Q&A#5: What really matters in parenting? Part 1

Hi, I'm Adrian in suburban Chicagoland and this is Your Parenting Mojo with Jen Lumanlan. Jen is working on a series of episodes based on the challenges you are having with your child. From tooth brushing to sibling fighting, to the endless resistance to whatever you ask, Jen will look across all the evidence from thousands of scientific papers across a whole range of topics related to parenting and child development to help you see solutions to the issue you're facing that hadn't seen possible before. If you'd like a personalized answer to your challenge, just make a video if possible, or an audio clip if not, that's less than one minute long that describes what's happening and email it to support@YourParentingMojo.com and listen out for your episode soon.

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Late last year, I put up a post in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group, which you're welcome to join, by the way, asking what questions listeners have that they would like me to answer in an episode. And listener Roberta submitted this question.

Hello, my name is Roberta Pereira and I'm in New York City. So as parents, we are faced with so many decisions about our children. And I'm wondering what decisions actually matter? So in terms of looking at the research, what are the things are going to have the greatest impact on their lives?

So as soon as I heard this question, the wheels started turning in my brain because it's such a fun question to ponder. What is really important? How could we know? How would we decide? Would it be the same for all children, or different for different children and different families? I also quickly realized that what matters is very different for babies and for children. And yes, there are some commonalities, but a child who is talking and who can say 'no,' and express very different parts of their personality has a different set of needs from an infant, and different things will be important at different stages.

In this episode, I'm going to share what I think are the top five things that matter for children. And in a future episode, I'll look at the same issue related to babies.

So let's start by putting all this into context. We'll take a look at the literature on the topic. So there have always been cycles of advice related to parenting. A while ago, I wrote a piece for my blog on Psychology Today on why people claim that gentle parenting 'doesn't work,' where I looked at the values that parents have held in the past and that they hold today. So in the 1920s, parents were very concerned that their children were too independent (this is American parents of course) and wanted to squash this tendency. A hundred years ago, the trend had reversed and independence among their children was a top priority. And parenting advice from the so-called 'experts' changes all the time as well. Before 2016 The American Academy of Pediatrics said that children under age two should avoid screens at all times. And children over age two should have no more than two hours of screen time per day. And so now the AAP acknowledges that hardly anyone seems to be following this. They say the only screen time that children under 18 months should get is video chatting with an adult, and between 18 to 24 months, they should watch only educational programming with a caregiver, and children aged 2 to 5 should limit non- educational screen time to 1 hour per weekday and 3 hours on weekend days, and for ages 6 and older we should "encourage healthy habits and limit activities that include screens." And that's a lot more nuance. And when you dig into the studies underneath the guidelines, you find a whole lot of ambiguity with studies testing different ideas among different populations, getting different results, with nothing that looks like what parents want, which is to know how much screen time is okay, and how much could be dangerous for children. The short answer on that is firstly, we don't know and secondly is likely to look different for different children, which the research has a really hard time teasing out.

Guidelines have changed on many other topics too. The AAP used to recommend that children under age 3 avoid peanut butter in case they were allergic, but it reversed itself in 2008 after finding that children who ate peanut butter had lower incidences of peanut allergies. And we won't go super far into co-sleeping except to say that the AAP does now finally acknowledged that co- sleeping with infants happens occasionally, or only accidentally, and it recommends that "if the parent falls asleep while feeding the infant in bed, the infant should be placed back on a separate sleep surface. As soon as the parent awakens." Co-sleeping is much more common and much less dangerous in countries where everyone in the family sleeps on hard beds with light coverings or no coverings at all. Australia has decided to promote safe co-sleeping, while, the City of Milwaukee has published ads showing an infant sleeping nestled in a pile of comforters and blankets, with one finger resting gently on it meat cleaver, and the tagline your baby co-sleeping with you can be just as dangerous. The same research is out there for all of these policymakers, but they decide to interpret it in very different ways. And how much of these decisions about things like screen time, peanut butter and co-sleeping and all the other choices we make on a daily basis actually impact outcomes for our children? Well, there are definitely a lot of people who say it doesn't matter very much, but a pretty big chunk of our children's potential is decided by their genes. One very popular way to try to understand how heritable traits are is to see whether twins who are reared by their biological caregivers or other caregivers end up with outcomes that are similar to or different from each other, or to compare identical twins who share 100% of their DNA with fraternal twins, who only share 50%. A massive meta-analysis of 2748 publications, including 14.5 million twin pairs, which included virtually all published twin studies of complex traits found the average heritability of traits is 49%. So parents, you're responsible for the other 51% after the child is born, a big chunk of the rest is determined by socio-economic status. And this has been linked with pretty much every outcome you can imagine from physical and mental health to academic achievement to employment on one side, incarceration on the other. Socio-economic status also affects things like parental education, which impacts children's learning before and during school, and career expectations after school. It also affects the way we interact with our children. So it's difficult to sort out the effects of socio-economic status from the actual decisions we make as parents. Even here, we may find more flexibility than we think. It's possible there's some specific aspect of socio-economic status that confers most of the benefits. If there was, I would think that that would be safety and security. And I think back to the research on the marshmallow test, where researchers see whether children will eat a marshmallow now, or wait 15 minutes to get a second marshmallow. Children who wait for the second marshmallow tend to do better on all the usual measures. But when you bring in socio-economic status, things look very different. Waiting for the second marshmallow is a great strategy when you're sure there will be a second marshmallow. If you're in a household where food is scarce, then taking what food is available now, rather than waiting for the promise of more food later, is actually the more rational strategy. So we might be able to improve the outcomes for the children of lower socioeconomic status by providing support with accessing food. And that may have as much of an effect on the outcome as the family's overall socio-economic status.

