Be Someone They Can Come To
Read on kevferrell.com
Welcome to REWIRE | REBOOT, a weekly newsletter where I share reflections from my ongoing personal growth journey and provide tested ideas, frameworks, tools and practices to help you create the life you want.
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In this issue:
- Rewire - Be the Safe Space
- One Action - Say It. Then Show It
- Reboot - Are Peptides Safe?
- Recommended - Peptides: Separating Scientific Promise From Marketing Hype
Rewire - Idea I'm Exploring
Be the Safe Space
One of the most important roles you can play as a parent is to be a safe space for your child.
I have told Tyler some version of this many times:
No matter what it is, you can always come to me. You don’t need to be afraid that I will judge or embarrass you. I will always be here for you, no matter what. Depending on what happened, we may still have to deal with the consequences, but you will never have to face them alone.
Being a safe space doesn’t mean approving of everything your child does. It doesn’t mean removing boundaries or protecting them from every consequence.
It means making it safe for them to tell you the truth and to come to you for help.
When I was about 10 or 11 years old, I found some matches in our basement and started playing with them on my way to school.
My walk took me through a dry, grassy field and a large cornfield that connected our backyard to the school playground. At some point, I dropped a pack of burning matches in the grass and kept walking.
A few minutes later, I turned around and saw smoke billowing from the field.
I ran back and tried to put out the fire with my baseball glove. It had already spread too far. I couldn’t stop it, so I ran to school.
A garden centre and tree nursery also backed onto the field. Fortunately, someone there saw the smoke. A crew began containing the fire until the fire department arrived and put it out before it caused more serious damage.
I sat in class terrified. I could still smell the smoke on me from trying to beat out the flames with my glove. When I went home that afternoon, my stepfather at the time was there.
I never knew what I was going to get from him, and that uncertainty made the fear worse. He apparently knew nothing about what had happened behind our house, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell him.
I had done something dangerous. I deserved to face the consequences. But what I needed most when I saw that fire spreading was immediate help from an adult.
Fear didn’t make me more responsible. It made me try to fight a spreading grass fire with a baseball glove and then run away.
That’s what fear often does. It doesn’t prevent the mistake. It makes the mistake harder to admit and easier to hide.
Your kids are going to try things, experiment, take risks, push boundaries and make mistakes. You did too. To think otherwise is naive. Pretending it won’t happen doesn’t protect them. It only increases the chance that they will be left trying to manage it alone.
Think about the child who dreads the car ride home after a game because they know they are going to get a tongue-lashing.
What are they learning in that moment?
Are they learning that they can come to you when they screw up, and that you will help them reflect, recover, and learn from the experience?
Or are they learning that mistakes lead to anger and humiliation—that the safest response is to hide what happened and suffer in silence?
Is that what you want?
If every small mistake produces an explosion, what do you think will happen when the mistake is much bigger?
We have all seen or heard about someone who was struggling or had seriously messed up but didn’t feel they had anyone they could turn to. By the time the people closest to them found out, the situation had become far worse.
When the truth finally comes out, the first question is often:
“Why didn’t you come to me?”
But before asking them, ask yourself:
Why didn’t they come to me? What had I taught them to expect from my reaction?
This idea extends well beyond parenting.
If people on your team are afraid they will be reprimanded or ridiculed for reporting a mistake, you will eventually find out about it, but probably later than you should have. By then, a problem that could have been corrected early may have become far more expensive.
Fear doesn’t prevent bad news. It delays it.
In a relationship, if your partner has to calculate the consequences of your reaction before being honest with you, the foundation is already weak. Trust, honesty, and loyalty cannot grow when concealment feels safer than the truth.
There are significant things I have lived through that I tried to manage alone or brought to the wrong person for help. Almost no one close to me knows about them.
I know what it is like to carry something alone.
That is not what I want for Tyler.
I can’t guarantee that he will always come to me. No parent can. But if I want him to believe that he can, I need to do more than say the words once.
I need to keep telling him.
More importantly, I need to show him through my behaviour. When he brings me a small mistake, an uncomfortable admission, or something I may not want to hear, my response becomes evidence. It either confirms that I meant what I said or teaches him that my promise was only words.
