10 Years, 10 Lessons: Everything I Got Wrong About Parenting

Hello and welcome to episode 000 of Your Parenting Mojo, the podcast that aims to bring you rigorously researched information and distill it into a toolkit you can actually use. I'm your host, Jen Lumanlon. In this episode called Parenting Philosophy, I'll share a bit about my background and what I believe about parenting, because I find that most people who put information out there make you do the work of trying to see how your beliefs and fit together. And instead, I want you to understand where I'm coming from and how this fits with your approach to parenting.

Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? Me too. Hi, I'm not Jen. I'm Jessica, and I'm in rural East Panama. Jen has just created a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes, and I got to test it out. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it in context for you as well, so you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, sign up at yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe, and come over to our free Facebook group to continue the conversation about this episode. You can also thank Jen for this episode by donating to keep the podcast ad-free by going to the page for this or any other episode on yourparentingmojo.com. If you'd like to start a conversation with someone about this episode, or know someone who would find it useful, please forward it to them. Over time, you're going to get sick of hearing me read this intro as well, so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script she's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to yourparentingmojo.com and click read the intro. I can't wait to hear yours.

No, don't worry. You didn't get stuck in a time warp. Today is a milestone episode for me because the Your Parenting Mojo podcast has been on the air for 10 years. A decade. I can hardly believe it myself. That wasn't the actual recording of episode zero because I've re-recorded it a couple of times over the years and I couldn't find the original recording files. But it was the original script that I used back in two thousand sixteen. Apparently 90% of podcasts only release three episodes. The vast majority of the rest don't make it past 20. And it's a little surreal to know that I've been doing it for this long. I took a course on podcasting when I first started out and one of the participants asked in the community, do I have to read my guest's book before I interview them? And I had to laugh because even in those very earliest days, I would read everything that my guest had ever published, including all of their books and also the literature around their research that supports them and that provides a different perspective. I've released a little over 300 episodes with over three quarters of these either interviews with experts in their fields or my review of the research. And the remainder are conversations with parents. In researching those episodes as well as modules for the parenting and learning memberships and the workshop, I've read well over ten thousand books and academic articles. But of course the podcast goes far beyond my work. And I'd like to thank a few key people, a couple of these up front. Dr. Roberta Golinkoff was my first well-known guest back when nobody, including me, knew if this show would last past its first 10 episodes. I had no idea if anyone with a real reputation would say yes to a brand new podcast. And she did. And that gave me the confidence to ask more guests who are at the top of their fields. A few years in, I moved the business to a new platform right at a point where I did not have the bandwidth to learn it myself. And listener and parenting membership member Katie Stankie stepped in and figured out the new system as she went, right as we needed her most. So special thanks to both of them right out the gate.

I used to think that my job was to hand you the research and let it speak for itself. And very early on, I realized that was only half the job. The other half is doing this with you. Episode zero concluded like this. I want to be clear that I'm not an expert. I don't have all the answers. I'm still figuring this out too. I'm not here to judge you or lecture you or make you feel inadequate as a parent because you haven't been doing XYZ critical activities with your kids for the last year. Instead, I want to research and tell you about information you can use to help your children thrive as human beings and hopefully to make your life as a parent a bit more confident and maybe even a bit easier at the same time. If you disagree with something I've said, let me know. If you know of an angle on a certain topic that I should have considered and didn't, please tell me. This will be a journey and I hope we can enjoy the ride together. It was really interesting to read that because in many ways it's still happening.

It's true that I have more of a point of view now than I did a decade ago although even in that first episode I said I was planning to look at how culture interacts with both parenting and scientific research. Early listeners got to come on this journey with me and I know it's sometimes been challenging for folks who have jumped in more recently now that my point of view is a bit more baked than it was back then. I do aim to always be someone who will incorporate new ideas into my life and work so in that spirit I present to you an entire episode devoted to things that I got wrong. I'm going to split this episode into three parts. In the first part I will look at three things that I got wrong about kids and how we interact with them and then I'll move into three things I got wrong about myself and finally we'll look at what I got wrong about what parenting even is.