But socio-economic status also affects things like a child's exposure to lead and to gun violence and to schools with adequate resources, as well as to things that are more within our direct control, like our approach to parenting and learning. Researchers can't even agree whether socio-economic status functions as a proxy for all of those specific factors, or whether it operates as a single coherent variable that broadly affects most aspects of our daily lives in a way that can't be reduced to the sum of its parts.

I would imagine that it's fairly conservative to say that socio economic status contributes another 10% or so to the 49% that's heritable, and perhaps even more older, that really is an educated guess. I couldn't find any specific statistic on it probably because of the lack of agreement on what socio-economic status actually represents. So if you care about the output factors that the studies that look at this care about, like years of education, and income and lack of incarceration, then earning more money may be one of the most impactful things you can do for your child. Although if you've been listening for a while now, I'm sure you'll be surprised by me saying this. This is where we start to see that this isn't simply a question of telling me what the science says about what really matters, because what really matters depends mostly on our values.

I personally think that the inequality that chasing after socio-economic status has created is not a good thing. High socioeconomic status might be a good thing for one individual child, which is what the studies are looking at. And as long as you do consider years of education and income and the like to be the most important thing, but I see two problems here. Firstly, the difference between people who are classified as high and low socio-economic status causes a lot of problems in our culture. And secondly, I would argue that the focus on achieving high socio-economic status doesn't actually benefit the people who have that high status beyond the status itself. What I mean is that if money is your end goal, then socio-economic status is the right metric to focus on. But for most people, money isn't their end goal. Money is supposed to be a means to an end, and that end is supposed to be happiness. And it turns out the money isn't that good at creating happiness. There seems to be some sort of cutoff point that was around 75,000 dollars in the 1990s. Maybe it's up to 100,000 now with inflation, and beyond that point, most people don't experience more well-being even if they have more money. Writing in 1998, Dr. David Myers observed that "The second $50,000, like the second slice of pie, seldom tastes as good as the first." So once your basic needs are met, what matters much more than money is how you feel about what you have. Forbes's 100 wealthiest Americans surveyed in 1985, when they were probably considerably less wealthy than they are now are only slightly happier than the average person. So setting aside just for a few minutes, the idea that high earnings might not necessarily be a good thing and accepting the premise that it does impact outcomes that researchers consider to be good things, the actual amount beyond that, that you can impact through your parenting decisions may be somewhere in the 30 to 40% range.

And then we factor in the wider context global trends like global warming, which are creating wildfires that have had an impact on me and my family, much bigger impacts on other families. There's the national context of the overall economic situation which shapes whether parents can get jobs that they want, and that pay enough to sustain a lifestyle. They want to have cultural norms that communicate to us that some things are okay other things aren't through TV shows, news, magazines, and books. Policies that make things like paid family leave and childcare available at a price that we can afford or not, are also important. There's the child's experience in the school, the physical structures they interact with, like their homes and their schools, which may be clean and beautiful mansions, or they might have mold and lead paint on the walls. There's the availability of extended family and the values of these people and whether the child is in a cohesive community or not. Then there are the parents, each of which may have different styles, motivations, traumas, histories, and other caregivers who interact with the child often like grandparents, foster parents, extended family, and parenting doesn't just flow down in one direction from parent to child.

