Leslie Priscilla, founder of Latinx Parenting and author of the new book CHANCLA, joins Jannese for a conversation about intergenerational trauma, reparenting, and how the scarcity messages we grew up with still shape our relationship with money today.
Mi gente, this one’s personal.
This week I sat down with Leslie Priscilla — certified Parent Coach, founder of Latinx Parenting, and author of the brand-new book CHANCLA: Healing Our Families, Ourselves, and Our Culture) — for a conversation about Latino parenting: the good, the bad, and la chancla itself.
I’ll be honest, I went into this one preparing to be triggered. Because when I bring up parenting with my own mother, she is not trying to hear anything about how she raised me. But she’s real quick to give me advice now that I’m a mom myself. And listen — there are beautiful things about our culture I want to pass on to my daughter. And there’s some other stuff, like la chancla, that I’m not participating in.
Where La Chancla Comes From
Leslie didn’t set out to write a book about a house slipper. She spent years working in elementary schools running parent education programs, and every time she asked a room full of Latino parents “¿qué es la disciplina?” — what is discipline — the same answer came back immediately: la chancla, la chancla voladora.
“That chancla makes us feel powerful. It makes us feel like we’re in control again.”
What started as a joke, a stereotype, a punchline in every Latino comedy special, became Leslie’s entry point into a much bigger conversation. It’s not just a Latina thing, either — she pointed out that the same tool shows up across cultures under different names: the shib shib in Arabic households, the chinela in Tagalog. Different name, same instinct: fear a child into safety when you have nothing else.
Reclaiming La Chancla — Against the Right Target
Here’s the reframe that anchors the whole book: la chancla was never really about hurting kids. It was about scaring them into safety in a world that gives Latino and immigrant parents almost no support. Leslie names four systems she calls “los cuatro enemigos” — patriarchy, harmful religious dogma, individualism and capitalism, and white supremacy — that seep into our families and set impossible standards for how we and our kids are supposed to behave.
The idea isn’t to shoot la chancla down at our kids anymore. It’s to raise it up at those systems instead — as a symbol of resistance, not a tool of harm.
“All Behavior Is a Strategy to Meet a Need”
This was the line that stopped me. Leslie learned it from one of her own teachers years ago, and it’s simple to say and genuinely hard to practice: every behavior, even the ones that read as disrespectful or defiant, is a strategy a person is using to meet a need. Not just our kids’ behavior. Ours too.
“How do I look in the mirror and say that to the little girl who stares back at me, too? You are trying to meet your need the best way you know how.”
It doesn’t mean every behavior is fine. It means the question shifts from “why is this kid being bad” to “what need is going unmet here” — for them, and honestly, for us as parents in that moment too.
Reparenting, Without the Instagram Infographic Version
We talked a lot about reparenting, which gets thrown around online until it stops meaning anything. Leslie broke it down into something much more concrete: developing an actual relationship with the wounded younger version of yourself, recognizing when your reactions are that inner child trying to get a need met, and building a disciplined practice around asking, “what would be loving for me right now?”
Not what your inner child wants in the moment. What would actually be loving. Those are not always the same thing, and Leslie was clear that this isn’t indulgence — it’s discipline.
She was also honest about something a lot of healing content skips over: we don’t heal all of it in this lifetime. And when a parent refuses to acknowledge harm they caused, that’s not always denial in the way we assume. Leslie explained the trauma-brain science behind it — parents who lived in a constant state of survival stress often genuinely don’t have the memory stored the way we do, because the brain deprioritizes conscious memory formation under chronic threat. That doesn’t undo the harm. But it can change what we’re waiting around for.
The Money Connection Nobody Talks About
Because this is still a money show, we had to go there: how does “el dinero no crece en los árboles” and “we don’t have money” shape a kid’s entire relationship with money and their own worth?
Leslie shared her own experience growing up on financial aid at a wealthy private school, absorbing scarcity and resentment from her mom about people who had more. She talked about the belief she had to actively unlearn in her own business — that her community “can’t afford” what she offers — and what changed when she stopped offering blanket scholarships and instead let people invest in the value of the work.
“Money is just an energy transfer. It’s about what we’re valuing and what we’re wanting to call in.”
Key Takeaways
- All behavior — yours and your kid’s — is a strategy to meet a need. That reframe changes how you respond to both.
- Reclaiming la chancla means aiming resistance at systems like capitalism and patriarchy, not at your children.
- Reparenting is a disciplined practice of asking “what would be loving right now,” not indulging every impulse.
- You can’t control how your parents or grandparents react to you parenting differently — but that doesn’t mean you stop.
- Scarcity language (“we don’t have money”) quietly shapes a kid’s money mindset and self-worth well into adulthood.
- Respect is not the same as obedience — teaching kids to question authority is a life skill, not disrespect.
Leslie’s book CHANCLA: Healing Our Families, Ourselves, and Our Culture is out now, buy it here. Follow her work at latinxparenting.org and on Instagram @latinxparenting.
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