So the first thing I got wrong was thinking that when Carys did something I didn't want her to do. My job was to make her stop doing it. I was lucky to find Magda Gerber's work early only because I happened to invite friends over to meet Carys after she was born and before they moved away. That one visit profoundly changed the course of Carys's life. A bit later in the episode I'll share some excerpts of a diary that I kept before she was born to illustrate just how easy it would have been for me to be a parent who is very different from the one that I've become. But as is the case when we all make changes, I had a much easier time when things weren't stressful than when they were. If one or both of us was hungry or overwhelmed it was sometimes hard to do things the way that I wanted to. I remember when she was about three she had an infection, she needed antibiotics. We'd already gone to two different pharmacies that morning trying to find the flavor she'd actually take. When we finally got home it was after lunchtime, both of us were hungry, both of us were tired and she was supposed to have already had the first dose. She refused and I just, like, she had to take the medicine. That was the only thing in my head and so I held her down and I forced the syringe into her mouth and she spat most of it out. I'd done the thing I set out to do and it hadn't worked and I didn't have any other tools to try because in my mind the problem was she wasn't taking the medicine and the solution was that she had to take it and I had to make that happen. And that night it was actually my husband Alvin who took her into the bathroom and he sat in there with her for an hour and he was completely calm the whole time and he just kept saying, I'm willing to do whatever it takes but we're not leaving until we figure this out. And they figured it out and she ended up taking small sips of medicine, alternating with small sips of water, which seems as though it would just make it take longer, and then she had a tiny square of chocolate afterward to take away the taste and she took every dose for the rest of that course of antibiotics without a single fight. And that difference between what I did and what Alvin did wasn't that he was more patient than me, although he was in that incident, it was that he wasn't trying to solve the behavior. He was trying to understand what would help her to be able to actually do the thing. And of course she needed some autonomy over how it happened. She wanted it to be less awful tasting and to feel like she and us were on the same team rather than having something done to her. And I'd been so focused on taking the medicine right now that I couldn't see any of that. And I wish I could tell you that was the last time I made that mistake but of course I had to keep learning it because when you've spent your whole life being told that your job in a difficult moment is to get the other person to stop doing the thing that's bothering you, it doesn't disappear just because you've read a book about it. That's actually the whole reason that the Parenting Membership exists. Not necessarily to give you more information about what's underneath your child's behavior, you probably already have a lot of that, we do have a little more if that would be helpful to you, but mostly we give you a place where you can practice what you already know you want to do in the actual moments you find yourself in with your real kid and with people who are working on the same thing alongside you.

So the second thing I got wrong is thinking that expert frameworks tell the whole story of what's happening with her kids. I definitely was not as strong a critical thinker when I started the podcast and to be honest I know there were listeners who preferred those days when I was more open to what I would find in the research and my point of view wasn't as defined but honestly I see that as a weakness. Back at the beginning of the podcast I just uncritically accepted the idea that authoritative is the best parenting style. After all, all of the blog posts, all of the research, everything you read say is the best style. So how could anything other than that be true? Here's an excerpt from episode 20 published in two thousand seventeen where I got the authoritarian and authoritative labels hopelessly mixed up and I had to go back and dub the corrections in. And so you'll hear me doing the poking around the edges that I used to do back then looking at whether the so-called best approach was best for all kids but there was no critique of the model itself. Diana Baumrind is a psychologist who described three different types of parenting styles. Authoritative parents foster individuality, self-regulation, and self-assertion by meeting and responding to their children's needs and exert a fairly high level of control over the children to integrate them into the family culture. In White western cultures authoritative parents are generally considered to be the good kind of parents. Parents who exert a lot of control but don't balance it with meeting and responding to their children's needs are called authoritarian parenting. This parenting is more common in the African-American community in the US and while it has been shown to cause negative effects on White children that's actually not necessarily the case with African-American children. Authoritarian parenting is associated with better outcomes for African-American children but the authoritative style isn't terrible like it is for White children. And finally the third style is a permissive parenting style that's linked to a high degree of responsiveness to the child but a low degree of control. So the child gets what she wants and doesn't have to fit in with the rest of the family in fact the rest of the family fits around her. A fourth style was added later by some other researchers who noticed that low responsiveness and low control are basically elements of neglectful parenting. So Alfie Kohn, the author of Unconditional Parenting, cites a number of studies that link authoritarian parenting, the bad kind, with really negative psychological outcomes and several more studies have been done since his book was published that essentially find the same thing. A really early study from way back in nineteen forty-eight noticed that when parents control children and don't allow children any kind of say in how rules are made or who does what and when then we get a quiet well-behaved non-resistant child. The paper goes on to say that conformity to cultural demands is not easily obtained without rubbing the child of that personal integrity which gives him a mind of his own. Very controlling parenting obtains conformity but at the expense of personal freedom in areas which are not intended to be restricted. It wasn't until I was researching episode 148 on spanking and stumbled on a paper that Baumrind co-authored that defended parents ability to spank their kids that I realized there might be something worth digging into here. It was a massive learning experience for me to see that this framework that has been cited over twenty-six thousand times and that for six decades has basically defined the entire body of research on parenting as a verb, as a thing you do, is based on 146 White middle-class preschoolers in the town where I happen to live. And those kinds of shifts in my thinking have happened across a whole variety of topics on the podcast. I see it as thinking critically on a couple of different levels. A lot of what I'm doing on the show is at a macro level. Does this make sense as a theory? Does this fit with how I think the world should work? What do I see in this that other people aren't looking for? And on a micro level with my own daughter I'm looking at a lot of the same things that you are. Once I've considered, yes, this approach fits my values to consider the relationship above all else and to push back as much as I can against systems of dominance, how does it fit with the child who's right in front of me? Does it meet their needs? Is it asking them to work against their temperament or sensory sensitivities or timing or neurodivergence? And this can be an area where we often learn the hard way. Here's parent Laura from episode 183, which is called What I Wish I'd Known About Parenting.

