[Looking back and looking ahead]

Jen Lumanlan  00:02

Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a free guide called 13 reasons why your child won’t listen to you and what to do about each one, just head over to yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you’ll join us.

Jen Lumanlan  00:56

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I just have a short episode lined up for you today with a few updates about the podcast and the Your Parenting Mojo world more broadly, we’re coming to the end of what has been a pretty amazing year. I finally feel as though we have a really complete set of memberships and courses to help parents at all stages of their parenting journey. I run the Right From The Start course with Hannah and Kelty of upbringing to help expecting parents and those with a child under a year old to get it right from the start. And of course, we mean figuring out what’s right for you and your family. We’ve had so many people sign up because they found that it’s the only course for parents of very young children that doesn’t focus entirely on the baby and instead looks at both babies and the parents needs and how to meet both of those as you negotiate your new relationship. That course has actually opened registration right now for a couple more days until midnight Pacific on November 3rd. Later on, the parenting membership helps parents who are struggling with their child’s behavior to understand what’s going on when their child is resisting them and what to do about it. Not just by changing their child’s behavior, but by meeting their child’s needs and also meeting their needs. Then we cover every other topic that parents want to know about from raising healthy eaters to screentime to supporting anxious children. If the parents are finding they’re having a hard time with their own reactions to their child’s behavior, the parents exploding or mentally shutting down, or doing anything they can to placate the child and get them to stop crying or screaming or hitting, then the taming your triggers workshop allows them to see where those feelings are coming from and gives them concrete tools to navigate them more effectively. And then once things are on a more solid footing the Supporting Your Child’s Learning Membership helps parents to support their child’s intrinsic love of learning. So the child can retain their motivation for learning and gain new skills on how to learn which they will carry for the rest of their lives. Of course, all of that is grounded by the podcast where I interview the who’s who of academic researchers in parenting and child development to use scientific research to help us understand how to guide our children’s development and learning based on principles of respectful parenting. Increasingly, over the last couple of years, I’ve also begun to look beyond the scientific research, not to just question the methodology of an individual study, but to look at the context that a body of work sits within, and understand how the studies fit with what we believe about capitalism and patriarchy, and racism that some people hear about on the show and then give me a one-star review on iTunes because they don’t appreciate discussions of these topics alongside information on parenting. This year, I particularly enjoyed the episodes we covered on the topic of sex, both talking with children about it, and also teaching them about respect-based pleasurable relationships, through the ways that we interact with them. We also looked at how to use tools like Mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to live in a way that’s more aligned with our values. We started a series of episodes on food and I have more to come on that topic. And we did a series on How Children Learn. Early in the year, there was an episode on whether you should hold your child back a year when entering school, which is called Redshirting in the US. Then later, we looked at How Children Learn with their Bodies as well as their Brains and How to Support Gifted Children. The thing that keeps me going in all of this work is hearing from parents who are in the courses and memberships and who listen to the podcast who tell me what an impact these have had on them and their families. I was talking with my husband about it recently, he does a lot of the editing of the testimonial videos that go on the information pages for the courses and memberships. So he gets to watch the multiple times and look for the rich stories that members are telling that illustrate these transformations they’ve made. And he said, You know, I just edit the videos. I’m not the target audience and even I can see how your work is impacting so many people. I can only imagine what it must be like to see it from your perspective. And he’s right. It’s what I love about this. Might be a parent or a caregiver coming into Taming Your Triggers and realizing by the end that they have a whole lot more issues to deal with that are the reasons why they exploit their children all the time. So they sign up for therapy, or another parent who reports having conversations with their partner and children that they could never have imagined possible, where each person expresses their needs and together they come up with a solution to the problem that actually works for everyone, so the parent doesn’t need to nag or be frustrated or explode. And then they go deeper into the parenting membership and expand their learning to all the other topics or they have another baby