The child's temperament and personality have a big impact on the parent and on the relationship quality. Any parent with more than one child knows as much as you try and treat them the same, you end up parenting children quite differently. I saw this when I was researching the recent episode on adverse childhood experiences, which is abbreviated to ACEs, a number of studies found connections between experiencing ACEs and having ADHD. And it's tempting to take that correlational data which says the two things vary together and say that experiencing trauma causes ADHD. And it may. But there's also evidence that parents treat children with ADHD like symptoms more harshly than children who don't have these symptoms. These children aren't easy to parent. They test our patience. We may not get as much rest because we're watching them closely, which can make a short tempered. I'm not saying that all parents of children with ADHD abused their children. But the kinds of hitting that we classify as adverse childhood experiences tends to occur in families, where parents are trying to cope with a lot and children aren't behaving in a way that's easy for the parents to cope with. Obviously, we're getting pretty deeply into guesstimate at this point, perhaps we're now looking at around 10% of the outcomes being affected by all of those other factors collectively, which leaves maybe 20 to 30% of children's outcome that we can actually directly affect through our parenting practices, perhaps a little bit more when we think that we can try to mediate the messages that they get from other people in other places.

I read a lot of books to Carys, and I don't censor anything we read, except I did refuse to read the first book in the Warriors series about four Wildcat clans. Because three chapters in we were both hopelessly confused about which character was which. But we've read all 21 books in the Famous Five series that I read when I was a kid and all 22 books in the Redwall series, which I was really kind of done with it about book 15. And now we're starting the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series and every one of those books was packed with White supremacist, patriarchal capitalist ideas. But we've discussed them so much that she's starting to spot them herself. Almost every time a young female character was mentioned in the Redwall series, we were reminded that she was pretty, but of course, none of the characters outside of adolescence were pretty. My personal favorite instance was when a young male and female character were locked up in the dark hole of a ship when neither of them could see a thing. And the female character was still described as pretty. Carys asked me to insert the phrase 'definitely not' every time the author use the word 'pretty.' And she knows that our culture rewards girls for being pretty and demure, and boys for being brave leaders and she thinks it's a load of crap. So our children aren't just passive recipients of culture. They form their own ideas about it, and these ideas can be moderated by how we interpret the ideas.

There's been quite a bit of research on the associations between Dr. Diana Baumrind's parenting styles and children's outcomes. The results are somewhat expected. Neglectful parenting has almost universally negative outcomes when we look at cognitive and academic achievement, job success, emotional development well-being, social development and relationships and physical development and health. Authoritative parenting, which is the high demandingness and low warmth kind doesn't look great in most studies either. Although the picture is mixed for so-called permissive parenting, with findings across the board from negative to neutral to positive or inconclusive not finding any specific outcomes. Authoritative parenting, which is the quote unquote 'good' kind that balances war within demandingness is almost universally now seen as "good," with only a very few mostly negative or inconclusive results. Of course, I was interested in what were those negative results and I was lucky that the paper I read that did this meta-analysis included downloadable Excel tables summarizing the findings of each paper. And I found that one study had non-significant findings with exercise for girls, another had a non-significant findings on the onset of illicit drug use, frequency of drinking, while a third had negative results on interpersonal dependency. And I don't want to dig too deeply into these results because we've already spent a whole episode looking at how authoritative parenting is not the best parenting style. It's just the best of the four that are commonly researched. And this particular piece of research actually included less studied approaches like concerted cultivation, helicopter parenting, tiger parenting and over parenting. And the summary of those impacts is that for a concerted cultivation, researchers are pretty much only looking at academic outcomes, which isn't surprising given that the whole purpose of that approach is to ensure academic success. Helicopter parenting has an almost universally negative outcomes.Tiger parenting has mostly negative outcomes. Over parenting means being well-intentioned, but excessively controlling, supporting and problem solving for the child and had really mixed outcomes that were overall weighted toward the negative side.

So this leaves us with two uncomfortable ideas that I can neatly illustrate with the experience of a couple of people I've worked with recently who have kindly allowed me to share their stories. The first is Jeannou, who is in the Parenting Membership, and the second is someone I coached for whom I'll use the pseudonym Nadia. So firstly, we'll look at what happens on the input side, right? That's the decisions that we're making about parenting. And then we also want to look at the output side, which is how the person turns out at the other end. As I was preparing for the interview on adverse childhood experiences, I posted in both the Parenting Membership and in the Taming Your Triggers communities, which was running at the time to ask what questions parents had about ACEs, and Jeannou asked, "How do we deal with the fact that authoritative parenting includes behaviors that qualify as ACEs?" When I asked her for more detail on that, and what she had in mind, she said that shaming and humiliation were used as standard parenting tools in her family. Her parents spanked her or threatened to spank her, pushed grabbed at her. Spanking isn't actually an ACE at the moment, although Dr. Andrew Grogan Kaylor said when we talked that he thinks it should be an ACE. And you might remember from that episode that Dr. Diana Baumrind, who did the research that turned into the parenting styles, was an avowed advocate of spanking. And she said, there was no evidence that authoritative parents could do well at being authoritative parents, without at least an occasional spank.

Jeannou's parents did not value her ideas and her opinions. Everyone was in their own little box dealing with all their own traumas, and required that Jeannoue be small and compliant so that she didn't inconvenience them. Her parents' self- medicated with alcohol, sugar and nicotine, shopping, and nobody supported anyone else. Nobody felt close to each other. Everyone was out for themselves. And they were constantly shifting alliances and secrecy around important subjects. It wasn't that her parents were bad. It's just that they were dealing with their own unresolved trauma without the tools or support that they needed. And that experience was really difficult for Jeannou. You know, telling me that her experience seemed pretty normal when compared to our peers. And when she went to university, her friends seem to have had even worse experiences, which further normalize what had happened to her. So that's the input end.

On the output end. Jugnu has done very well. She is Dutch. She now lives in Belgium. She graduated from University. She has a master's in Laws degree and she was working as a consultant to a top firm, providing legal and strategic advice to corporate clients on immigration issues. She's married and she has two children. And I first met her when she joined the Taming Your Triggers workshop. And she had actually thought about joining the Parenting Membership but she decided not to do that.

I was introduced to your work by a friend of mine. And at that time, Parenting Membership had just opened. And that was tough because I was super tempted, and I really wanted to join. I was like okay, this, this sounds like it's exactly what I need right now. But to invest the time, and the money into something that was just for me, was really hard for me at that point, which is so silly. But yeah, that's that's culture for you. So I'm fine with spending money on my kids on my house on my job on my husband, but on me for something that's just for me, and for my growth, that was a really hard thing for me to say. And at that time, I couldn't justify that for me. And then Taming Your Triggers came along, and I haven't had that much more time to, you know, mull over the Parenting Membership And sort of missing that opportunity. And noticing these interactions with my kids, particularly being triggered by something from my partner, and then bringing that to my kids who are just these helpless, beautiful little creatures. And that being so unfair and so jarring with my core values. So then Taming Your Triggers came along as a coffee. This is a workshop. This is this isn't a membership, this is a workshop. I can do this. This is allowed. So I enrolled and registered and joined that, and it was just eye opening to see that I was right in my suspicion that my interactions with my kids had so little to do with my kids. And that just opened this whole world of knowing for me.

So we started to get a hint of what's to come here, right. Jeannou really wanted to participate in the membership, she thought it was exactly what she needed. She has the money, she was willing to spend an equivalent amount on her husband, the kids the house, but she couldn't justify spending it on herself. It was only because Taming Your Triggers was a course with an end date that was going to benefit her kids by helping her tame her triggers around them that she allowed her as she puts it to make that purchase. Now, what's wrong with that picture where a mother devalues herself so much, where she puts herself last in the family hierarchy. Our conversation continued, and we saw just how difficult things were. And I remember your last post in Taming Your Triggers. While we were kind of wrapping up the community at the end of the course, and you kind of said that you had joined hoping to get some new tools, and instead you found something. Can you do do you remember what you told us you found?

Yeah. That's so yeah, I was hoping to get some more tools to make my interactions with my kids smoother. And then I just I opened the garage door and it was filled with festering garbage. Yeah. That was necessary, but not a great moment. Really.

Yeah. And so often we do find that right. So some sometimes parents find, oh, yeah, there's a little pile of garbage here. And I can I can work on that now. And some parents do find they get into it. And they're like, Oh, I had no idea that all of this stuff was there from my childhood, from the ways that I've been conditioned to show up in society now. And I know that you have struggled with burnout over the years. And I'm curious about the intersection between your burnout and the kinds of things that you were discovering in that garage.

Yeah, absolutely. So actually, my, the formal part of my burnouts with me being put at home, that was right after the Taming Your Triggers, protocol concluded. So slightly awkward timing there, but kind of also necessary, because I was being forced to look at that garage and everything in it. And there is no unseeing that. So I'm not the type of person to then just close the door back up and pretend like nothing's happened, and pretend that I didn't learn anything. And I still want to improve my interactions with my children. So yeah, it forced me to really take that pause and prioritize myself basically, over just trying to keep up with everything.

Yeah. And so to the extent that you're comfortable doing it, what kinds of things were affecting your ability to show up and with your children in a way that that was aligned with your values and was contributing to this burnout? What did you find in there that made that so difficult?

What primarily my emotion regulation, so I was showing up with a level of anger, or level of sadness that I found completely inappropriate to show up with with my kids. But just because I had so much so much exhaustion at that point, my prior tools of suppressing no longer operated and because of all of this happened during the pandemic, so that was a really challenging period for a lot of people and just, you know, a lot of support structures that were sort of assumed before then just fell away. So then you're even more isolated and and disconnected and left without any level of support doing. So, it wasn't helpful. Yeah, And I just I wanted to be a more fulfilled and complete individual in showing up with my kids rather than just plowing through the day on whatever level of energy I had left. And particularly because I was often a parental burnout. So I had enough energy during the day to do my work. But then at the end of the day, and in the weekends, I had nothing left over for my family. And I really love my job. But I also really love my family. So that disbalance was quite apparent. And it's, it's really tough because with burnout, your whole problem is that you can't assess your energy balance. So I couldn't during the day, go like, Okay, I have to tune this down to like 50%. So that in the evening, I have something left over, particularly with the type of job I do. That's not it's a very demanding jobs. So that's it, that's not feasible. If if I didn't give my all, things wouldn't get done, and I would be the one cleaning up. So I couldn't tune down on my work. And I didn't have enough left for my family. And that just felt so wrong to me at so many levels.

Alright, so let's remind ourselves, Jeannou was successful. She is doing amazingly well according to most of the indicators that researchers use. And inside, she was falling apart. She was in full on burnout, she took a long leave of absence from work to recover. She joined Taming Your Triggers, because she wanted to find a few new tools to help her deal with her children's difficult behavior. And instead, she finds his whole garage full of festering garbage. And yes, some of that garbage is related to things that were happening then with the lack of support during the pandemic and how hard she was working in an environment that did not support her in prioritizing family. But a lot of it was much deeper than that. A lot of it goes back to her own parents who were successful authoritarian parents, who raised a successful looking daughter who felt anything but successful on the inside. And it was shared in our community that she doesn't really do anything playful ever.

One time she wrote a comment on a post about play, she said, "All My hobbies are productive: knitting, writing, baking. I'm particularly envious of kids finding joy in their bodies, toddlers just learning to stand and taking immense joy and bouncing on their feet. I think that's one of the coolest things. I so miss that enjoyment in just moving my body and standing in all of it. My time feels like gold, so I shouldn't waste it. It's a journey to allow myself the humanity to just exist, to have just my existence be enough to be worthwhile to have intrinsic worth, I still find it a bit yucky to think about for too long. Although it's empowering in the good moments. That perspective is gradually giving me permission to be unproductive sometimes, but I still feel guilty about it afterwards most of the time."

So when we're thinking about what really matters in parenting, we have to consider both ends of this question. We have to consider what really matters among the things we can actually affect. And we also have to consider what we want to be acceptable outputs, which is how we know we will be successful. Because I know Jeannou is not alone. It's very common among the members of my communities to find themselves in something of a reckoning, asking: is this it? I've achieved the education and the job and the house and a family. So why do I feel so empty inside? I know some of you will be listening to this and thinking: "But I do want my child to do well in school and go to a good college and have a good career and be able to buy a house and get married and have children." And I hear that. And I also know that many of you want more than that for your children. I know I do. And if we want our children to feel fulfilled, and to be happy in themselves without needing a degree from a specific university, or a high paying job in a specific field, or a huge house, but just in being themselves, and if we want them to be in relationships where they feel truly equal to their partner, and to have an intrinsic sense of their own worth, so they can sit still doing nothing and not feel guilty about it, and to have a deep sense of joy in life, and see the suffering and be able to cope with the suffering, and to do work, so hopefully there'll be less suffering in the world and more joy for everyone, then I don't think we can look to the old tools that were designed to get us academic success and a job and a house and a marriage to get us there. And I 100% acknowledge this is a value choice. If you value different things than I do, then your list of things that really matter will be completely different. But if the list of things that I value sounds a lot like what you want for your child, then I think there are some things you can do to make that happen.

Before we get there, here is a non-exhaustive list of the things that I think don't matter enough to be worth worrying about for children in the toddler years and beyond. And I've done episodes on most of these things if you want to dig deeper and those will all be linked on the episode page. Okay so we got: how much screen time they get as long as that's balanced by time spending connecting with you on time off screens; whether your child has grit or growth mindset or can pass the marshmallow test; whether your child jumps right into new situations or hangs back to observe first; what extracurricular activities they do, including what sports or instruments they play; whether they do any activities or play any sports at all, as long as they're moving their bodies in some way that feels good to them; whether they learned to read at age two or age six, if they're in school, or even later than that, if they aren't in school; whether they learn a second language if that language is not one that you or your family speak regularly; whether you're a single parent or you're co-habiting or married or partnered with more than one person, as long as you find whatever your relationship you're in to be fulfilling; whether your children get along with each other now, since that may have very little bearing on their long term relationship; whether you go on expensive vacations to places where they will learn about other cultures or not; what toys your child plays with, and I will include here all of the toys subscriptions that claim to match the toys they send with your child's developmental stage, even though children develop differently, as well as all the subscription kits, the aim to teach your child the language you don't speak or about other cultures, or art or cooking or science or anything else; whether you've said an extra 30 million words to your child, by the time they're three or not; whether you do pretend play with your child or not; whether you stop at one child or have more than one, if you want to have more children, or the age difference between your children if you have more than one; whether you give your child pocket money, or how much; whether your child has high self-esteem or not, since self-compassion is a much more useful skill; I'm sure there are probably a lot more things I can add to this list but I will stop here for now.

Many of those things will make some tiny difference. But in my opinion, it's going to be so tiny, it really is not worth spending time worrying about just because there's research on it doesn't mean it's important. When I interviewed Dr. Ansley Glipin about whether we really have to do pretend play with our children if we hate it, she told me about all the benefits, pretend play has children. And at the end of our conversation, she said the effect sizes they're finding are small, but it's cheap to implement. So they keep doing research on it, many of the items on my long list will be correlated with better outcomes. But it's hard to know for sure if the action is the thing that's causing the outcome. And for those that actually are driving the outcome, the effect size is likely to be tiny. There are just so few of these individual decisions that can have a real impact because there are so many other factors at play. When I started looking at what I think really does make a difference, it quickly became clear that this was not going to be a directly research-based list, because no researchers are studying the inputs that I'm suggesting. And because the outputs I'm suggesting, aren't considered either relevant or studyable. I'm increasingly finding this is a problem for a podcast that's focused on using academic research. So I'm sort of trying to muddle through as best I can, using the research where that's possible, and being clear with you where I'm relying on my own opinions and ideas and experience.

So here are the five things that I think really do matter in reverse order. Number five, is aligning your parenting with your values. When our values are misaligned, with our parenting methods, we feel crummy. We experience what's called cognitive dissonance, which is kind of a fancy term for feeling crummy. When we believe one thing, but we're doing another, we have to constantly try to reconcile the tension we feel, which takes a lot of mental capacity, which reduces our capacity for other things that are important to us. If you see that beyond the point of safety and security, that money is not creating much more happiness for you, and that in fact, paying for all the things beyond basic safety and security means you work longer hours doing harder work than you would like, and you're doing everything you can to prepare your child to earn lots of money, like buying special toys, and subscription kits and extracurricular activities and tutoring and maybe even private school, then your values and your actions aren't aligned. If you feel lonely and overwhelmed, and wish you had more people in your parenting village, but you're raising your children to do everything themselves, that doing things individually is more valuable than doing them as part of a team, and you're teaching them that leadership roles are preferred over all else, then your values and your actions aren't aligned. We saw that in our recent episode on consent, where our sex education has mostly consisted of putting the fear of God into boys and telling girls not to be alone with boys. And we know that this combined with other factors has created a culture where sexual assault is trivialized. So if we continue to use this approach with our children, but we have a goal of raising people who truly respect others, and who fully understand what consent means that our values and our actions aren't aligned.

Parenting isn't like cooking, where you mix the right ingredients in the right order and bake for the right amount of time and you get a predictable result. You're interacting with a complex other being has who has their own ideas about how they want to live, you can't know that the inputs you provide are going to create a certain kind of output. But we can be pretty certain that if we have a goal to raise children with one set of qualities, but we interact with them in a way that creates an entirely different set of qualities, then we're unlikely to reach our goal. The more we can align our goals with our everyday actions, the better off we and our children are going to be.

Alright, number four, healing your own stuff. And this builds on number five, because it's hard to be with our children in a way that's aligned with our values when we're carrying around our own crap. So we heard in the conversation with Dr. Nadine Burke Harris and Jackie Thu-Huong Wong that the impact that adverse childhood experiences have on us. They affect our mental and physical health a well being decades later. But I know some of you listening to this will be thinking, I didn't have a traumatic childhood. My parents did pretty well all things considered. So why do I still exploit my kids age appropriate behavior? And I coached a parent recently, I'm gonna call her Nadia, and she's given me permission to share this story with you. Nadia describes herself as a very sensitive person, and her daughter has this characteristic as well. Nadia actually had a pretty good relationship with her own mom, although she sees that her mom would blame Nadia for her struggles saying things like: why do you do this to me? And Nadia, and I walked through an exercise where she brought to mind a recent events that she had found difficult that very same morning. She had been running around doing a million things and her daughter who has recently had COVID, and about of gastroenteritis, were saying, "Mommy, mommy mommy" over and over again without actually asking for anything in particular. And I asked Nadia, what story she was telling herself, in her own mind about her daughter, and Nadia broke down in tears as she said, "She's so demanding. She always has been since she was born. I'm crying, because as I say it aloud, it feels so unfair to her." And this was difficult for Nadia, because it touched that place in her where she was perceived as needy and demanding by her own mom. Even though telling someone they are needy, and demanding doesn't come anywhere close to being an adverse childhood experience. It still hurt Nadia. And so it still shows up in those moments when parenting is hard, like when we're distracted by a million things, and our child is feeling sick. And they're looking for comfort and connection. And they're asking for it in a way that we find difficult to receive.

So when we can heal our stuff, we find we can be in relationship with our children in a way that is aligned with our values. And as a side note, I was really intrigued before I met Nadia, because she knows she is very sensitive, she had the impression that I wouldn't be able to relate to her. And I was so grateful for that honest, unfiltered feedback, and we got to talk through it in person. And Nadia realized she got that impression from listening to the show and seeing that my work is grounded in research. And she didn't think that she could relate to me because I seem so rational. And I have a lot of tools. And she said she felt like she makes so many mistakes. And after we spend that time together, she realized the impression I apparently give of not being able to relate to people wasn't very accurate. And that a short conversation actually profoundly shifted how she perceived this struggle with her child. All right.

So once we've looked at ways to heal our stuff, we move on to our third most important point, and that is finding ways to meet both your and your child's needs. This one's important in the short term, because it prevents power struggles in your family. When you're in power struggles, it's really hard to parent in line with your values (number five) because you ended up parenting in reaction to the hurts, you've experienced (number four) or you override their knees because you can't see a way to meet both of your needs. The key to being able to start doing this is to separate your needs from the strategies you're using to meet your needs. In the back of my book, Parenting Beyond Power, there's a list of needs and when you're starting out, it can be helpful to use a list because then you don't end up getting stuck fighting over a strategy rather than meeting both of your needs. So if you're trying to get your child to stop jumping on the couch, that's a strategy that's not on the needs list. When you look at the needs list, you'll find things like peace and ease and calm and one way you can meet those needs is for your child to stop jumping on the couch. But other ways might include you wearing earplugs or you're moving to a different room or your child jumping on the bed or outside. And because you aren't in power struggles you aren't overriding your child's consent on a regular basis, which then means you're going to raise a young adult who can be in consent-based relationships, not only with romantic partners, but also with everyone else in their life. It makes parenting easier today because we feel good when our needs are met so your child stops fighting you and you get to relax.

All right, number two is the important point, working on changing our society. Our Western educated, industrialized, rich, democratic culture is so destructive. We're destroying the earth. And we're destroying the well-being of people who mined minerals and grow our food and make the things we use. And we're doing all that so we can have more moneyand stuff that doesn't increase our well being either. Many listeners have a relatively high degree of privilege compared with the wider population, and especially compared with the wider global population. On average, we have more money and more stuff. And that money on stuff did not protect us from hurt in childhood, just like it will not protect us in adulthood, as long as our basic needs are met. I think back to the episode called How to do right by your child and everyone else's with Dr. Elizabeth Cripps, where we discussed how it's our responsibility as people who have been responsible for most of this harm to the world to work on putting it right. And I also know that many parents feel overwhelmed. So how are we supposed to find time to do this work?

Well, firstly, I think this work happens in ways that don't take time or energy or effort necessarily. When we share cooking or childcare responsibilities with a friend or neighbor, we aren't creating more work for ourselves. And we're creating the kinds of relationships we need to be able to take care of each other instead of paying for the kind of care we used to provide to each other on a routine basis. The second big idea that came up for me in that episode, is that we spend a lot of time both doing things to get ahead and trying to get our children ahead and worrying about things that might happen. All of those things can take up an enormous amount of our time and energy. Dr. Cripps recalled a time when she was spending a lot of time worrying about something that suddenly was wasn't an issue anymore. And her sister said to her, "Well, what are you going to do now?" And Dr. Cripps said, "Well probably worry about something else, I guess." But what if we didn't do that? What if we spent the energy we've been spending getting our own children ahead and instead spent it working to support everyone's children? We could get involved in political campaigns and a behind the scenes role if being front and center isn't our style. The organization showing up for racial justice works in support of organizations led by people of color, and mobilizes White people to work in these causes as well. You can dip your toe in the water by joining an action hour where they'll tell you exactly what emails and phone calls to make on behalf of their partner organizations, and how to do it. At the end of the hour there's no commitment to do anything else. Or you can show up for more regular activities, and they now have a membership as well. As we're doing this kind of work, we have to be really clear. This is not an us-and-them kind of relationship. If we think of ourselves as the privileged ones coming in to save the day, we will fail. And our help will not be helpful. We have to recognize we're doing this work for ourselves as much as for anyone else. For the most part, you and I are not among the most hurt by these systems. But we are still hurt. And when we work to dismantle these systems, we are working for others Yes. But we are also working for ourselves.

And finally, the biggest most important thing that I think you we can do that will really make a difference in our children's lives, is to see them for who they really are. Think back to what Nadia told us about her mom asking Nadia the rhetorical question, "Why are you doing this to me?" Her mom couldn't really see and accept all of Nadia because to do so would have been too much for her mom to cope with. Here's how this showed up for Jeannou.

I recently realized that I don't do what my mother said to me growing up, but I do what she did growing up. And she was a stay at home mom, and she cared a lot and she gave a lot. And her whole life was basically dedicated to us. So now every day that I go to work, I feel like a failure because I'm not dedicating my life to my family.

And as you can hear as a new has not arrived at any kind of mythical state where parenting is easy. But you can see that she's actively moving toward parenting and alignment with her values. She's working on healing her own stuff, and she's no longer in active burnout. She routinely works with her children to find strategies that work for all of them on issues like mourning struggles and chores and the sibling fighting which used to consume every moment of all of their days, but is now much less because our children see that she trusts and honors their needs. She sees them for who they really are, which means they can relax into being themselves rather than competing for her attention all the time. She new told me that her youngest child is a ray of sunshine bouncing into action from the moment that she opens her eyes. She loves to laugh and joke and dance and will drop whatever she's doing to dance if she hears a song that she likes. She's a storyteller. Her imagination runs wild and she invites everyone in. Even though she's easygoing and cheerful, she's stubborn as a mule if her boundaries are crossed, and she will advocate for herself loudly and forcibly. Jeannou sees the difference between her child being cheerful and being a people pleaser, which is where a lot of us parents get stuck. You can be cheerful and know your own mind. You don't have to be cheerful and a people pleaser. It would be easy to see her younger child as the easy one and her older child as the more difficult one since the older one experiences the world very intensely. She feels deeply. She has a keen awareness of her body, her boundaries and her needs. She's moody, she's exuberant, incredibly creative, she's kind, curious and helpful. She is loved and valued by her friends And peers exactly as she is. She doesn't need to self-censor her thoughts or ideas or feelings to deserve love. She receives love for being exactly the person she is now. And what came through to me most clearly in these descriptions of two very different children is how deeply she new sees and values both children for their unique qualities.

I introduced the labels of easy and difficult to make a point. Those weren't Jeannou's words. My impression from working with Jeannou is she knows and understands both of her children and tries to see each of them for who they really are, meeting their unique needs as much of the time as possible, while also meeting her own needs, which is the key to avoiding burnout. Just imagine how she knows our life would have been different if her parents had had the capacity and tools to be able to see her in this way.

Just imagine how your life would have been different if your parents had been able to do this to honestly, I think being seen and known for who we really are is at the heart of the vast majority of our struggles. We're constantly sending the message out to the world: This is who I am. Am I lovable? And we're hoping to get a reflection back: Yes, yes, you are.

I could have used some social skills training in my teenage years so I could have decided when I wanted to fit in more. But what really would have helped me would have been when I sent this 'this is who I am, am I lovable' message out to the world, would have been for my parents or someone close to me to have responded 'yes, I see you and you are lovable just as you are.' Virtually all of the parents who show up in my Taming Your Triggers workshop did not get that message back from their parents, or from our broader culture. And now they feel an immense amount of shame about the parts of themselves that they were told, are too big and too loud and too needy. By working on number four, healing yourself, you're working to make your own life better today. By changing our culture, you're working on all of our ability to send those 'Yes, you are lovable' messages back to all children.

And so I truly believe the most impactful thing you can do for your own child more than making more money, certainly more than any of the other things that have these tiny effect sizes, and maybe even more than improving your socio-economic status, and all the things that go with that is to see and understand your child for who they really are. I certainly work with a lot of parents whose families did not struggle financially. And the parents are still having a hard time today. I also work with parents whose families did struggle financially. And the thing that they all seem to have in common is nobody returned those messages saying 'yes, I see you and you are lovable as you are.'

So that is my list of the top five things that I think really matter. Your list may be different because your values are different. And that's okay. You'll still be working to bring your parenting in line with your values. So you'll still be on my list either way. Roberta I'm sure this is not the answer you were hoping to get and I'm sorry that the research can't give us the answer that you want, but I hope this will be helpful. Anyway. I look forward to continuing the conversation with you and others in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. You can find the references to all of the other episodes I mentioned today as well is the peer reviewed papers at YourParentingMojo.com/whatmatters.

If you'd like Jen to address the challenge you're having your parenting, just email your one minute video or audio clip to support@YourParentingMojo.com and listen out for your episode soon.