Hi, I'm Laura. I have a seven-year-old son and a four-year-old son. When my oldest was two years and two months old, the teacher at his daycare said that she thought he was ready to start potty training. While I have worked with thousands of children in my career, I have worked with fewer than 20 children that were not yet school-aged. So I felt like this was not my area of expertise. And these people have worked with thousands of other children that are of this age. And I thought, well, they must be the professionals if they're telling me he's ready. He's ready. They were wrong. He wasn't ready. Over five years later, my son still has regular accidents. He has daytime accidents two or three times a week. He has nighttime accidents six or seven nights a week. Potty learning before he was ready has caused a lot of long-term problems. He is chronically constipated, and he's had so many accidents in his bedroom that we are going to have to replace the carpet. I learned after all of this potty trouble that several studies say that potty training before the age of three is harmful. One of the doctors that we work with says that a child's bladder keeps growing to its standard size until the age of three, and it grows faster and stronger when we don't disrupt the process by inhibiting filling and emptying. My son's pelvic floor physical therapist, that's right, my seven-year-old has a pelvic floor PT. She says that the muscles to void aren't and haven't developed yet, and they aren't in the right place until after age three. So potty training before those muscles are in place is detrimental to a child's development. I wish I had known this before. We waited to potty train our four-year-old, and one day he said he found the underpants that I had bought for him in preparation for the day that he was ready. He decided that would be the day. I put the power into his hands. I put the ownership of his body into his own hands, and when he decided he was ready, which was that day that he found the underwear, he potty trained himself. He has only had one daytime accident, and he is dry six or more nights of the week. And me letting go of the societal expectations of potty learning and any societal expectations regarding the potty has put the responsibility into his hands. It has allowed him to learn how his body works, and he's taken complete ownership of his body. This is a complete 180 from his older brother. So research potty training, potty learning. Make sure that your child is ready. Don't do it until you're ready no matter what anybody else says. Trust yourself and trust your child.

So whether the issue that you're dealing with is potty training, sensory issues, neurodivergence, or whatever, do listen to people with more knowledge than you. Getting opinions from a variety of people with more and different knowledge from you can shed new light on situations. Because trauma plus anxiety can look a whole lot like ADHD. The hyperactive kind of ADHD can look a whole lot like sensory processing issues. Eating challenges due to sensory processing can look a whole lot like eating disorders. And so each expert has their hammer that's coded to look for particular kinds of nails. So it can be helpful to get a wider variety of hammers involved so you don't end up hitting the wrong nail over and over again.

So the third thing I got wrong is this idea that without punishments and consequences, kids are going to walk all over me. I've mentioned on the show I thought about discipline early. I very clearly remember being in the shower, Carys was four months old, and I'm wondering how am I going to discipline her without becoming the mean parent. I just had no concept there was another approach than using discipline. It was nothing but complete luck that those friends introduced me to RIE. It's hard to imagine what our lives would have been like if that hadn't happened, because until then I hadn't considered that there could be another way to parent. Dr. Houri Parsi in the Parenting Membership community was like this as well. She's a clinical psychologist who's trained in behaviorist-based ways of shaping behavior. And because this was so ingrained in how she thinks, she also had a hard time seeing that there could be another way.

