Through her Not Alone Summit, Jewel aims to normalize conversations about mental health and increase access to resources and tools people can use to improve their mental well-being. As a mom, having these kinds of conversations about mental health with her son is also important, but her approach differs from what a lot of other parents might choose to do.
While she definitely wants her child to feel heard and validated, she also wants him to know that he’s responsible for his feelings, she explained during an interview with Us Weekly.
She thinks some of today’s wellness and parenting trends might actually take things too far.
And she gets why those approaches are trending. “For someone like me whose feelings were never listened to — the tendency is to over-empower our kids’ feelings, which can be just as bad as under-empowering them,” Jewel told the publication. For her, it’s all about balance.
“Finding that good middle road where they feel listened to, but where they also still feel responsible for their feelings, is important,” she said.
She has enjoyed having these conversations with her son as he gets older.
The singer-songwriter’s son is 15 years old. The difficulties she faced during her own childhood have motivated her to talk to her son about his feelings and how to take care of his mental health.
She told the publication, “We all have brains, and so we all have to learn tools to have good mental hygiene and good mental health hygiene. What we think affects how we feel. That creates biochemical cascades, and that affects our actual body, and it’s this loop.”
She added, “And being able to be aware of that, be responsible for it, and then being able to teach my son about it has been a really wonderful gift.”
It sounds like Jewel has prioritized teaching her son about self-reflection and processing his emotions. “A lot of it was teaching him that philosophy of if you want your outer life to change, look at your inner life,” she said. “Be responsible for your feelings. Don’t make other people responsible for your feelings. Be accountable and curious about what you’re feeling. What do your feelings need from you?”
Her own childhood experiences have shaped her approach to mental wellness.
At a very young age, she learned “that you don’t outrun” pain because she watched people around her “use drugs and anger and all kinds of things to try and manage their pain.”
When she was the age her son is now, she moved out. At age 18, she was homeless. When speaking to USA Today, she revealed that she had a lot of “traumatic experiences” that ultimately pushed her to “learn what to do with it.”
When speaking to the publication, Jewel also noted that teens today face unique challenges she did not face growing up. Social media has exposed teenagers to a lot of information and content. Jewel worries that this is overwhelming for them.
“The youth are overwhelmed,” she told the publication. “There’s so much coming at them all the time. Their worlds are noisy.”
And in addition to that, many teenagers also deal with feeling like they’re being perceived online. “You can have a 14-year-old trying to navigate that much public awareness, that much critique about their appearance every day, and they’re just a normal 14-year-old that isn’t having a music career,” Jewel said.
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