and they realize they need right from the start to navigate these uncharted waters with multiple children, or they see their child’s love of learning as a precious resource to be nurtured rather than squashed so they joined the learning membership. It’s really truly my privilege and honor to work with parents who are so committed not only to their children but to children everywhere. Also, this year, a racially diverse team of listeners helped me to develop anti-racist policies, I’d been on my own anti-racist journey for a couple of years, and by then after I learned that I do actually have White privilege. And it shows up in all kinds of ways in my parenting. My critical exploration through a series of podcasts episodes, and blog posts and other resources that you can find at yourparentingmojo.com/race. I knew there was a lot more to do. But I didn’t really know where to start uncovering issues related to race that touch a podcast and a business related to parenting and child development. How to develop a narrative on exactly how we did that at some point, so anyone who wants to replicate this kind of work or build on it and improve it doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. But the short version is that a small set of listeners helped me to research frameworks to guide the development of these policies. So we would know that we were being as complete as possible, then we drafted the policies themselves, and reviewed them with a broader group to get feedback and make sure we were developing policies that would be true to anti-racistcist mission that we developed, and also having a meaningful impact. If you go to yourparentingmojo.com/anti-racism, you can see the policies and the rationale behind each one, as well as a mechanism for reporting any departures from the policies that you might find in the podcast or on the website so we can address those issues. This was no one-time project, I do plan to assess my progress towards the goals that we’ve set and report this to listeners annually. And I’m also investigating ways to make more commitments and take deeper action on this topic. So that’s where we’ve been this year. And the reason for this episode is to take a chance to reflect because I don’t think we do nearly enough of that in our culture, and also to let you know what’s coming. In the short term, a hiatus is coming, I’m going to take a break from releasing new episodes for a few weeks. And there are a few reasons for that. Firstly, our culture prioritizes Go Go going all the time and I’ve been doing that for quite a while, until we spent a couple of months traveling recently, I was averaging one day off per month over an 18-month period so that I can produce all the content to help parents during COVID lockdowns. Since we’ve been traveling, I’ve been doing a bit better than that and I’d like to continue that trend when we get home. I want to spend more time with my family and doing things that I enjoy other than reading about child development for the rest of this year and into early January. And the other main reason I’m taking some time off is that I’m writing a book, this has been quite a journey as well, so a year ago, a book editor approached me after hearing me on somebody else’s podcast and asked if I’d like to write a book, and she helped to guide the proposal development, and she said that she only takes projects forward internally that have a very good chance of being approved. But ultimately, the executive team did not approve the project after all. I have a friend who works for a company that helps writers to improve their work and get published, and he advised me to get an agent who could shot the proposal around to several publishers, and I submitted the proposal to several of them, but I never received any calls back. And then serendipity struck. So Hannah and Kelty of upbringing mentioned that an editor had approached them about writing a book and the timing wasn’t right for them, so they offered to introduce me to her. And we were right in the middle of launching Right From The Start at the time, so I said, “Yes, please, but in a few weeks.” And so the course finished and I said to them, “Okay, I’m ready now,” and they said, “You already know her.” It turned out the editor and her partner are expecting a baby and had just been through the Right From The Start course, and I had no idea at the time that she was the editor. So I emailed her and I explained the history of the book proposal and asked if she’d be willing to look at it and she emailed me back immediately and thanked me for reaching out first before she’d had a chance to do it. She told me my coaching had changed her life and she said she definitely wanted to work with me to develop the proposal. So overall, while I wish it hadn’t taken a year, going from initial development to actually having a signed book contract, I know that many authors go a lifetime without receiving an offer from a publisher, so I’m very grateful that happened for me. And I also think the proposal was much stronger the second time around and we’ll create a more useful book for readers. It’s going to be a how-to guide for putting into action, many of the ideas you hear about on the podcast, to help you interact with your children in a way that’s aligned with your values. And also just so happens to bring about the kind of social change towards justice and equality and away from capitalism, and patriarchy, and racism that generates those lovely one-star iTunes reviews