I still had the mentality that compliance was the goal. And, you know, I hadn't yet shifted that. And we were struggling with every little thing, getting dressed, getting, you know, at the door for anything was a big fight, brushing his teeth was always a big one. And so, you know, we, you and I talked about ways to, you know, handle the brushing teeth resistance. And I wanted to sort of prove to you that I was doing all the right things and that my situation is just like harder than what you think or something like that. And there is a, again, he wasn't diagnosed at the time. So I think there was a different flavor to it that we weren't aware of. However, what was surprising to me was because I wanted to show that to you, I was recording it. And so that by the time that we met, I could play it for you. And so for the recording, performing for the recording, I was not going to threaten or punish or even offer a reward. And what I remember was that he came around in four minutes, which I would have thought would have taken forever. Um, and so what I, I remember the incident still, which was that he didn't want to brush his teeth. No, I don't want to brush. I don't want to brush. I did all the normal, like sing song and dance and try to make it fun. And he was just like, no, no brushing, no song, no toothbrush, nothing. And because it's recording, I thought, well, I'll just ask him, you know, I'll just ask him. And, and at this time he was two, he wasn't even fully verbal. And that was a big part of why I thought this is not going to work. He's not even going to be able to tell me. Um, I, so I said, why don't you want to brush your teeth? And I think that was the first time that I'd really even like, you know, created the space. And he didn't answer directly because he's, he couldn't, he just said, mommy. And he buried his head in my chest. And in that way communicated to me that, um, what he wanted was time with me. And so I reflected on it and realized, you know, that time when he and I are in the bathroom together is one of the only times he gets with just me. And so he benefits from prolonging it as long as possible.

For connection with you.

Yeah. And just that time to do this thing together. So, you know, put the lid down on the toilet and sat down, give him a hug. And, um, we sang a song, I think together, and then he just brushed his teeth. Yeah. And the whole thing was less than five minutes without any meltdown. So that was a, that was a turning point. Um, I think for us.

It's a turning point for pretty much every parent I work with. And it has such profound implications for our relationship with our kids, because even though it seems like we have to control things for them to happen the way we want, when we stop trying to control them, our kids stop resisting us. All right. So let's move on to the second of our three parts to what I got wrong about myself.

Item number four is that people have needs. It's almost laughable to think back now to a time when I didn't understand what needs were. And when saying I need you to take out the trash to my husband was a perfectly logical sentence to me. Because we never really disagreed before we had Carys, we would mountain bike every weekend in the summer and ski every weekend in the winter because we worked for an advertising agency that did the ads for a resort and we got paid in tickets. And I was the executive assistant to the general manager of the agency, and I controlled who got the tickets. And it was awesome. And every time I asked Alvin if he wanted a baby in the summer, he would say, well, let's just wait for the end of ski season. And then every winter he would say, well, let's just wait for the end of bike season. And we were lucky, incredibly, and oblivious, and everything was fine as far as I could see. And once Carys was born, things shifted and I didn't understand it. During the first three weeks of his paternity leave, he would willingly bring me anything I asked for. And he spent the rest of his time training for a one hundred mile road ride that we'd done together the previous year and watching the Tour de France. I still get a really visceral reaction every year when that comes on the TV. Carys cried a lot in the first month. And later I realized it was probably because nipple shields I was using to make nursing hurt me less was giving her gas. Because when I stopped using them, she cried a lot less. And there were days when I would meet him in the garage and I would shove her into his arms and I would say, I don't care what kind of day you have had or how your commute was. It is your turn. And things really came to a head when his parents were staying with us, which coincided with the four-month sleep regression. And I would rock her gently to sleep and I would lay her down and I would extract my hands from underneath her excruciatingly slowly. And I would creep out of the bedroom silently so she didn't wake up. And grandpa could do it too. But Alvin would bounce her three times, put her in the crib, and she'd be crying as he left the room. And he would just kind of shrug and say, well, I guess I can't do it. And I was infuriated, but I didn't have the knowledge to understand why. Learning that I have needs for collaboration and partnership and acknowledgement of my effort just cracked open something really huge for us. And of course he has needs too. And until we figured that out, there was a lot of resentment on my side that I did not know what to do with.

And that actually links to the fifth thing that I got wrong, which is I thought when I was triggered, it was about the other person and not about me. Sometimes in the earlier days on the podcast, you would hear me figure things out live in real time in an interview. In July of two thousand eighteen, I recorded a conversation with Dr. Rebecca Babcock-Fenerci. She's an expert on intergenerational trauma. And during our conversation, I realized the source of one of my biggest triggers. Here's the moment where that happened.

Just thinking about those moments that may stand out to us, or if there's a change in the pattern of our relationship with our child, where it may be becoming more strange or conflictual for whatever reason, like really thinking that through and thinking about, does this remind me of something? And what could it be? It may not have been processed fully and just taking some time to think about that. Because I think if we're able to gain more insight in the moment and that'll help us be more mindful and present with our children.

