Woman Goes Viral For ‘Weird’ Upbringing Because Her Parents Were Actually Brilliant Geniuses

Janse described her parents’ rules for raising her and her younger sister as “incredibly intentional.”

Every single thing Janse’s parents did appeared loving, thoughtful, and designed specifically to instill successful habits, life skills, education, and security. Plus, nearly every “rule” they had had sneakily built-in educational lessons, like family game nights with Scrabble and Ruki, which taught spelling and math, or the family’s habit of always bringing cards wherever they went, promoting family bonding, creativity, and a reduced dependence on screens.

Janse even noted how her mom did things like go on “bracelet walks,” where they put duct-tape bracelets on their wrists and found treasures outside to add to their bracelets.

“We would collect little flowers and little leaves and just all little things that we found beautiful and add them to our tape bracelet,” she explained. “And I loved it. I think it encouraged us to get out, move around, and be in nature. As a non-athletic kid who, like, really didn’t want to move my body, making it like a craft made me obsessed with it.”

“OMG WHO IS YOUR MOTHER!?? MOTHER THERESA!!?” observed one commenter.

Other “brilliant” parenting hacks her parents used were:

• Her father hosted “Dad Camp,” in which he broke down and taught his girls how to do basic home and car repairs and maintenance, like fixing a broken toilet — a tactic he continued into adulthood as they both became homeowners
• Giving them three piggy banks and a weekly allowance to teach the concepts of saving, spending, and tithing (the family is a non-denominational Christian, another trait Janse praised her parents for in never forcing their religion and always focusing on “love, not rules.”)
• Taking them to volunteer and interact with unhoused communities
• Allowing them to transform their closets into reading nooks, complete with custom shelves built together
• Including them in hosting dinner parties, including curating a playlist and lighting candles
• A family “campfire” every night to gather, talk, and pray together

Encouraging their kids to get involved in the kitchen was a recurring theme of her parents’ intentional parenting. For instance, Janse noted that as a child, she and her mom would have a weekly “Lunch Club” with another mother-daughter pair, learning about a different culture’s cuisine and then cooking and eating it together.

“I loved being exposed to so many new flavors and learning about how people lived differently from me, a kid in the suburbs of Houston, Texas,” Janse said in the video. “And because of that, I love food to this day… like food is my thing.”

In addition to the Lunch Club, Janse also added that her parents even made everyday meals at home special by having themed dinners and doing “Chopped” competitions.

“My parents let us gamify some meals,” she noted. “We would basically have a few ingredients that we had to incorporate, and then we were allowed to, like, play and just make dinner out of those ingredients.”

Janse said that her experience experimenting and getting creative in the kitchen as a kid led to her love of the culinary arts to this day, noting that she has since taken culinary classes and even worked as a line cook.

“Please tell your parents they our parents now 🥹🥹🥹 we love them ❤️❤️❤,” added a commenter to Janse’s video.

In a FAQ video about her parents, Janse revealed that there were many factors that contributed to her parents’ ability to raise children well. She explained, for instance, that both she and her younger sister were conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF) after her parents experienced a “long journey” with infertility.

Janse pointed out that had her parents had children earlier in their marriage, she may have been raised much differently, as her mother was “very much in the grind of her career and really trying to make ends meet.”

Instead, not having children for over eight years allowed both her mother and father to build their careers and have a thriving business that provided them with financial stability by the time they did have a baby. She added that her mother also spent the time before having babies reading and researching everything she could about parenting, so she could be a thoughtful and intentional parent.

“I’m thankful to have had older parents and parents that spent those eight years just like learning and being intentional and growing themselves,” Janse noted.

It was nice to see Janse acknowledge the “luxury” her parents had in being able to afford a full-time stay-at-home mother and finances that allowed for much of their intentional parenting methods. Because I admit that I watched all seven of Janse’s videos, and as a mom myself, hearing her describe the idyllic and downright magical childhood she had almost started to make me feel bad about myself as a mom. (There are no family campfires or dinner parties happening here, I assure you; it’s more like survival of the day-to-day.)

But it’s a good reminder that every family is different, and resources and support can go a long way in helping both parents and children succeed.

Janse also pointed out that no one is perfect, and even with her nearly picture-perfect upbringing, she still struggles with a few issues, such as being a people-pleaser, struggling to place boundaries, and even having “really thin skin.”

Overall, however, she says she is “so thankful” for the childhood her parents provided her, and it’s made her decide to wait to have children until she feels she can give her own kids a similar upbringing.

“I hope to do so much of the same things for my children, which is why I’m always like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to have kids yet. I need to. I need to get, you know, my life to a certain point, because I want to have the time to invest in my children,” she explained in a video. “I want to raise them to be adults just like my parents so intentionally did, even if it wasn’t the timeline that they were necessarily hoping to have kids.”