Jen Lumanlan  09:57

And in the spirit of practicing what I preach, I also got the publisher to agree to allow me to provide a sliding-scale ebook version of the book on my website. I’d hoped to have it available on the same basis on their website as well. But I certainly prefer the option to do it myself over being forbidden to undercut the retail price. And I hope that that’s going to enable more people who want to dig deeper into this work to do it in a way that they can afford. I’m super, super excited to start working on the book and some friends have loaned me a cabin in the mountains for a couple of weeks, so I can actually focus instead of riding myself around in circles, which is going to happen if it gets dragged out over a period of months. The break is also going to give me time to plan episodes for next year and start researching those in a less time-pressured way. and give my team a chance to make all kinds of updates to stuff that happens behind the scenes to make it faster and easier to serve you when you reach out to us, and to improve the website as well. And of course, all of this costs money. I’ve produced 146 episodes requiring 20 to 40 hours of research each over the last six years, as well as a variety of episodes with other parents and folks working in the field, and short episodes commenting on current events. I haven’t counted them, but I’m guessing we’re in the neighborhood of about 170 episodes by now. And throughout all of these episodes, I’ve never run a single advertisement. I know they’re really common on podcasts but I’ve always said that, “Really? Everything you need to raise your child is in you, so why would I tell you that and then sell you cruises or activity subscriptions for your child or mattresses?” I’ve had a donation page up on my website for a long time and if your listeners have used it, I particularly love it when listeners reach out to tell me that they’ve donated because an episode has been especially helpful to them. And I recall one listener who made a substantial donation in memory of the look on her mother’s face after the listener’s mother was strapping her daughter into the car seat and her daughter said something like not so tight grandma that doesn’t feel good on my vulva. The listener at the very early episode on the book talk sex today and had been putting it into practice with our daughter with hilarious results. The reality is, at this point, the donations don’t cover the hard costs associated with the podcast, never mind the hours of time that I put into each episode. And I know how much value many listeners get from the show because of the emails I receive and the many five-star iTunes reviews that outweigh those one-star reviews from folks who don’t appreciate my approach. I know it’s easy to think, oh, I should donate and I’ll get to it someday. I’ve done that myself. I actually took a break from writing this episode to donate to Tara Brach because I’ve been listening to her meditations and talks for a year now. And she doesn’t take advertising either. And before each episode, she requests a donation. Of course, I’m always in bed with my eyes closed while I’m listening to her so it’s easy to forget. I know I haven’t mentioned the opportunity to donate very often, so maybe you didn’t even realize you could do it. A listener and a friend reached out to me six months ago actually to say she had been job searching and had been using a website published by someone who offered some really helpful interviewing tips. And on each page was a short little blurb saying, “If you found this information useful, please consider donating.” My friend send those to me and she said, “You should do that!” I’ve always focused first on creating content for members and listeners so it’s taken six months to actually get around to doing it, but it’s now been done. And so you’ll see an invitation to donate on each episode page on my website. So if you’re listening to an episode and you’re finding the information in it to be useful, I invite you to make a donation. It could be a one-time amount that recognizes the value you got out of that one episode or you could become a sustaining member, as they say on National Public Radio pledge drives in the US, which means that your recurring donations helped me to not have to ask for them as often. I’m especially grateful to members who have made one-time donations in the past but particularly to Jacqueline B, Rebecca S, Elizabeth M, Kelsey B, Jessica S, Christian M, Meghan P, Alison O, and Kristin B who have been making monthly donations for quite a while now. Which funds things like website hosting fees, a podcast editor, and all the little tools that it takes to pull various aspects of the episode together, from scheduling to graphics for the cover art, which all adds up. Thank you so much to each of you. If you’d like to join these awesome parents in helping to pay for a service that you get value from you can go to any episode page and look for the donate button on the right side. So we won’t have new episodes for a few weeks but I do have a schedule of oldies but goodies lined up to be re-released. These include a super early episode with Dr. Roberta Golinkoff with co-author Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. She co-wrote Einstein Never use Flashcards among many other books. She was the first nationally known guest whom I reached out to and I still remember exactly the place that I was sitting in a cafeteria at a client’s office, back when I still had a day job when I received her email, saying that they would be delighted to talk about their book becoming brilliant. I couldn’t believe that someone so well-known would take the time to talk with a podcaster who only had a handful of episodes out by that time, and her willingness to talk gave me so much confidence in inviting future guests. I was actually supposed to interview both her and Dr. Hirsh-Pasek together, but we had technical problems and Dr. Golinkoff proceeded alone and it was a nerve-wracking moment for me for sure, but I think I recovered okay. And it certainly beat the time when she actually came to my house to record an episode on the 30 million word gap, and the lapel microphones refused to record so she ended up sitting with her laptop on my daughter’s bed in the dark because the blinds were closed as we tried to block out the noise of a leaf blower across the street, and I scoped her from my living room. On Thanksgiving week here in the US will release an episode on Why isn’t my Child Grateful. And then in early December, we’ll take another look at parenting beyond pink and blue, where a listener and I co-interviewed Dr. Kristina Brown about the components of gender and how children learn about this. In late December and early January, we’ll have a couple of episodes on reading with your child is maybe you have time at home with your family in this period and wonder what your child is learning from reading with them, and what to do if all they do is page randomly through the book and then chew on it. If you usually watch episodes on YouTube, rather than listening through my website or on iTunes, then you might want to head over to yourparentingmojo.com to subscribe there to hear these episodes. Let’s just say there’s a reason why I started podcasting instead of a YouTube channel. In those early days, I was not at all comfortable in front of the camera and I also didn’t want to actually have to get dressed and all fluffed up before I recorded episodes, so I don’t have video for the old episodes. So if you only watch on YouTube, then you won’t see any episodes until the new ones are out in mid-January. We’ll start with one looking at another side of the sugar debate that we started with Dr. Michael Goren and also looking at the research on Spanking. Another fun thing I’m working on is a mechanism for listeners to read the intro and outro for each episode. If you’ve ever listened to radio lab on National Public Radio here in the US, you’ll get what I mean. It will provide a short script and a way to record on the website and then we’ll mix your recording into the episode so you can actually hear yourself in the episode. I’m so grateful for an amazing year with the podcast as well as with parents who have taken courses and enrolled in memberships. I’m excited to slow down just a little bit over the next couple of months, and then be back in the new year with fun new episodes and other things to share. I’ll see you then. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Don’t forget to subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com to receive new episode notifications, and the free guide to 13 reasons your child isn’t listening to you and what to do about each one. And also join the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. For more respectful research-based ideas to help kids thrive and make parenting easier for you. I’ll see you next time on Your Parenting Mojo.