Yeah. Okay. So I hadn't planned on doing this. So I'm going to share a personal example and I hadn't even thought that this would come up. So if my husband's listening right now, he knows one of my biggest triggers, which is being interrupted. And if I am saying something and he interrupts me, he often interrupts with a question that I'm about to answer. And I just absolutely see red and get furious instantly. And it's about a tiny issue. The one I remember most recently, and it was actually a while ago now, was about how much postage was required on a particular package. And I was explaining, I was trying to make his job easier by looking it up before I went to the post office. And he kept interrupting me with questions. So I have absolutely snapped at him. I've absolutely done it in front of my daughter when she was younger, for sure. And looking back on it, it probably has something to do with the fact that my dad was a teacher of special needs kids. And so he would teach children who were 16 and who thought like ten-year-olds, and he would come home and treat his 16-year-old like a 10-year-old. There was a period where he was lecturing me every night for some reason or another, and I've blocked it out. So I never remember why. And we were in the car a couple of nights ago, and my daughter was talking and I did interrupt her. And she said, don't interrupt me, mama. And my husband just looked at me and he said, she is you. And so that to me was a very powerful moment. And you don't always get that, you know, the child parroting exactly what it was that you said to give you that insight. But firstly, the process of looking back, which I literally did while you were talking through it, I was listening as well. But the idea of why do I get triggered by that? I've really never thought about it before because the reason right now is that my husband is interrupting me and that is what is making me angry, right? So if he just wouldn't do that, then I wouldn't be angry.

It's very simple.

It is, yes. So if you're listening, Alvin, stop interrupting me. That really was the moment when I realized this is not just about the two people here in this relationship. And I've been lucky I haven't been triggered a lot by Carys. I'm triggered much more often in my marriage. And a while after that, I was asking parents in the Parenting Membership what content they wanted me to cover next. And one of them asked, when will my kid grow out of doing things that trigger me? And that became a one month module of content called Taming Your Triggers, which grew into a 10-day course and then two weeks. And now it's 10 weeks long with all kinds of support to help you heal the pain that causes those triggers and learn new ways of being with your kids so you don't get triggered as often.

And so here's an example of a thing I got wrong number six, which is that parenting wouldn't change me very much. Before Carys was born, I pretty much assumed that my life after she was born would be very much like it was before, only I would have a baby. I thought the first year might be rough because how do you even communicate with something that can't talk? But after that, I imagined I'd be able to reason with her, and then things would just kind of continue as they had. And in fact, I hiked most of the Tour de Mont Blanc with her when she was eight weeks old to prove to myself that I was the same person that I was before, just with a baby. We covered seventy-five miles and twenty-eight thousand feet of elevation over ten days. We used a hundred forty-five diapers. And I'm so glad that I did it. It was one of the best things I've ever done in my life. I was lucky that my delivery was easy and my friend Sarah agreed to go with me. And I made a combination diary and photo book of the pictures that I took during the trip and I was showing it to a friend when I got back and she said, okay, so now you have to tell us what it was really like because the photos look amazing, but it can't have been that good. And I was so confused because it really was that good. I'd spent the first eight weeks of her life trying to get her to sleep. And of course, all she would do all day while we were hiking was sleep. She'd wake up, we'd feed her, change her diaper, get loaded up, walk three steps, change her diaper again, and then she'd just fall back asleep. And when we were at home, we were, we just seemed really out of tune a lot of the time. But when we hiked, our rhythm was totally attuned. The book says I dried wipes before we went and cut them in half. And then we would rehydrate them on the trail by spitting water on them from our drinking bladders. So that part was awesome. But the overall experience of motherhood has really just ripped apart the person that I was and remade me into something entirely different. I do think I'm a better person now than I was before. I certainly have a lot more compassion. I remember being at a boardwalk with some friends of Alvin's who had a child when we didn't yet. And coming the other way towards us was a parent with a kid who must have been at least five, and the kid was in a stroller. And I made some comment about how the kids should probably be walking by now. And I was kind of miffed when Alvin's friend said, we try not to judge other parents too much. And now I can imagine probably at least 10 different scenarios that could result in a five-year-old being in a stroller. And I would try and give that parent a warm smile.

