Dec. 22, 2025
How Two Grandmothers Inspired a TEDx Speaker, Spiritual Leader & Financial Genius
Are you inspired by the powerful legacy grandparents can leave for their grandchildren? Are you striving to move beyond daily crisis management and set up systems for lifelong resilience, healing, and financial stability? Do you wonder how the lessons of your own upbringing could shape the future of the children in your care?
I’m Laura Brazan, host of "Grandparents Raising Grandchildren: Nurturing Through Adversity." In this episode, I sit down with Nathaniel Turner—a TEDx speaker, spiritual leader, and financial expert—who credits his remarkable success to the intentional systems built by his two influential grandmothers. Discover how trauma, spiritual guidance, and the “financial rebel” mindset led to generational breakthroughs.
For more information about Nathaniel Turner, please visit his website. Visit this link for more information about the League of Extraordinary Parents.
Together, we’ll explore real-world strategies for kinship caregivers, from trauma-informed parenting, building emotional and financial systems, modeling resilience, and creating powerful relational legacies. Hear actionable advice, honest stories, and practical frameworks you can apply today to transform adversity into opportunity for your family.
Join our community of grandparents reshaping the future—gain hope, support, and essential wisdom for raising grandchildren through life’s toughest moments. Don’t miss this transformative journey!
Kids on the specturm have the most imaginative minds. They can say the silliest things. My world can get way too serious. Sometimes the best thing to do is "get on the train" with them! Here's another fun Self-care tip with Jeanette Yates!
Thank you for tuning into today's episode. It's been a journey of shared stories, insights, and invaluable advice from the heart of a community that knows the beauty and challenges of raising grandchildren. Your presence and engagement mean the world to us and to grandparents everywhere stepping up in ways they never imagined.
Remember, you're not alone on this journey. For more resources, support, and stories, visit our website and follow us on our social media channels. If today's episode moved you, consider sharing it with someone who might find comfort and connection in our shared experiences.
We look forward to bringing more stories and expert advice your way next week. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other.
Want to be a guest on Grandparents Raising Grandchildren: Nurturing Through Adversity? Send Laura Brazan a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/grg
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00:00 - "Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Podcast"
04:41 - "Defiant Driver and a Dream"
12:40 - Family Lessons and Epiphanies
15:38 - "Life as a Farmer"
17:35 - "Backward Design for Education"
20:30 - "Creating Your Legacy Daily"
23:31 - Parenting Expectations and Shifted Perspective
29:47 - 3D Printing to Solve Homelessness
31:29 - "Timeless Wisdom for Grandparents"
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Welcome to Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Nurturing through Adversity.
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In this podcast, we will delve deep into the challenges and triumphs of Grandparents Raising Grandchildren as we navigate the complexities of Legal, Financial, and emotional Support. I invite you to join us on a journey of exploring thoughts, feelings and beliefs surrounding this growing segment of our society. Drawing from real stories and expert advice, we will explore the nuances of child rearing for children who have experienced trauma and offer valuable resources to guide you through the intricate journey of Kinship Care.
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As Grandparent caregivers, you step in during crisis, but how do you move from reactive Caregiving to intentional system building? Our guest today, Nate Turner, not only survived significant childhood trauma, but credits his two Grandmothers with giving him the system to defeat it. Nate is living proof that the foundation laid by a Grandparent can create incredible success.
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Thanks again. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, it's nice to have you back. Your story is so powerful to me because you're not only a trauma survivor that survived eight out of ten aces, but you attribute a lot of that success to your grandmothers.
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That's correct. Tell us about those influential women in your life.
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The spiritual anchor and the financial rebel.
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Yeah, Both of my Grandmothers lived beyond 99. One of them is the Financial one. Her name is Adriana. She's still with us. My mother's mother lived to be just short of 103rd birthday and her name is Ari. So, interestingly enough, both of them have names that begin with A.
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And, yeah, they each have a very interesting role in my life. My mother's mother, Ari, was the sort of, I would say, the spiritual matron of the Family. And my father's mother, Adrianna, is very different. Not that she's not spiritual, but she is much more in your face, much more demonstrative about stuff. My mother's mother was mild.
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My father's mother, not so much my father's mother, if I can.
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It's a great, unique story. Give you some sight to her. She once told me that a police officer pulled her over for speeding and she got out. The police officer asked her, you know, where was she going?
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And she said, none of your business. Now, if you want to write me a ticket, just write me a ticket now. But when. I'm telling you right now, as soon as you write me the ticket, I'm getting back in my car and I'm driving just as fast as I was driving before. And yes, that's my. My father's mother. My mother's mother, on the other hand, is very different. I think I mentioned to you. I don't know if he talked about it during the show, but at one point, I spent a small amount of time, brief period in the pulpit, and it was that Grandmother who called me and told me, I had this dream. You were a minister.
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So they served different but very similarly important roles in my life. You said that your Grandmother instilled the core belief that adversity is a condition, but failing to design a system to defeat it is a choice.
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Yeah, especially so. Think of this. My. My mother's mother, Ari, was born in 1908, and she lived to 2011. So there is no complaining to someone who knew grandparents who were slaves, who grew up on a farm, who lived through the Depression, who lived in the south under Jim Crow, who lived when there was a civil rights period.
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Like, there's not a whole lot you can complain about your life.
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She would just say, okay, so essentially, now what?
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My father's mother, Adriana, she was. She got pregnant with my father in 1950, 41.
