S4 EP2: Living in a Material World - Spotlight People, Scapegoats, & Staying Clever

The Middle School Mary Poppins Podcast

In this heartfelt episode of The Middle School Mary Poppins Podcast, host Suzanne explores the emotional complexity of being valued for one's usefulness rather than as a

Key takeaways

• Being useful to someone does not equate to being genuinely valued.
• People often don't think the way you do—recognizing this helps build emotional safety without fear or suspicion.

Main topics

• Spotlight people vs. scapegoats in social dynamics
• Distinguishing usefulness from genuine value

Notable quotes

Other people don't necessarily think the way you do.

Being useful to someone is not the same as being truly valued.

Conclusion

Suzanne concludes by affirming that kindness, creativity, and empathy are powerful gifts—but they should never come

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) Well, hey folks, welcome back to the Middle School Mary Poppins podcast, where it's always a beautiful day to bust a few cognitive distortions, right? Well, today's subject matter is a bit on the tender, kind of important slash hopeful side. I'm going for that. My voice may waver a little bit. I'm just getting over being really sick with a respiratory infection, but it's the feels that are going to get me this time. This isn't a scary conversation or anything. It's a flashlight conversation. It's really meant to help you feel wiser and safer and hopefully more confident in your good heart. So, hi, I'm Suzanne, and I'm your host here, and I am a master teacher, educational specialist, former librarian, therapist, all kinds of stuff. I've spent my entire career learning about middle schoolers because... They're my favorite people. And Middle School Mary Poppins is an organic, no-budget podcast. It's self-funded. I use an app and my decades with middle schoolers and way too many browser tabs, that's for sure. But it's kind of like my fake doctorate in a way that I've created in my head in middle school sociology, which I don't know that exists. But it's really a very real public dissertation that's built across more than 40 episodes. hoping to help you understand middle schoolers just a little bit better and give them the benefit of the doubt. And that's why we're here. But that dissertation is really now becoming a book, and I'm really excited. I've been working on it. It's called Ridiculous Joy, How Tweens and Teens Can Thrive in the Middle. So why not, right? I think it'd be awesome. And I'm just searching for the right literary representation to help me navigate that because I've never done anything like that before. And just a little bit of a news update and a thank you, thank you. We have over almost 850,000 downloads so far and like 46,000 Spotify followers and 7,000 plus five-star ratings on Spotify. And we've made multiple number one appearances on the Apple podcast charts. So, wow. You know, that's amazing. So thank you. And, you know, we're getting wonderfully close to that million. So honestly, thank you. Truly. Thank you. So the title of today's episode is, of course, a little wink to Madonna. Material Girl was actually one of my favorite songs. And although the material world it describes has always kind of made me think about how much energy people spend keeping up appearances. Speaker 1 (2:44) And, you know, being polished may attract the spotlight, but being real is where genuine connection begins, I think. And, you know, I'm going to choose real every time, no doubt, full stop. So how about a kid question of the week? Before we get started on this, this week's kid question comes from a little guy named Samir, and he's in India. And Samir's 12, and he would like to know, what is Steve's superpower? So Steve's my dog. And he helps me out. He's my emotional support friend and bestie. But Steve's official superpower is what we call co-regulation. So, vocabulary. And that means Steve kind of notices when somebody needs comfort and just kind of lends them his calm without demanding an explanation or anything. He just doesn't want anything, just wants to help. And his unofficial superpower is kind of, well, alright, detecting cheese, definitely, but... several rooms away even, but, you know, many neurodivergent kids find animals easier to trust because animals communicate more directly. And there's a podcast on that about dogs and cats, but we don't have to study every word and facial expression and hidden meaning or social rules with animals. And animals generally let us know, you know, where we stand and they live in the now. So it makes sense. You know, it's a little bit easier to read in less of a stressful situation potentially. So right now Steve is lying by my feet and he's watching the bedroom door for invaders, probably. There's none, but none are expected. But, you know, Lieutenant Steve is always on duty. But support is a verb and it's something that we do. So Steve actually is a great segue into what we're talking about today. You know, support can look like sitting close and honestly lending someone your calm for just a minute and listening and respecting the word no. Or helping someone find backup when a problem is just way too big to handle alone. So animals don't replace trusted humans, but they really can be such wonderful teammates. I mean, sometimes love simply just sits beside you and watches the door for you. And that's the best thing. You know, that's safety for us and kind of beautiful. You know, my granny used to say in Dog We Trust. And I always thought that was the cutest thing. It was so funny because she was a very religious lady. But she's like, you know, but still, in dog we trust. And she loved talking about her dogs. So let's talk about something that desperately needed an adult to explain to me when I was a kid. And hopefully it'll maybe help you out a little bit too. Speaker 1 (5:23) There's a sentence that I needed to hear along the way that I would like to share with you now because I would feel remiss if I didn't. And that sentence is, other people don't necessarily think the way you do. New concept. It took me a really long time. Everyone doesn't think like you nor have the same brain as you. And thought patterns. Speaker 1 (5:49) They may experience things like fairness or loyalty and empathy, definitely forgiveness, differently. And that doesn't make you in any way foolish. It doesn't make everybody else bad. Humans have different histories and habits and priorities and growing edges. And they've made different choices. So totally different outcome. It's like getting a drink at Sonic. There's like 900,000 combinations. Well, that's just a small smidgen. Your heart can't be everyone else's instruction manual, even if sometimes you think you should and maybe that's your job. But have you ever noticed that somebody likes you best when you were helping them? Hmm. I mean, maybe they loved your ideas or like you had this great creativity and this awesome, you know, glowing sun like energy or, you know, the fact that maybe you were