#1152 - Why Inside Out 2 is Essential Viewing for Every Parent

Published Jan 15, 2025, 6:00 PM

Inside Out 2 isn’t just a movie—it’s a parenting masterclass on navigating the beautiful chaos of adolescence! Justin and Kylie Coulson explore the profound parenting insights from Inside Out 2, discussing teen brain development, emotional complexity, and why this film offers valuable understanding for parents.

Key Points:

  • Teen brain development and the "construction zone" phase
  • The role of anxiety in adolescent decision-making
  • How emotions work together (or sometimes don't)
  • Why perfect isn't possible or desirable
  • The importance of embracing all experiences, both good and bad

Quote of the Episode: "Life is supposed to be joyful. It's just that it can't stay that way all the time." - Justin Coulson

Key Insights:

  • Understanding teen brain development through visual metaphors
  • How anxiety can both protect and hinder
  • The exhaustion of trying to maintain constant positivity
  • Why difficult experiences contribute to wholeness
  • The complexity of managing multiple emotions

Research Referenced:

  • Dr. Lisa Damour's work on teen psychology
  • Adolescent brain development research
  • The role of the prefrontal cortex in teen decision-making

Action Steps for Parents:

  1. Watch the film with your teens
  2. Discuss emotional complexity openly
  3. Acknowledge the challenge of growth
  4. Embrace imperfection
  5. Create space for all emotions

I'm starting with the take home message on today's podcast, Kylie, Inside Out Too is a must watch. I know that we're months and months and months late here, but as a family, we've just sat down and watched Inside Out two and it has blown us away.

Let me catch you up. Riley's officially a teenager now, which means more emotions, anxiety, Hello on we envy and embarrassment.

Welcome to the Happy Families podcast, Real parenting solutions every day on Australia's most downloaded parenting podcasts. I'm justin. I'm here with Kylie, my wife and mum to our six kids.

I didn't think they could do any better than Inside Out one.

I was uninterested in watching it. I feel like we've watched enough Disney movies over the years with our six kids. My goodness.

So we sat down with our kids and we watched it a few weeks ago, and our fourteen year old in particular was an absolute blubbering mess by the end of it. And when I dissected it with her, the acknowledgment for her was when Inside Out one came out. She was roughly about the same age as Riley.

I need to stop you there, we got to do some quick maths. I did say roughly, well, Riley has aged two to three years and it's taken nine years for her to do that, So, very very roughly, Yeah, she was a little bit younger and now she's a touch older. And there's been nine years from twenty fifteen to twenty twenty four for the two movies. And again I just wasn't that interested in it. But I just all I want to say is wow, wow, Wow, what a movie.

Even as an adult, as I sat there and watched it, it was literally like they had an inside of you into my.

Brain that it's such an incredible job. They've really talked to great people obviously as they've built this movie. You went back and watched it a second time because I said, we've got to do it on the podcast. We've got to talk about this. Even though we're months and months and months late, we've got to talk about this. You sat down with pen and paper and started taking notes when you watched it the second time.

Well, I may have fallen asleep the first time, not because of me. He was boring, because I was exhaustious.

Living living on fumes. All of our kids. We sat down with three or four of them or something like that, and all of them were blubbering messes. Gosh, it's good, So let's get into it. I'm going to highlight a couple of things. You're going to add a lot more because you've taken copious notes why you need to watch inside out to and what you'll learn.

Riley's life is more complex now. It requires more sophisticated emotions than all of you.

You just aren't what she means any more. Joy, how dare you, madam?

You can't just buddle us up. Oh that's a great idea.

First thing for me. I love the way the film visualizes the construction zone nature of the teenage brain. There are two times during childhood where brains literally explode with development and everything. I'm going to say it gets undone and redone. That's not exactly correct, but for our purposes today, it's sufficient. When a children are toddlers, their brain goes through this enormous explosion, and everything that was working a certain way shifts at changes. Same thing happens with adolescence. The film shows headquarters literally under construction. New neural pathways are being formed, old systems are being renovated. And for me watching this happen, it's such a perfect depiction of what goes on when our adolescents or our young adolescents enter puberty.