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And she was 14. 14 or 15. So in her family then, I want to say, I'm pretty sure if she was forced to leave, but she did leave because she had to raise his child in 1942. The world was very different. You weren't having children at home and not being married. She chose not to marry the gentleman who is my father's father. And she then moved, eventually moved to East Chicago, Indiana, and started working in a steel mill. So there was this child working in the steel mill to take care of a child. And again, those are traumatic experiences, but they didn't allow those traumatic experiences to determine their outcomes in life. And so I learned from them, if nothing more, but just by watching them, to know that, you know, that for me to be crying and complaining about something was kind of useless or pointless to talk to them about crying and complaining, given what they had lived through and what they had overcome.
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What about the financial rebel that taught you that discipline was a choice over immediate gain? We talked about.
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Yeah, I didn't mean to cut you off. So finish your question. I don't want to. I didn't mean to cut you off. I know that learning to be fiscally responsible with money is something not everyone is taught or that is modeled for lots of children.
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So obviously, it was modeled for you.
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Yes, yes. My Grandmother, if you can imagine. Right. You're 15, and you have a baby, then you leave Alabama and you move north, and you're living just outside Chicago. You have this child you have to take care of. You start working in the steel mill. And I can remember I would go visit my Grandmother. This is when, you know, we still got checks from work. She would have uncashed checks, like stacks of them in a drawer. And I'm like. And she would say to you, go get a check. And then she would go cash it. I mean, she bought her own home. She paid for her cars in cash. I mean, I just watched her model, you know, one. First of all, she didn't, you know, she would tell you, I don't need a man. So there was no. There was no need of someone else to take care of her. No man, no parents. That's the way she had rolled. And that stuff's taught at the kitchen table.
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Yes, yes. So I learned that stuff from her. I would just watch her and just, like, what? She always had. She always had money. She's. She. But she worked. But, you know, she worked. Yeah. Well, fortunately, my Grandmother modeled what it meant to be Financially independent. Not so much for my father, but my Grandmother. My father told me what to do.
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My Grandmother showed me what to do.
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I think that we spoke about that in the last interview, that if that's what you want your kids to learn, we have to model it as parents. Yeah.
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Well, fortunately, my Grandmother modeled what it meant to be Financially independent.
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Not so much for my father, but my Grandmother. My father told me what to do. My Grandmother showed me what to do. Interesting. So when did you realize that those lessons were something that weren't just personal anecdotes. But maybe other people might want to learn those lessons as well in your structural framework, the life template.
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I think when I had a child and started trying to figure out what to do for him, you know, there are times you have an epiphany. You're like, oh, I know where that came from. That's not originally from me.
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I'm not that smart. That's something you learn, something you learn from your Grandmothers or that's. And I would say, and I would say my grandfather, but the truth is I never knew my father's father. I should say I met him once at 25. I went looking for him because I was curious who this man was who produced my father. I did know my mother's father, but he died when I was 17. Actually died the night of my prom. So I knew him, but he always worked. And he was a little, I don't know, a little less interested in having the Grandchildren around. To us, we were kind of a pain in the behind. It was four of us, and we would come over and my Grandmother would dote on us. And he couldn't wait many days for us to go home. He. He had worked the full day. He wanted to come home and have his pop, which was a Budweiser, and he wanted to have his beer and he wanted to go to sleep and not have us bother him and making noise. And I get it.
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So most of the lessons I got from my Grandmothers, but I don't know that I really fully appreciated them until I had a child of my own and started to think through how I got to be who I am and realizing a lot of those were things that I learned from my Grandmothers. You've been a TEDx speaker, being co-founder of the League of Extraordinary Parents. This takes consistent work. And it takes a lack of fear to stand up and build something that matters to you that much.
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Do you feel that was something that was modeled by either of your Grandmothers? So both of my grandmothers. This may sound hokey cliche. I'm not sure what the right word is, but both of my grandmothers had gardens.
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And there are lessons that you learn from gardening.
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There's patience, there's planting a seed.
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Well, first of all, there's plowing, there's pulling weeds, there's all this stuff. Then you plant the seed. Then you have to nurture the seed and you have to water and you got pray for sunlight. There's things that are out of your control. And. But you do plant this seed, and you do hope that the child will grow and you have to do your part. And I tell people, like, in many ways, that's the way I think about life, that I'm a farmer. And so farmers don't think about the harvest because they can't. Farmers think about what we're going to do today, what do I need to do today to hopefully have a harvest? But I don't ever know for sure that I'm going to have a harvest. I have no control of the wind and the rain and the frost and those kind of elements, but I'm going to do my part every day. And I think that's the way that I've learned to approach life and certainly the way that I've learned to approach being a Parent.
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But you do plant this seed, and you do hope that the child will grow and you have to do your part. And I tell people, like, in many ways, that's the way I think about life, that I'm a farmer. And so farmers don't think about the harvest because they can't. Farmers think about what we're going to do today, what do I need to do today to hopefully have a harvest? But I don't ever know for sure that I'm going to have a harvest. I have no control of the wind and the rain and the frost and those kind of elements, but I'm going to do my part every day. And I think that's the way that I've learned to approach life and certainly the way that I've learned to approach being a father. I think the organic aspect of those lessons are important in a very immediate gratification society that we live in.
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Yep, yep, yep. And those lessons are now lessons that Naim has. So I would tell him, you know, you're a farmer.
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And I want to say, probably.
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Was he in high school yet? I don't know if he was in high school, middle school, but I stopped at a. Wasn't a florist. What do they call them? I don't even if they have them very often anymore. Where you'd go and buy plants and stuff? Well, yeah, I bought seeds in a planter and some dirt, and I said, I want you to grow this plant. And the whole point was to help them to understand about being patient but also being vigilant. There are things you have to do every day if you want this plant to grow.
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And I said, it's the same thing about anything you do. So if it's sports and you want to be great at something every day, you have to get up and do the work. If you want to be great as a student. Every day you have to get up and you have to be great at the work that you do. And you can't focus on the outcome. You just have to focus on the work. Interesting enough, a few days later, we put the planter on the balcony and the wind came and blew it off the balcony. And then you got to start again.
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Lesson, lesson learned. Yes, I know this is repetitive from the last interview, but for those that are listening to this interview for the first time or didn't listen to the last one, I want to talk a little bit about the backward design concept, which I think is amazing. I'm already using it and thinking about it with my Grandchildren. The success of your son earning the advanced degrees that he did debt free is proof that your system works. Could you briefly walk through the listeners that did not listen to the last episode with you about what the first two steps are a Grandparent can take today to apply that backward design framework to maximize their Grandchildren's education?
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Sure. First, I'm going to say, shame on you. Go and listen to the episode.
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Lord is great. There are a bunch of people. That's another. That is one of them. The first step I said, and I hope I repeat this correctly, the first step is to have a dream. I just don't believe we can accomplish or achieve anything without a dream. So I would tell Grandparents the same thing I would tell a Single Parent or a child. You must have a dream. You have to have something that wakes you up every day that you're committed to seeing become a reality. Whether or not anybody else wants to assist you or not, you have to have. And I would say the bigger the dream, the better. So I have a dream. And then there are things you could do. You could.
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But you need images. Most of us need a dream that is a big dream, but a dream that's not about us. Because so often we all kind of have this New Year's resolution experience where, you know, you've heard people say, oh, this year, girl, I'm gonna lose ten pounds. And tomorrow, say, this year, girl, I'm gonna stop smoking or drinking. And this year I'm gonna work out a lot more. And then by the 20th of the month, right, January, everybody has quit to dream. Yeah. But if you, like, if your mother or someone needed help, they weren't well, you would find a way to do everything you possibly could for them. And I always attribute that to. Oftentimes we love other people more than we love ourselves.
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So I think you have to have a big dream and Find a way to not make the dream about you. Because you already know what most of us, I should say, will quit on ourselves all the time, but rarely will we quit on anybody that we.
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I love what you say about relational legacy because I think this is an important one. You frame Parenting around the fiduciary duty of care and the relational legacy.
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What practical daily steps can a Grandparent take to build that relational legacy with their Grandchild today?
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Well, thinking about where you want to be in the end. So when I think about a legacy, a legacy is something that we leave. And the question is, again, like the big dream, what legacy do you want to leave? I would ask people sometimes if today were your last day and whatever you believe in, and I know, Lord, what you believe in, and you know what I believe in, but whatever people decide to believe in, I think it's unimportant me to say, hey, so and so is a Christian, a Muslim, or whatever. But whatever it is you believe in, if that thing or entity whispered in your ear and said to you, unless you can prove to me that you're committed to something, today's your last day.
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And I think most of us would suddenly realize what we want our legacy to be. But I think too infrequently, we don't think about this like the time is running out until time has run out. So every day is a chance. I always say every day is a day to create your legacy. So I'd say people have to have parents, grandparents, anyone have to decide. What kind of relationship do you want your grandchildren to say they had with you? When it. When you're. When that last grain of sand falls out of one's life hourglass. And that to me, is always where you begin, how you want things to be when you're no more. I love.
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I love that advice and I also love you shared in our last interview that you made a choice to write down some thoughts to your son.
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I've also interviewed a gentleman who wrote a whole series of letters, put them in a book and published them. You've done something similar to that. That's another way that we can share the important things that we want them to remember later on, if they may go to deaf ears today. Yeah, absolutely. Tell us about the books and the children's books that you're writing. Yeah, so I first started writing. Just writing notes tonight. And you. You know this. I didn't have a great relationship with my father. To say I didn't have a great relationship with my father is probably a mild way of explaining the relationship out my father.
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But I was determined that I wanted to be. It may be some ego. I wanted to be better than my father. There was this ego.
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I'm going to be better than him. And so I just started making notes about what it was I wanted for my child. And I think as you and I are having this conversation, there's this reality that you just helped me have, which is to say, I believe what I was attempting to do was be better than my father, but not be a better father than my father, if that makes any sense.
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I just wanted to prove to my father that he didn't know what he was doing and he didn't do right by me. I think it was less initially about, how do I help a child that I've brought, I've invited to this planet, have a really great life to have a life greater than mine. So I will write down things, and when I think about some of the things I wrote down, they were certainly egotistical things. Like, I wanted him to win a high school Heisman trophy. Well, I wanted him to be an All American in this and All American in that and National Merit Scholar, and those were all wonderful things.
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But there were things that were kind of trophies or patches that I would wear and not so much about the child. So that was like 0 to 2. And then at 2 years old, he walked in a mailbox with me and he asked me for mail, which then changed the dynamic, because before, I was writing notes about what I wanted for him, and he went to the mailbox and told me he wanted mail from me.
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So now was like, well, what do you mean you want mail from me? Like, there's nothing here. I don't. Daddy, will you get mail? I'm like, yeah, but I got bills. I got bills and junk mail. You don't want that. But, Daddy, I want mail. Yeah, but you don't really want mail. Daddy, I want mail.
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So now. Now I have to write him. Before, I was just writing notes to myself about what to make sure he did so that I could essentially puff my chest out. But suddenly, now the child has asked me, right? So now I have to write the child. Those are real words to a real. Person, to a real person. No longer about trophies and awards. Now it's about, okay, I now got to pour out to this young man. And then suddenly when I started writing, I just couldn't stop, because then it was cathartic.
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I was like, man, you're not healed. Like, there's. You haven't talked to your father. But you still got a lot of. You got a lot of stuff you gotta work through. You're writing this child and you can't. Now you can't tell this child stuff to do. And if you're not living it yourself, it just. It changed everything. And I just kept writing him and found out that was a great way to communicate with him because, as you have seen, I could be very demonstrative. And children will have a tendency to look at your face or hear the intonation in your voice and then make assumptions about what it is you're saying. They'll miss the message altogether. Well, many people will do that, but children especially. And so when I could write him, I could do so and seem to do it without emotion. And that helped a great deal.
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Takes the emotion out of it. But they can also receive it in their own way. Absolutely. And you published those letters, though? I did, at his behest. He told me at 16 to take 38 of those letters and we published him in the book called Raising Superman. That's great. We'll put those in the show notes. What a great way for a father to express his feelings that he may not be able to do in person to a grandchild. Yes, I think it's a wonderful idea. I've been encouraging fathers and mothers, but lots of fathers have been places and had an opportunity to speak to fathers great deal. And there's this whole movement afoot about, you know, what's wrong with men and men are suffering and so forth. But I would say to fathers, the truth is we focus a lot to me on the wrong things.
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I hear the time talking about, like, creating generational wealth. And I say, that's great, but how about you create generational health?
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Most of us are unhealthy. I don't care how much money you have. Most of us have come from. Right. About a third of all people in America have suffered at least one adverse childhood experiences.
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So a lot of us are unhealthy. How about we focus and I'll say, how about we focus on being healthy? And many of us are never going to leave that. We're not going to have great fortune to leave someone. But what if you left someone words that could uplift them and encourage them long beyond the time you're gone? What a legacy.
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Yeah. Yep. And then you've written children's books with your son. With my son. So that's the cool thing. How did that come about? We had long talked about wanting one day to write a children's book. And then we had the pandemic. And so he was a Carnegie Mellon working on his PhD, and they sent him home. As they sent home many students, hey, go home.
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You know, be safe. So while we were sheltering in place, we decided, hey, you're in the same place, I'm in the same place.
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Let's work on this children's book. And so we did the first one, and then we wrote a subsequent one thereafter. And we. They're based on the 17 UN Sustainable Goals. There are 17 things the UN says threatens the existence of the planet.
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Clean water, clean air, energy, et cetera. And so we thought, no housing. And we thought, all right, well, let's try to tackle those things. Because adults seem to want to argue about politics and all this kind of stuff. But whenever I've met somebody who's homeless, they don't care about politics. If I've ever met someone who didn't have anything to eat, they're not talking to me about which political party you belong to. So, like, let's just write something through the lens of a child, through the lens of these children who are this group of children who are diverse. The kids in the book are Jewish and they're Christian and they're Muslim and they're black and white and like, whatever. They're just all. And so we. Let's put these kids together and let's let the kids show the adults how to figure stuff out. Did you interview children to do the book or did you come up with all of the. We did some research, but we just. He and I wrote the book, I guess, from our lens over in the lens of the children that live inside of us. And so we. The book is loosely based on a kid named Stem Stewart Tyson, Elmo Morgan. And so we called him stem so that we could get people to understand we thought STEM as a science, technology, engineering, math was important. And everything the children would do, they would use science, technology, engineering and math to navigate the world's problems. So in the first book, Stem father is a. Is a postal worker.
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And he ends up. He's playing with his son because that's what fathers should do. And the family's out having a great time. They're playing soccer together, and the father ends up falling. He breaks his leg. And now Stem is worried about his father becoming unemployed because now his father can't go to work. So he decides to build his father self driving a golf cart that would allow his father to still deliver the mail. And there's some other stuff in it I Don't want to give it away. But that was the thing.
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And his friends helped him to create the cart. And the next time was a story about a lady named Martha Washington. We named her purposely Martha Washington because we wondered, if Martha Washington was homeless, would America care about her?
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So she's the character. And the kids figured out a way to 3D print a home for her. That was new technology, and we were like, but nobody's using it. We could solve homelessness in this country because we could 3D print homes for less than $10,000. So the kids in the story, we tell the story about how that can be done. Books with a purpose.
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Books with a purpose. Wonderful. We'll make sure to put those links in the show notes. I'm looking forward to reading them myself, and I think they would be great books for our grandchildren.
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The information about you personally is on Nathaniel A.
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Turner.com, correct? Yes, that's correct.
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And the books are there, too. Great. And then the website that is more specifically for your parenting programs are@help me.
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Lxtrap.Com so the League of Extraordinary Parents.
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But L X T R A p dot com.
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And please check it out. I did after our first interview, and it's very exciting. Nate, thank you so much. We're honored to have you. I can't wait to hear what you do next.
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Well, you'll know because you'll be a part of it. So thank you for having me. And I'll see you later. I'm just going to say. I'm not going to say goodbye. I'm just going to say I'll see you later. Yeah. Amen. All right, Nate, thanks. Have a great evening. You too. Thank you.
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I would like to hear from you what is the most powerful piece of advice you learned from your own grandparents that you're now applying with your grandchildren? She share your thoughts and tell us how you are intentionally designing your family's future in our online community, on Facebook, Instagram, or on our website.
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To learn more about Nate Turner's work, including his books, the Backward Design Blueprint and the League of Extraordinary Parents, the easiest way to find those links are in the show notes. Please subscribe and leave a review to help bring this essential framework for resilience and success to more grandparent caregivers Next week, my New Year's gift to you is to play for you the Top podcast of 2025. Four skills that correct 99% of behaviors with Nicholeen Peck. We did a series of podcasts with Nicholeen Peck, who is a wife, mother of four and grandmother who has spent decades helping families around the world find more peace at home and learning self mastery. She's also the founder of teaching self government and a global advocate for strong families. Known her calm, principle based approach to parenting and communication. See you again next week.
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Thank you for tuning in to grandparents, raising grandchildren, nurturing through adversity. Remember, you are not alone. Together we can find strength and hope in the face of adversity.
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Peace be with you and I pray that you find some time this week to listen to your inner wisdom. I amongst the noise and the pandemonium of this world.
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Welcome to Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Nurturing through Adversity.
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In this podcast, we will delve deep into the challenges and triumphs of Grandparents Raising Grandchildren as we navigate the complexities of Legal, Financial, and emotional Support. I invite you to join us on a journey of exploring thoughts, feelings and beliefs surrounding this growing segment of our society. Drawing from real stories and expert advice, we will explore the nuances of child rearing for children who have experienced trauma and offer valuable resources to guide you through the intricate journey of Kinship Care.
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As Grandparent caregivers, you step in during crisis, but how do you move from reactive Caregiving to intentional system building? Our guest today, Nate Turner, not only survived significant childhood trauma, but credits his two Grandmothers with giving him the system to defeat it. Nate is living proof that the foundation laid by a Grandparent can create incredible success.
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Thanks again. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, it's nice to have you back. Your story is so powerful to me because you're not only a trauma survivor that survived eight out of ten aces, but you attribute a lot of that success to your grandmothers.
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That's correct. Tell us about those influential women in your life.
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The spiritual anchor and the financial rebel.
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Yeah, Both of my Grandmothers lived beyond 99. One of them is the Financial one. Her name is Adriana. She's still with us. My mother's mother lived to be just short of 103rd birthday and her name is Ari. So, interestingly enough, both of them have names that begin with A.
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And, yeah, they each have a very interesting role in my life. My mother's mother, Ari, was the sort of, I would say, the spiritual matron of the Family. And my father's mother, Adrianna, is very different. Not that she's not spiritual, but she is much more in your face, much more demonstrative about stuff. My mother's mother was mild.
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My father's mother, not so much my father's mother, if I can.
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It's a great, unique story. Give you some sight to her. She once told me that a police officer pulled her over for speeding and she got out. The police officer asked her, you know, where was she going?
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And she said, none of your business. Now, if you want to write me a ticket, just write me a ticket now. But when. I'm telling you right now, as soon as you write me the ticket, I'm getting back in my car and I'm driving just as fast as I was driving before. And yes, that's my. My father's mother. My mother's mother, on the other hand, is very different. I think I mentioned to you. I don't know if he talked about it during the show, but at one point, I spent a small amount of time, brief period in the pulpit, and it was that Grandmother who called me and told me, I had this dream. You were a minister.
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So they served different but very similarly important roles in my life. You said that your Grandmother instilled the core belief that adversity is a condition, but failing to design a system to defeat it is a choice.
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Yeah, especially so. Think of this. My. My mother's mother, Ari, was born in 1908, and she lived to 2011. So there is no complaining to someone who knew grandparents who were slaves, who grew up on a farm, who lived through the Depression, who lived in the south under Jim Crow, who lived when there was a civil rights period.
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Like, there's not a whole lot you can complain about your life.
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She would just say, okay, so essentially, now what?
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My father's mother, Adriana, she was. She got pregnant with my father in 1950, 41.
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And she was 14. 14 or 15. So in her family then, I want to say, I'm pretty sure if she was forced to leave, but she did leave because she had to raise his child in 1942. The world was very different. You weren't having children at home and not being married. She chose not to marry the gentleman who is my father's father. And she then moved, eventually moved to East Chicago, Indiana, and started working in a steel mill. So there was this child working in the steel mill to take care of a child. And again, those are traumatic experiences, but they didn't allow those traumatic experiences to determine their outcomes in life. And so I learned from them, if nothing more, but just by watching them, to know that, you know, that for me to be crying and complaining about something was kind of useless or pointless to talk to them about crying and complaining, given what they had lived through and what they had overcome.
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What about the financial rebel that taught you that discipline was a choice over immediate gain? We talked about.
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Yeah, I didn't mean to cut you off. So finish your question. I don't want to. I didn't mean to cut you off. I know that learning to be fiscally responsible with money is something not everyone is taught or that is modeled for lots of children.
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So obviously, it was modeled for you.