The number seven thing that I got wrong is that I thought I could shape my daughter into who I thought she should be. So this is the book that I made when I was pregnant. I'm going to describe it because this is being released on YouTube and on a podcast episode as well. So it actually has three covers. There's one in the middle, there's one on either side, so you can open the book in two different directions. And the three covers are covered in brown book cloth, and the spines are a cream book cloth. And on one cover, the word me is cut out of the cardboard underneath the book cloth, and the book cloth is kind of pressed down into it. And then when you flip the book over, the other cover has the word you raised from the underlying card with the book cloth molded around those letters. That's probably hard to see on the video. And the concept was that it's a book for Carys with you coming out of me. And on the me side, I would write about how I was feeling and what I was thinking. And on the you side, I would write about the as yet unknown Carys. And in one of my earliest entries, I made a list of my hopes for you. And I'll read you some of those items. So, I hope you'll be smart, or at least average. I hope you'll be one of those kids who shakes people's hands rather than hiding behind my leg. I hope you like to rough and tumble as much as you like to be pretty. I hope you won't cry all the time. I hope you'll be the kind of kid who gets up after they fall and says, I'm okay. And I had seen a kid doing that on a video on YouTube not long before that's where that came from. There were more items on the list than that, and some of them were a bit more charitable toward me and lean toward accepting the child as they arrived. But you can see I had a pretty clear idea of what the child should act like and be like. And now I look back and I see what a mistake that was. I really had no idea how to just be present with a person and allow them to be their whole selves and witness that without having ideas about how I think they should act and be. And in a way, it's not super surprising because I grew up with parents who had a pretty strong idea about what I should do and how I should be. And of course that goes right back to that episode on intergenerational trauma and my dad's lectures. I've been in touch with him recently on that topic and he told me he was trying to help, but somehow telling other people how you think they should be ends up not being as helpful as we want it to be. And that's been one of my biggest lessons as a person over the last decade, and I think I'm a lot better at now at seeing behavior as it arises and saying, okay, this is what's here. Let's work together with that. And I think that's serving us pretty well through stressful times and a number of diagnoses. And now Carys and I have such a strong relationship. Okay, so that closes out the second of our three parts.

Now for the third and last one, which is what I got wrong about parenting itself, right? Not just my relationship with my daughter, but the whole idea of what parenting is supposed to be and who's doing it with you. And so a number eight thing I got wrong is I thought I was going to be the enforcer. And in fact, even before Carys was born, I assumed Alvin would be the preferred parent. And another item on that list of my hopes for you was that I hoped you would love me as much as you loved him. I didn't have any other mental model for how to be in a relationship with a child that didn't involve me being in a position of deciding what behavior was appropriate and that the child should change their behavior to match my expectations. How could I? Everything in our culture says that when there are two people in a relationship, one should be in a position of authority over the other, especially when one of those people is a parent and the other one is a child. The idea that not only could I not discipline a child and that doing so meant that I wouldn't get walked all over was out of the realm of my comprehension. I think RIE really tilled the ground for me here because the idea of treating an infant with respect certainly was not something I'd considered before. But it was Alfie Kohn's book Unconditional Parenting that planted the seeds and then all of my other learning after that watered the soil and allowed the plants to grow after those seeds were planted. Toward the end of the book, Kohn offers 13 guiding principles to express unconditional love for children, give them more chances to make decisions, and imagine how things look from their perspective. And I want to share just a few that really resonated with me. Principle two is to reconsider your requests. I love this one. He says, here's a very unsettling possibility. Perhaps when your child doesn't do what you're demanding, the problem isn't with the child but with what it is you're demanding. And I think this is at the root of many of the problems we have with our kids. Principle five is to change how you see, not just how you act. It's not just that we're avoiding punishment, it's that we see the child doing something that we've asked them not to do and our mind immediately goes to wondering what the child is struggling with, not what we can do to get them to stop. And of course that change is at the heart of the work that I do with parents. A big part of it is seeing the whole family dynamic as contributing to the child's behavior, rather than just the child's behavior in isolation as the problem to be fixed. Sometimes parents feel guilt when they see that they've been contributing to what's happening, but I actually see it as an enormous opportunity. Because you know, if you've ever tried to change anyone else's behavior, how hard it is. Changing our own behavior, relatively speaking, is a lot easier. And that then creates change in our children. And that's why whenever parents are with kids' behavior, my first request is almost always that they start a Special Time practice. You can search for special time on my website for more information on that. Special Time helps to meet your child's need for connection, which almost always produces some movement in the situation. It creates a sense of goodwill and your children start coming towards you a little bit. And then you can do some more digging from there to find out what else is going on with them. Kohn's principle seven is to be authentic. And this means you're a real person, and you have needs, and you deserve to get those needs met. You also have a life outside of being a parent. Most parenting advice assumes that your only job is to provide the perfect environment for your child to grow up in. And it really doesn't care what that costs you. It also means you're not a perfect parent. You're going to mess up. When that happens, you can apologize. Most of the parents I work with had parents who rarely or never apologized when they messed up, and my clients are still carrying the hurt of those interactions with them. Apologizing is not weak. Apologizing gives our kids the model to apologize themselves when they mess up, and it can actually strengthen our relationship. Principle 10 is to attribute to children the best possible motive consistent with the facts, which Kohn says he got from educational philosopher Nel Noddings. And I hadn't realized actually that when I quote this to parents, I tweak the ending. I say, attribute to children the best possible motive consistent with the observed behavior. And this means that not only are we assuming there's a real reason why the child did something, but my altered ending doesn't assume that our interpretation of what happened is the correct one. There is no fact. There's just what we observed. And that gets us out of these dueling facts and into a place where we can each share what we're observing and what our needs are. The final principle that I want to share is number 11, and that is don't stick your no’s in unnecessarily. And of course, he means no as in the word no. So his suggestion to track the number of times children are prevented from doing something they want or made to do something they'd rather not became the homework for the first stage of Setting Loving (and Effective) Limits workshop. And most parents find it pretty enlightening because it creates an explanation for the challenges that they're seeing in their kid's behavior that they hadn't considered before. And from there, we learned some different ways of getting our needs met that don't require saying no as often. So maybe you can imagine me as a parent from a very traditional power over background reading that and thinking, yeah, in general, that's the direction I want to go. I didn't have the skills to do the nuanced evaluation of Kohn's work that I can do now. And the last decade of experience has helped me to build on his ideas with my own. But it all started from that revelation that my job was not to control Carys, but to be in relationship with her.

Shifting gears a bit for thing number nine was that for a long time, I thought couples' relationships were an entirely different animal from parent-child relationships. In fact, when I opened the parenting membership eight years ago, I saw how important the communication was between parents. And I hired the awesome Dr. Laura Froyen to develop the content module for me on co-parenting, because I had absolutely no idea how to work with couples. I've mentioned in this episode and elsewhere that my work on my own relationship was much slower than my work with Carys. It's honestly been relatively easy for me to shift my parenting over from the traditional track it was on and onto the collaborative approach that I now use. My explanation for that is because I didn't already have a decade of experience with her doing things a different way. So we didn't have a lot of ingrained habits ourselves. But Alvin and I had been together for a decade before Carys was born, and we'd never learned how to disagree. Because of course there wasn't much to disagree over when we spent most of our time doing hobbies we enjoyed. And I didn't much mind doing most of the housework, and he was quite happy to have that done for him. But the longer my needs weren't met, the more resentful I got, and I didn't have the tools to communicate that to him. Because of my family of origin, one person was always on top in the communication, and it was not ever me. And that person got to talk as much as they wanted, and they weren't interested in hearing my perspective, and this is how we end up replicating the patterns from our own childhoods in our later relationships. It wasn't until I went through the Gottman training that I realized, firstly, this is almost the same as what I've been doing with kids all these years. And secondly, that in my opinion, there are a couple of key flaws in the Gottman's own method that make it harder to use. I talked about those in episode 209 on how to get on the same page as your parenting partner. So I recruited couples from within the Parenting Membership who were struggling too, and I recorded them discussing an issue as they usually did, and then using the modified Gottman-based tools to truly understand each other and make progress on issues that they had struggled with for years. And it was shocking even to me how fast they could make progress. One couple had an issue that was toxic between them. The husband refused to even discuss it, but after just 10 minutes of his wife listening closely to him with a real intent to understand his experience, he was suddenly very willing to discuss the toxic issue, and they made an agreement in that same session on how to keep making progress on their own time. Coaching isn't appropriate for all couples. If there's abuse, infidelity, substance use, serious untreated mental illness, those situations would be a better fit for couples therapy. But even couples who have tried therapy have found that they can make more progress faster in coaching than they did in therapy. Here's one couple talking very briefly about their coaching.

And that's the bit that I don't think you know normal counselling does. It's just a lot of talking, and I just felt like we've done this talking, we've been around this, we've been around so many times, but what we needed was literally the communication. You know, just felt so much better. Felt very, you know, goal focused.

So I didn't think it would work. I'm quite surprised how quickly it worked. It felt, did feel like a paradigm shift just completely.

Quite amazing.

