateful for that. And I will be doing way more live streams in the future. So feel free to tune in. Thank you.