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Yes, yes. My Grandmother, if you can imagine. Right. You're 15, and you have a baby, then you leave Alabama and you move north, and you're living just outside Chicago. You have this child you have to take care of. You start working in the steel mill. And I can remember I would go visit my Grandmother. This is when, you know, we still got checks from work. She would have uncashed checks, like stacks of them in a drawer. And I'm like. And she would say to you, go get a check. And then she would go cash it. I mean, she bought her own home. She paid for her cars in cash. I mean, I just watched her model, you know, one. First of all, she didn't, you know, she would tell you, I don't need a man. So there was no. There was no need of someone else to take care of her. No man, no parents. That's the way she had rolled. And that stuff's taught at the kitchen table.
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Yes, yes. So I learned that stuff from her. I would just watch her and just, like, what? She always had. She always had money. She's. She. But she worked. But, you know, she worked. Yeah. Well, fortunately, my Grandmother modeled what it meant to be Financially independent. Not so much for my father, but my Grandmother. My father told me what to do.
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My Grandmother showed me what to do.
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I think that we spoke about that in the last interview, that if that's what you want your kids to learn, we have to model it as parents. Yeah.
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Well, fortunately, my Grandmother modeled what it meant to be Financially independent.
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Not so much for my father, but my Grandmother. My father told me what to do. My Grandmother showed me what to do. Interesting. So when did you realize that those lessons were something that weren't just personal anecdotes. But maybe other people might want to learn those lessons as well in your structural framework, the life template.
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I think when I had a child and started trying to figure out what to do for him, you know, there are times you have an epiphany. You're like, oh, I know where that came from. That's not originally from me.
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I'm not that smart. That's something you learn, something you learn from your Grandmothers or that's. And I would say, and I would say my grandfather, but the truth is I never knew my father's father. I should say I met him once at 25. I went looking for him because I was curious who this man was who produced my father. I did know my mother's father, but he died when I was 17. Actually died the night of my prom. So I knew him, but he always worked. And he was a little, I don't know, a little less interested in having the Grandchildren around. To us, we were kind of a pain in the behind. It was four of us, and we would come over and my Grandmother would dote on us. And he couldn't wait many days for us to go home. He. He had worked the full day. He wanted to come home and have his pop, which was a Budweiser, and he wanted to have his beer and he wanted to go to sleep and not have us bother him and making noise. And I get it.
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So most of the lessons I got from my Grandmothers, but I don't know that I really fully appreciated them until I had a child of my own and started to think through how I got to be who I am and realizing a lot of those were things that I learned from my Grandmothers. You've been a TEDx speaker, being co-founder of the League of Extraordinary Parents. This takes consistent work. And it takes a lack of fear to stand up and build something that matters to you that much.
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Do you feel that was something that was modeled by either of your Grandmothers? So both of my grandmothers. This may sound hokey cliche. I'm not sure what the right word is, but both of my grandmothers had gardens.
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And there are lessons that you learn from gardening.
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There's patience, there's planting a seed.
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Well, first of all, there's plowing, there's pulling weeds, there's all this stuff. Then you plant the seed. Then you have to nurture the seed and you have to water and you got pray for sunlight. There's things that are out of your control. And. But you do plant this seed, and you do hope that the child will grow and you have to do your part. And I tell people, like, in many ways, that's the way I think about life, that I'm a farmer. And so farmers don't think about the harvest because they can't. Farmers think about what we're going to do today, what do I need to do today to hopefully have a harvest? But I don't ever know for sure that I'm going to have a harvest. I have no control of the wind and the rain and the frost and those kind of elements, but I'm going to do my part every day. And I think that's the way that I've learned to approach life and certainly the way that I've learned to approach being a Parent.
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But you do plant this seed, and you do hope that the child will grow and you have to do your part. And I tell people, like, in many ways, that's the way I think about life, that I'm a farmer. And so farmers don't think about the harvest because they can't. Farmers think about what we're going to do today, what do I need to do today to hopefully have a harvest? But I don't ever know for sure that I'm going to have a harvest. I have no control of the wind and the rain and the frost and those kind of elements, but I'm going to do my part every day. And I think that's the way that I've learned to approach life and certainly the way that I've learned to approach being a father. I think the organic aspect of those lessons are important in a very immediate gratification society that we live in.
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Yep, yep, yep. And those lessons are now lessons that Naim has. So I would tell him, you know, you're a farmer.
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And I want to say, probably.
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Was he in high school yet? I don't know if he was in high school, middle school, but I stopped at a. Wasn't a florist. What do they call them? I don't even if they have them very often anymore. Where you'd go and buy plants and stuff? Well, yeah, I bought seeds in a planter and some dirt, and I said, I want you to grow this plant. And the whole point was to help them to understand about being patient but also being vigilant. There are things you have to do every day if you want this plant to grow.
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And I said, it's the same thing about anything you do. So if it's sports and you want to be great at something every day, you have to get up and do the work. If you want to be great as a student. Every day you have to get up and you have to be great at the work that you do. And you can't focus on the outcome. You just have to focus on the work. Interesting enough, a few days later, we put the planter on the balcony and the wind came and blew it off the balcony. And then you got to start again.
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Lesson, lesson learned. Yes, I know this is repetitive from the last interview, but for those that are listening to this interview for the first time or didn't listen to the last one, I want to talk a little bit about the backward design concept, which I think is amazing. I'm already using it and thinking about it with my Grandchildren. The success of your son earning the advanced degrees that he did debt free is proof that your system works. Could you briefly walk through the listeners that did not listen to the last episode with you about what the first two steps are a Grandparent can take today to apply that backward design framework to maximize their Grandchildren's education?
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Sure. First, I'm going to say, shame on you. Go and listen to the episode.
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Lord is great. There are a bunch of people. That's another. That is one of them. The first step I said, and I hope I repeat this correctly, the first step is to have a dream. I just don't believe we can accomplish or achieve anything without a dream. So I would tell Grandparents the same thing I would tell a Single Parent or a child. You must have a dream. You have to have something that wakes you up every day that you're committed to seeing become a reality. Whether or not anybody else wants to assist you or not, you have to have. And I would say the bigger the dream, the better. So I have a dream. And then there are things you could do. You could.
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But you need images. Most of us need a dream that is a big dream, but a dream that's not about us. Because so often we all kind of have this New Year's resolution experience where, you know, you've heard people say, oh, this year, girl, I'm gonna lose ten pounds. And tomorrow, say, this year, girl, I'm gonna stop smoking or drinking. And this year I'm gonna work out a lot more. And then by the 20th of the month, right, January, everybody has quit to dream. Yeah. But if you, like, if your mother or someone needed help, they weren't well, you would find a way to do everything you possibly could for them. And I always attribute that to. Oftentimes we love other people more than we love ourselves.
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So I think you have to have a big dream and Find a way to not make the dream about you. Because you already know what most of us, I should say, will quit on ourselves all the time, but rarely will we quit on anybody that we.
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I love what you say about relational legacy because I think this is an important one. You frame Parenting around the fiduciary duty of care and the relational legacy.
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What practical daily steps can a Grandparent take to build that relational legacy with their Grandchild today?
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Well, thinking about where you want to be in the end. So when I think about a legacy, a legacy is something that we leave. And the question is, again, like the big dream, what legacy do you want to leave? I would ask people sometimes if today were your last day and whatever you believe in, and I know, Lord, what you believe in, and you know what I believe in, but whatever people decide to believe in, I think it's unimportant me to say, hey, so and so is a Christian, a Muslim, or whatever. But whatever it is you believe in, if that thing or entity whispered in your ear and said to you, unless you can prove to me that you're committed to something, today's your last day.
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And I think most of us would suddenly realize what we want our legacy to be. But I think too infrequently, we don't think about this like the time is running out until time has run out. So every day is a chance. I always say every day is a day to create your legacy. So I'd say people have to have parents, grandparents, anyone have to decide. What kind of relationship do you want your grandchildren to say they had with you? When it. When you're. When that last grain of sand falls out of one's life hourglass. And that to me, is always where you begin, how you want things to be when you're no more. I love.
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I love that advice and I also love you shared in our last interview that you made a choice to write down some thoughts to your son.
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I've also interviewed a gentleman who wrote a whole series of letters, put them in a book and published them. You've done something similar to that. That's another way that we can share the important things that we want them to remember later on, if they may go to deaf ears today. Yeah, absolutely. Tell us about the books and the children's books that you're writing. Yeah, so I first started writing. Just writing notes tonight. And you. You know this. I didn't have a great relationship with my father. To say I didn't have a great relationship with my father is probably a mild way of explaining the relationship out my father.
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But I was determined that I wanted to be. It may be some ego. I wanted to be better than my father. There was this ego.
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I'm going to be better than him. And so I just started making notes about what it was I wanted for my child. And I think as you and I are having this conversation, there's this reality that you just helped me have, which is to say, I believe what I was attempting to do was be better than my father, but not be a better father than my father, if that makes any sense.
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I just wanted to prove to my father that he didn't know what he was doing and he didn't do right by me. I think it was less initially about, how do I help a child that I've brought, I've invited to this planet, have a really great life to have a life greater than mine. So I will write down things, and when I think about some of the things I wrote down, they were certainly egotistical things. Like, I wanted him to win a high school Heisman trophy. Well, I wanted him to be an All American in this and All American in that and National Merit Scholar, and those were all wonderful things.
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But there were things that were kind of trophies or patches that I would wear and not so much about the child. So that was like 0 to 2. And then at 2 years old, he walked in a mailbox with me and he asked me for mail, which then changed the dynamic, because before, I was writing notes about what I wanted for him, and he went to the mailbox and told me he wanted mail from me.
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So now was like, well, what do you mean you want mail from me? Like, there's nothing here. I don't. Daddy, will you get mail? I'm like, yeah, but I got bills. I got bills and junk mail. You don't want that. But, Daddy, I want mail. Yeah, but you don't really want mail. Daddy, I want mail.
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So now. Now I have to write him. Before, I was just writing notes to myself about what to make sure he did so that I could essentially puff my chest out. But suddenly, now the child has asked me, right? So now I have to write the child. Those are real words to a real. Person, to a real person. No longer about trophies and awards. Now it's about, okay, I now got to pour out to this young man. And then suddenly when I started writing, I just couldn't stop, because then it was cathartic.
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I was like, man, you're not healed. Like, there's. You haven't talked to your father. But you still got a lot of. You got a lot of stuff you gotta work through. You're writing this child and you can't. Now you can't tell this child stuff to do. And if you're not living it yourself, it just. It changed everything. And I just kept writing him and found out that was a great way to communicate with him because, as you have seen, I could be very demonstrative. And children will have a tendency to look at your face or hear the intonation in your voice and then make assumptions about what it is you're saying. They'll miss the message altogether. Well, many people will do that, but children especially. And so when I could write him, I could do so and seem to do it without emotion. And that helped a great deal.