I love the way they've built on the story. In their first movie, the take home message for Joy was recognizing and learning that all emotions, the good and the bad, are important. And in number two, we're now coming to recognize that all the experiences that we have in life, the good and the bad, make up the beautiful whole. I just think it's such a beautiful insight into the making of us as individuals.

There's some curious parts in the movie where Joy is getting rid of all of the memories that could potentially be bad, all the memories that don't build Riley into a perfect specimen of a human.

Well, Joy's job is to help her feel joy. That's her job. She wants her to be happy all the time, and so the experiences that leave her feeling a little bit sad or just you know, kind of feeling embarrassed, she doesn't want those ones. She doesn't want them in the front of her brain where she can recall them quickly. She wants them as far back as possible so that Riley can experience joy. That's her job.

Yeah, the thing that I want to talk about most. To me, this is the crux of the film. New emotions come on board, so we see nui, which is not Nui on we on we. I'm Australian and I'm going to say Nuire's on we, which has done so well. So well. There's embarrassment. There's also anxiexiety, and to me, anxiety is the star of the show. I love the way anxiety comes in and takes control of Riley's brain at a critical juncture in her life. And the perfectly positioned thing to me for anxiety is that everything makes sense when anxiety takes over. Anxiety steps in, starts pushing buttons, and there's a perfectly logical rationale for everything that anxiety encourages Riley to do. Whether it's about popularity with friends, whether it's about making the team, whether it's about it doesn't matter what it's about. Anxiety has got Riley's best interests at heart, and we see because of anxiety that Riley makes a number of really smart moves. But we also see that anxiety leads Riley down some unhelpful parts as well.

One of the things that I think the movie depicts so beautifully is the realized that all of our emotions are working together for our good. The challenge that the movie depicts so beautifully is that once anxiety takes over, she's not a team player. She doesn't allow the other emotions to be a part of it before she comes on. Joy's the leader, She's the definite leader in the group, but she's able to work with all of the emotions because the number one she learned how important being angry was, how important being sad was, and so she uses their strengths to help Riley move through her emotions. Once anxiety comes on, with all the energy that she has, she's not interested and anyone else's input. She wants to take over. And she's so beautifully acknowledged in that that her job was to keep her safe for the future, and.

My job is to protect her from the scary stuff she can't see.

I plan for the future. Oh, I can show you. You're going to love it. Joy's job was about keeping her joyful in the moment and to be mindful of what's been in the past.

This taps in so perfectly as well with adolescent brain development. I mentioned there are two times for the brain explodes. The first one is during toddlehood. The second one is during adolescence. And this second brain explosion, I mean toddlers and children, they just don't think about the future. But once we hit adolescents, that's when future planning strategy thinking. That's when the prefrontal cortex comes on board, and we.

Don't spend time in the present because we're so worried about the future.

And to tie in with something that I've been saying for over a decade, maybe two decades now, when our emotions are high and we're speaking about all emotions, but specifically emotions like anxiety, our intelligence is diminished. And that's because anxiety takes over. It doesn't let anything else step in. There are two metaphors that I love here. The first is from doctor Lisa to Moore. She's one of America's best known child and adolescent psychologists. She was I believe a consultants too inside out too and her fingerprints are all over it. Novelle I think through this. She says that we should let emotions have a seat at our cognitive board of directors, but they shouldn't chair the board and when anxiety steps in, emotions go up, intelligence goes down because anxiety starts to share the board, and through the movie we see what happens there. She's also got another brilliant metaphor though, She talks about how when emotions get stirred up and become high, it's like picking up a snow globe and shaking it. And now you can't see the picture in the snow globe clearly because all of the snow's buzzing around. And we see that depicted so beautifully in the movie. After the break, I'm going to share my last big insight, the thing that blew me away, And I know you've got about fourteen pages of contenting you want to whip through as well. I'm watching Inside Out too, and one of my favorite things see in the whole thing. I loved seeing the complexity and the mixed emotions. I loved seeing the social complexity as Riley tried to navigate to friend groups. But my one of my favorite things was watching the parents with their emotions and having their own little emotional board of directors going nuts in their brain.

The biggest shifting point in the movie was when all the original emotions had been banished to the back of the brain right, And there comes a point where Joy recognizes that for the first time, she's willing to acknowledge she doesn't have the answers.

Come on, please, what am I missing?

This is really.

Critical because an adolescent's brain is so much more complex and their situations are so much more complex than a child's brain.

So she realizes that she doesn't have all the answers, and the other emotions are looking at her to know what to do next.

She's been the leader of the pack for Song, and she just says, maybe this is what happens when you grew up.

You feel must joy. It's just so melancholy and sad in that moment when she acknowledges that growing up is hard.

But but but we know from good science that joy is at the very core of who we're supposed to be, where life is supposed to be joyful. It's just that it can't stay. There's a wonderful thing that I heard from a I think it was a rabbi in a book or a talk that I was listening to, a book that I was reading, or a talk that I was listening to, who said, you can't stay on top of the mountain. The view is so great at the top of the mountain, but you can't live on top of the mountain. Now, obviously we're not talking about Australian mountains here. We're talking about the Alps or the Pyrenees. We're talking about the Rocky Mountains or something like that. And we've been to some of those places, and you can't have houses up there. The houses stop in the valley. You can't stay on top of the mountain.

But that was part of the shift for Joy because she has an exon in that moment before she has that realization and she just says to everyone, you.

Know how hard it is to stay positive all the time.

When all you folks do is complain, Complain, Complain, Jimny, mother love and druget. Like, she just loses it in that moment because she's exhausted from having to be the one who's in the front seat the whole time.

We're away supposed to be happy.

And I think that that is just it's just so well, so well depicted. But the saving part of the movie, in order for them to actually save the day, they rode an avalanche. I'm gonna get emotional. They wrote an avalanche of all the bad memories that Joy had to throw into the back of the brain because she didn't want them. It was that avalanche of bad memories that actually restored Riley's true sense of self because while ever we feed ourselves with only the positive we recognize and no, it's not our true self. We are those things, but we're all so selfish, and we're also unkind from time to time, and we're also not loyal to our friends or whatever it is. But we're also beautiful and thoughtful and respectful. They make up the whole picture. And I just love that. It was an avalanche of bad memories, an avalanche of difficult, hard moments in time that actually saved.

Her inside out too. You can get it on Disney Plus hashtag not sponsored. We just wanted to talk about it. We should have talked about it months ago. We should have watched it months ago. But hey, we're not going to bat ourselves up about it. I definitely think it's worth a couple of watches. And if you can sit down with your kids, regardless of their age, Kylie, it's worth sitting down and talking to them, watching it and having a chat about what the movie taught them, and even if.

The kids don't want to watch it, you should.

Oh yeah, yeah, you don't have to watch Disney movies just with the kids. You're allowed to watch them on your own.

You might actually get a bit more out of it.

Such a good show. The Happy Families Podcast is produced by Justin Roland from Bridge Media. Hey, we'd love for you to let us know what you think about the pod. Can you jump onto whatever platform you're listening to leave us a five star rating and review. We get to feel awesome because you love what we do. You get a warm fuzzy for doing something helpful, and we get to reach more people, which makes a big difference in their lives. Takes you about thirty seconds. Five star ratings make all the difference in helping the podcast get out there. If you'd like more information and resources to make your family happier, please visit this at Happy families dot com dot au. Back tomorrow on the Happy Families Podcast. Wow, those guys are jokes.