You can’t ensure that someone will come to you. But you can make sure they never doubt that they can.
One of the greatest gifts you can give someone is to be the person they know they can come to.
Be the safe space.
Be the example they want to follow. Not the one they spend their life trying not to become.
One Action
Say It. Then Show It
Choose someone in your life: your child, partner, friend or colleague. Make sure they know they can come to you. Tell them and then follow that up with the behavior that makes them feel it's authentic.
Prove it the next time they tell you something difficult. Pause. Listen. Thank them for telling you. Deal with the mistake without humiliating them.
The words create the invitation. Your response makes it believable.
Reboot - Health & Longevity
Are Peptides Safe?
The word safe also deserves more precision when it comes to peptides.
I get asked about them quite often: What are they? Do they work? Are they safe?
I won’t dive deeply into any one peptide here. Instead, I want to offer a practical overview of the category.
Peptides are relatively short chains of amino acids–the same building blocks that make up proteins. Many occur naturally in the body and act as signals. Others are manufactured for use as medicines or experimental compounds.
Do they work? Some unquestionably do. Insulin and GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic are peptide-based medicines supported by extensive human evidence. Others are marketed for recovery, performance, longevity or cosmetic purposes with little credible human evidence behind them.
The word peptide tells you what kind of molecule it is. It does not tell you whether it works.
I find it useful to think about peptide safety in three layers.
The first is the molecule. Is there good human evidence that it works? Do we understand the effective dose and the risks?
The second is the product and source. Does the vial contain what the label says, in the stated amount? Was it made and stored properly? Is it sterile?
The third is how it is being used. Is it appropriate for this person and condition, given other medications and available alternatives? Is a knowledgeable clinician involved?
BPC-157 is a good example because it is widely discussed in the recovery world. Animal and laboratory findings have created interest, but the human evidence remains thin. As of September 2026, no published peer-reviewed randomized human trial has shown that BPC-157 accelerates injury healing. A Phase 2 study is now recruiting, but it has no results yet.
At the same time, many people who have used it are convinced that it helped them. The anecdotal claims have moved ahead of the evidence. So the honest answer is that we don’t know.
BPC-157 is not approved by the FDA or Health Canada for human use. It’s not currently eligible for routine pharmacy compounding in the United States, although an FDA advisory committee recently recommended adding it to the list of substances that can be compounded. The FDA has not yet made a final decision.
In Canada, Health Canada identifies BPC-157 as an unauthorized peptide drug.
That hasn't stopped a large online grey market from exploding. Sellers frequently label these products “for research use only” or “not for human consumption.” Those labels don’t make their sale for human use legal, however.
The larger practical problem is that the supply chain is often opaque. Even when a seller provides a certificate of analysis (rare), you may have no reliable way to know whether it applies to your vial, whether the product contains the stated substance and dose, or whether it was made and stored properly.
A regulated compounding pharmacy could provide a more accountable supply chain and reduce that product-quality risk. Under the current rules, that option is not available for BPC-157 and many other peptides.
Full disclosure: I have experimented with BPC-157 myself through a grey-market source. The jury is still out for me. I am not convinced that it helped my recovery from injury, but I also did not experience any noticeable side effects.
My experience is not a recommendation. It is simply my experience. Anyone considering an unapproved peptide should ask two questions: What evidence supports the potential benefit, and how confident am I in what I am actually taking?
People deserve a better option than an anonymous vial from an online seller. A regulated pathway would not settle whether compounds like BPC-157 work, but it would reduce one significant and avoidable risk: not knowing what’s in the product.
Recommended - Listen
Peptides: Separating Scientific Promise From Marketing Hype
The Peter Attia Drive, Episode #403
Peter Attia provides a clear and accessible framework for evaluating peptides without dismissing their potential or accepting the marketing hype. He explains why each peptide must be considered individually, then uses BPC-157 to examine the human evidence, safety questions, dosing uncertainties, and additional risks of grey-market sourcing.
Listen to the episode →
Inspirational Quote
“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.”
— Fred Rogers
Readers Corner
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Until next week,
Kevin
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