Parenting Beyond Power: How to Use Connection and Collaboration to Transform Your Family--and the World - Softcover

Lumanlan MS MEd, Jen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1632174480 ISBN 13: 9781632174482

Verlag: Sasquatch Books, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

“I’m in love with this book! It illuminates the forces that make parenting so difficult, and helps us develop better relationships with our kids—and ourselves.”
—Hunter Clarke-Fields, MSAE, author of Raising Good Humans

Parenting is hard. But when we replace conventional parent-child power dynamics with collaboration, family life gets easier today—and we create a better world for all of us in the future.

When we see our children stalling, resisting, having tantrums, using mean words, and hitting, we want to just make it stop. But conventional discipline methods like time-outs, countdowns, and “consequences” teach children that it’s OK for more powerful people to control others—a lesson they take out into the world. This is how we learned White supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism from our parents—and we will replicate this with our children unless we make a different choice.

Research-based parenting educator Jen Lumanlan offers a simple yet revolutionary framework for rethinking our relationships with children. This new approach helps us to look beneath challenging behaviors to find and meet children’s needs, and ours too—perhaps for the first time in our lives. It involves empathetic listening, understanding feelings and underlying needs, and problem-solving with our children to find solutions to conflicts that work for everyone.

Family life becomes radically easier in the short term because behavior problems tend to melt away. In the long term, we’ll raise children who confidently advocate for themselves and treat others with profound respect.

Includes sample scripts, flowcharts, and resources to help parents learn and implement this new approach.


—"The compassionate guidance will be a boon to parents eager to move away from punitive child-rearing strategies."—Publisher's Weekly

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JEN LUMANLAN MS, MEd, is the host of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, which uses scientific research to understand parenting and child development. After attending Berkeley and Yale and following a traditional career path, Jen found that parenting was her toughest challenge yet. She went back to school for a master’s in psychology/child development and another in education, and is a Co-Active coach. Jen connects ideas across all of these experiences to help parents transform their relationships with their children.

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INTRODUCTION: Letting Go of What You Know

It’s no secret that parenting in our culture is really freaking hard, but not for the reasons you think. It’s not hard because of anything your child—or you—is doing wrong. You may wonder how on earth this book could be any more helpful than all the other books you’ve already read, podcasts you’ve listened to, and ideas you’ve implemented. After all, the sticker and star charts, counting to three, consequences, time-outs, ‘catching’ them being good, praise, setting expectations, and giving choices were all supposed to ‘work’, but they haven’t.

On a daily basis, your child doesn’t listen. They ignore you; they “don’t hear you,” even when you call them twenty times; they stall; they resist; they look you right in the eye and do the exact thing you just asked them not to do. And then they refuse to do the things you ask them to do.
You may be struggling to keep your cool through all of this. Perhaps days begin somewhat smoothly . . . but then come the demands:

“I want the green spoon, not the red one.”
“I don’t like these crackers today.”
“So-and-so is looking at me!”

You accommodate these requests for as long as you can; after all, you love your children, right? But eventually it gets to be too much: you feel walked all over, taken advantage of, and just plain resentful. Once meals are prepared, cleaning is sort of done, and the laundry mountain is at least reduced in volume, there may not be any time left for you to do the things you love. Or move your body in ways that feel good. Or sleep.

Conventional parenting advice is pretty clear on what your job is here: it’s to get your child to do what you tell them to do. When your child does what you ask without complaining; doesn’t do what you tell them not to do (also without complaining); plays nicely with their siblings or peers; and fulfills teachers’ expectations at school, then you are a Good Parent. And then you can relax, and maybe take some time for yourself. Even many so-called respectful parenting approaches argue that it’s the parent’s job to be in charge and obtain their child’s compliance—insisting that your way is the right way because young children are not equipped to handle the power of understanding and meeting people’s needs.