And this brings us to the final thing I want to share that I got wrong, and that's the idea that parenting happens in nuclear families that contain parents and children. I didn't interact with children before I had Carys. I didn't even like children very much. Why would I want to be around them? After she was born, I thought I'd be the same person with a child. What support could I possibly need? How hard could it be if I was only planning to have one? Our family is three thousand to six thousand miles away, but does it really matter? We hadn't thought much about parenting approaches before Carys was born, but if we had, I don't think we would have chosen either of the approaches our own families had used. And I think it's really incredible that we don't learn that we will need support, and our families may not be willing or able to provide it, so we might not want it. And then what will we do? Ten days after Carys was born, I wrote in her journal, you're ten-days-old now. It's taken me this long just to finish the birth entry. I never quite understood why people say your time is not your own with a newborn, but now I sort of do. I've met few people who don't have young kids, who are willing to be with young kids in a way that creates the village it actually takes to raise kids. In one of Carys's Not School programs, one of the facilitators is in their late 20s. They don't have kids. They have a job. They don't need the money. They're just on the schedule one afternoon a week because they like spending time with kids, and that creates stability in our schedule. So if a parent facilitator is off sick, there are more bodies available elsewhere in the week to cover it. What if I had done that when I was younger? I could have helped create some of that spaciousness for families when I had more capacity, and I could have learned a bit about being with kids as well. And if that facilitator has kids in the future, maybe the next generation will be there to provide support. That's just one model. I've also been around a few retired people and people without kids who have been offered support. But in general, it's people with young kids who support people with young kids, and we don't realize we're going to need that until we're in the moment when we actually need it.

I've been building a village in person. It's really hard work. It's also really amazing. When we're having a hard time, we have neighbors who will cook for us and take Carys to our outings, and we do the same for them when they're having a hard time. And we don't necessarily talk a lot about parenting. Their kids are younger than Carys, or they're grown and gone. And one thing I've learned about villages is that one village does not have to be everything to us. It's fine to have one village where we really connect with the adults over a shared interest and have nothing in common as parents. And then we can have other villages where we can be around parents who do share our values, and we can ask for help and know that the ideas that come up will be aligned with what we want to do with our kids, without having to do all the mental gymnastics to filter out the punishments and the, you've just got to make them listens, and all the other ideas that don't fit with how you want to be with your kids. So that's the last thing that I got wrong that I want to share. I thought parenting happened in one house with this set of parents and their kids, and that was it.

And I found out the hard way. This is not how it worked for most of human history. And in many cultures today, including cultures that parenting research often doesn't study, it still happens that way today. We were built to raise kids in groups. And somewhere along the way, some of us lost that. And we don't find out until the precise moment that we need it, and that we don't have a map to build it.

So here's what all ten of these ideas have in common. Every single one of them, I had to learn twice. Once in my head from a book or a study or a conversation with a guest. And then again, much more slowly, much harder in the actual moment with Carys or Alvin or other people around me. Often when all of my experience and most of those people around me were doing things a different way. You know how you want to parent, but it can be hard in the moment. Those days when your kid is on the floor while you're trying to cook dinner and you're looking back up at the end of that rope because you already fell off it. Those are the whole reason why the Parenting Membership exists. It's not a course because you don't finish it. A course implies that once you have the right nugget of knowledge, everything is going to change. And we both know that's not true. A course can help you when you have one specific problem that the course is geared toward that problem. But if you can't get out the door in the morning without a fight and your kids won't stay at the table for dinner and they stall throughout bedtime routine most nights and you can't be in the car together without one kid wailing on the other one and you're in fight or flight mode at least once a day, there's no course to fix all of that. It does take some new knowledge, yes, but then it takes practicing that and having some of it go well and having people celebrate that with you. And some of it go not as well as you hoped and having people who can help you see what happened and what to try next time. And over time it's not so much that your kids now cooperate more with you, it's more that you're all collaborating more effectively together. And you're doing all of this in your village who are practicing alongside you in the Parenting Membership.

The final person that I want to thank is Denise Suarez. She started out as a Parenting Membership member. She's listened to every episode I've ever made. She knows the resource library better than I do at this point and she's a coach in her own right. So a few years ago I asked her to be our Community Manager. She's incredible at it and she cares so much about our members. When you arrive with a whole array of parenting challenges she knows exactly the resources that will help you the most. There are monthly and annual options for the membership and scholarships available for anyone who needs the support. If you've listened this far you may have already realized you're working on one of these ten issues yourself. That's a good place to start. You can find the Parenting Membership at yourparentingmojo.com/parentingmembership. None of the last ten years happened without the guests who gave me their time, the listeners who kept showing up week after week, and everyone who's taken a workshop or joined a membership and helped keep this whole thing running. Thank you so much. Ten years ago I didn't have a village so I built one and we're still building it one parent at a time. I would love for you to be part of it in the Parenting Membership.

Hi this is Jess from rural East Panama. I'm a Your Parenting Mojo fan and I hope you enjoy this show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful you can also donate to help Jen produce more content like this and also save us from those interminable mattress ads. Then you can do that and also subscribe on the link that Jen just mentioned and don't forget to head to yourparentingmojo.com to record your own message for the show.