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Takes the emotion out of it. But they can also receive it in their own way. Absolutely. And you published those letters, though? I did, at his behest. He told me at 16 to take 38 of those letters and we published him in the book called Raising Superman. That's great. We'll put those in the show notes. What a great way for a father to express his feelings that he may not be able to do in person to a grandchild. Yes, I think it's a wonderful idea. I've been encouraging fathers and mothers, but lots of fathers have been places and had an opportunity to speak to fathers great deal. And there's this whole movement afoot about, you know, what's wrong with men and men are suffering and so forth. But I would say to fathers, the truth is we focus a lot to me on the wrong things.
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I hear the time talking about, like, creating generational wealth. And I say, that's great, but how about you create generational health?
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Most of us are unhealthy. I don't care how much money you have. Most of us have come from. Right. About a third of all people in America have suffered at least one adverse childhood experiences.
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So a lot of us are unhealthy. How about we focus and I'll say, how about we focus on being healthy? And many of us are never going to leave that. We're not going to have great fortune to leave someone. But what if you left someone words that could uplift them and encourage them long beyond the time you're gone? What a legacy.
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Yeah. Yep. And then you've written children's books with your son. With my son. So that's the cool thing. How did that come about? We had long talked about wanting one day to write a children's book. And then we had the pandemic. And so he was a Carnegie Mellon working on his PhD, and they sent him home. As they sent home many students, hey, go home.
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You know, be safe. So while we were sheltering in place, we decided, hey, you're in the same place, I'm in the same place.
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Let's work on this children's book. And so we did the first one, and then we wrote a subsequent one thereafter. And we. They're based on the 17 UN Sustainable Goals. There are 17 things the UN says threatens the existence of the planet.
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Clean water, clean air, energy, et cetera. And so we thought, no housing. And we thought, all right, well, let's try to tackle those things. Because adults seem to want to argue about politics and all this kind of stuff. But whenever I've met somebody who's homeless, they don't care about politics. If I've ever met someone who didn't have anything to eat, they're not talking to me about which political party you belong to. So, like, let's just write something through the lens of a child, through the lens of these children who are this group of children who are diverse. The kids in the book are Jewish and they're Christian and they're Muslim and they're black and white and like, whatever. They're just all. And so we. Let's put these kids together and let's let the kids show the adults how to figure stuff out. Did you interview children to do the book or did you come up with all of the. We did some research, but we just. He and I wrote the book, I guess, from our lens over in the lens of the children that live inside of us. And so we. The book is loosely based on a kid named Stem Stewart Tyson, Elmo Morgan. And so we called him stem so that we could get people to understand we thought STEM as a science, technology, engineering, math was important. And everything the children would do, they would use science, technology, engineering and math to navigate the world's problems. So in the first book, Stem father is a. Is a postal worker.
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And he ends up. He's playing with his son because that's what fathers should do. And the family's out having a great time. They're playing soccer together, and the father ends up falling. He breaks his leg. And now Stem is worried about his father becoming unemployed because now his father can't go to work. So he decides to build his father self driving a golf cart that would allow his father to still deliver the mail. And there's some other stuff in it I Don't want to give it away. But that was the thing.
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And his friends helped him to create the cart. And the next time was a story about a lady named Martha Washington. We named her purposely Martha Washington because we wondered, if Martha Washington was homeless, would America care about her?
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So she's the character. And the kids figured out a way to 3D print a home for her. That was new technology, and we were like, but nobody's using it. We could solve homelessness in this country because we could 3D print homes for less than $10,000. So the kids in the story, we tell the story about how that can be done. Books with a purpose.
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Books with a purpose. Wonderful. We'll make sure to put those links in the show notes. I'm looking forward to reading them myself, and I think they would be great books for our grandchildren.
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The information about you personally is on Nathaniel A.
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Turner.com, correct? Yes, that's correct.
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And the books are there, too. Great. And then the website that is more specifically for your parenting programs are@help me.
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Lxtrap.Com so the League of Extraordinary Parents.
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But L X T R A p dot com.
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And please check it out. I did after our first interview, and it's very exciting. Nate, thank you so much. We're honored to have you. I can't wait to hear what you do next.
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Well, you'll know because you'll be a part of it. So thank you for having me. And I'll see you later. I'm just going to say. I'm not going to say goodbye. I'm just going to say I'll see you later. Yeah. Amen. All right, Nate, thanks. Have a great evening. You too. Thank you.
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I would like to hear from you what is the most powerful piece of advice you learned from your own grandparents that you're now applying with your grandchildren? She share your thoughts and tell us how you are intentionally designing your family's future in our online community, on Facebook, Instagram, or on our website.
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To learn more about Nate Turner's work, including his books, the Backward Design Blueprint and the League of Extraordinary Parents, the easiest way to find those links are in the show notes. Please subscribe and leave a review to help bring this essential framework for resilience and success to more grandparent caregivers Next week, my New Year's gift to you is to play for you the Top podcast of 2025. Four skills that correct 99% of behaviors with Nicholeen Peck. We did a series of podcasts with Nicholeen Peck, who is a wife, mother of four and grandmother who has spent decades helping families around the world find more peace at home and learning self mastery. She's also the founder of teaching self government and a global advocate for strong families. Known her calm, principle based approach to parenting and communication. See you again next week.
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Thank you for tuning in to grandparents, raising grandchildren, nurturing through adversity. Remember, you are not alone. Together we can find strength and hope in the face of adversity.
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Peace be with you and I pray that you find some time this week to listen to your inner wisdom. I amongst the noise and the pandemonium of this world.