Whether we were Good Parented as children, or whether our parents struggled with their own issues while we basically raised ourselves, we probably learned to toe the line, play nicely with others, and do well (or well enough) in school. And either way, the end result was the same: we learned that our needs were not as important as theirs, that we would only be welcomed into the family when our behavior met certain expectations, and that deviating from those expectations would cause rejection and the withdrawal of love and approval.

It may seem as though we “turned out fine.” Or perhaps that’s just the version of us we like to show the world, and underneath, things are not fine at all. We may feel afraid to show parts of our- selves that still seem unacceptable and unlovable—to the wider world, to our extended family and friends, even to our partner. It may seem like we’re a fraud, looking like we’re keeping it together in work, parenting, and mental stability—and if we can just keep up the façade, nobody will find out. We may feel disconnected from our own children, since we spend most of our time telling them to do things and not to do other things and keeping them from trying to kill each other.

This is just what parenting is like, right?

Parenting with Power and Control

Parent Maria grew up in a very religious Australian family where God and Maria’s dad were in charge. The approach of counting to three and requiring obedience on the third count was popular when Maria was young, but in Maria’s house, her parents would count to one, at which time the children would have to agree to whatever was being asked and do it “with a good attitude.” With eight siblings younger than her, Maria’s role in the family was to keep the peace, making sure nobody upset her parents, who were struggling with their own mental health challenges. Any attempt to assert her own ideas about her body, her decisions, or her life was met with consequences, punishment, and shame.
Years later, when Maria’s oldest daughter Isabel was six weeks old, she was already asserting her strong will: she always wanted to be held in an upright position and would cry if her parents held her any other way. One day when Isabel was two, Maria made a plan to take her to the bakery up the road and have a doughnut together. In Maria’s mind, it was going to be a beautiful, connecting experience, and all Isabel had to do was put her shoes on (experienced parents can already see where this is going, right?). Isabel lived by the motto: “don’t do anything for yourself that you can get somebody else to do for you.” Now that Isabel is eight, Maria can look at that attitude and see the amazing leadership skills of a CEO or a world- changing visionary, but sitting in front of her hall closet that day, Maria was The Boss, and those shoes were going to get on those feet, and Maria was not going to be the one who put them there. Cajolements followed; bribery followed; forty minutes later, the shoes were still not occupied.

They never made it to the bakery that day. But Maria didn’t give in! She made sure that Isabel knew who was In Charge. And then Maria realized that she was essentially using the same tools that her parents had used, and that she might be able to reward and punish Isabel into cooperation now but this decision would come back to haunt their family later on. She didn’t want to break Isabel’s spirit. She really didn’t want Isabel to follow in her own footsteps and become a people pleaser who would do whatever she was told as a young child and then rebel in her teenage years (as Maria had done). So Maria stopped using time-outs and “power-over” tools and tried to work with her daughter’s spirited personality, although it was often still difficult.

For several years, Maria coped with these challenges, added a second strong-willed daughter, and figured she could slot in a third child. When her son was born just as spirited as the first two, though, all of a sudden she was right back where she started: constantly in a state of heightened arousal waiting for the next explosion of big feelings to happen, and fawning over her children whenever they cried to placate them back to calm and quiet, which was the only state that felt safe to her.

Parenting Beyond Power – From Fear to Joy

I first met Maria when she joined my Taming Your Triggers course. When she introduced herself in the community, it was clear that she had a good deal of awareness about her struggles but didn’t know how to cope when all three children were screaming at her at the same time. Using the exact tools that you’re going to learn in this book, Maria realized that she is not responsible for other people’s feelings, that she can identify her needs and make requests to get them met, and meet her family members’ needs as well.

Her relationship with Isabel has utterly changed. A few years ago, their morning conversations would go like this:
Maria: “Get dressed.”
Isabel: “No.”
Maria: “Get dressed.”
Isabel: “No.”

After we started working together, Maria sat down next to Isabel one morning and gently asked:...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sasquatch Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1632174480
• ISBN 13: 9781632174482
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar