Transcript of “Caring for Our Children and Ourselves in Tragic Times”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be talking about caring for ourselves and our children in times of crisis, like this crisis that our whole world seems to be in right now. And I hope what I have to say also applies to crises in our personal life, in our communities. How do we care for ourselves while caring for the greater suffering of others? How do we find our way when it’s all so overwhelming? I’m no expert, so I can only humbly share what I’m learning from others who are, and what I’ve discovered for myself that helps me, and also some specifics for helping our children.

So, the reason this is very focused on us is because we are our children’s number one, as their parents or caregivers. When we become parents, we take on an enormous responsibility that challenges us to our depths, brings us lots of pain, but also enormous joy. Our power and influence over these younger people is undeniable and it’s unrelenting. It’s a job that only we can do, we’re it. We’re their baseline, always. The baseline for our children’s well-being is ours. That can be daunting, I know. And as I brought up in the intro, I know some things about caring for children; I don’t know as much about caring for ourselves, and I’m learning. So I’m going to share what is helping me and also what I’m learning from people who are experts on this topic.

And on that note of learning from others, I’m learning that I have to be discerning about the input that I’m receiving. And when we’re taking in information and perspectives, to keep the focus on feeds that feed us, feed our spirit rather than draining us. And maybe that’s not being on media at all. There’s so much misinformation, so much rage and hate. So whichever perspectives we’re letting in and giving our attention to, I’m learning that for me at least, it’s important to keep checking in with myself and keep assessing: Is this fueling my empathy and compassion, or is it draining it? It’s really okay to not be glued to the news 24/7, especially if we’re caring for young children—which I’m not anymore, my children are adults. Still, I’m creating boundaries for myself around the sources that I follow and I’m limiting the times that I check in. And, as you all know better than I do, we can still support a particular voice, a person, or a page by following them and then muting them, maybe, and checking in when it works for us. So, I’m learning to use the media, not look away from it, but use it in a manner that I can digest and that helps me to be in the place that I want to be for the people I care about, so that I can be of service in some way.

And then I recommend also focusing on what we can do, who needs us most, which is our child, and accepting those limitations. Our priority has to be this job that only we can do, which is raising a secure child, raising a compassionate problem-solver, and a future peacemaker. This is the biggest gift that we have the power to bring to the world.

So, focusing on that, and then from there, are there ways that we can be of service?

Children, they give us this gift in all challenging times, times of crisis, this gift of the mundane. They still have all their ordinary needs and feelings. They still need to cry over—seemingly, comparatively—small things, they still need to play and laugh and be silly with us. They still benefit from the reliable daily routines that we’ve developed with them. So I would try to allow for this healing gift and welcome it. It’s good for us, and it’s good for our kids. Yes, it’s normal to feel guilty for the many privileges in our lives, the privilege of our life, the privilege of our safety. And sometimes, yes, our feelings of guilt are a sign that there’s something more that we can do and want to do, there are changes that we can make. But guilt alone doesn’t affect us or anyone positively. It drains, it hurts. So what I try to do is—and I have a lot of guilt, believe me—I try to turn my guilt into gratitude and, from there, empathy and compassion. I don’t always succeed at that, but that’s my aim.

And speaking of sources that feed us, I want to share some very wise words from one of my favorite sources, which is Susan David. She’s the author of Emotional Agility, she’s been a guest on this podcast, and she has a newsletter that I could not recommend more, it’s at susandavid.com. You can sign up for a free newsletter. And here are some thoughts that she shared this past week. I’m just taking an excerpt, so this isn’t the whole piece. You’ve got to go sign up for yourself to see it. Now I’m direct quoting her:

So how do we protect ourselves—and our ability to be compassionate—in a world that seems to be asking more and more of us each day? It’s crucial to recognize that “empathy fatigue” or “compassion fatigue” does not arise from having “too much” compassion or empathy. In fact, when we reduce empathy or compassion in the face of exhaustion or burnout we’re likely to actually perpetuate burnout rather than reduce it, because we numb our natural tendencies to connect and commune with others.

So instead of trying to blunt our inclination towards empathy or compassion, it can be helpful to think about how to enhance emotional regulation skills, including self care, setting boundaries, and recognizing what is within our sphere of influence and what isn’t. Remember that in order to maximize our compassion for others and reduce our risk of burnout, we must also show compassion to ourselves. None of us can do everything for everyone. None of us can eliminate pain from the lives of the people we love. But all of us can do something, and accepting our own limitations is integral to a compassionate life.

So, none of us can eliminate pain from the lives of the people we love, but we can connect. We can connect with them to bring compassion to them and ourselves. So if you’re blessed to have people in your lives that do need you, maybe even outside of your children, people for you to be with, commune with them, especially in times like these.

Here are some other things that I do. I cry. Lately, I’m crying at least once a day. And it’s so interesting to me that I still experience this moment of resistance. It’s like this little wall of resistance, this voice saying, Oh, don’t do this. It’s going to make you feel bad. Don’t give into this. But yet, just as with our children, it never does. It releases something that allows me to feel a little bit better, a little clearer, a little more connected to my humanity, vulnerable and therefore open to others. I mean, I’m a crier. If you’re not a crier, then maybe there are some other ways that you can allow yourself to release your feelings. In healing ways, not ways that actually end up making us suffer more like when we’re enraged and then we feel guilty about that or regret that. We have to keep caring for ourselves, loving ourselves. It’s crucial for caring for our children.

Now, how do we talk to our children about our feelings? Like, say we are crying. And how do we talk to them about what they may be hearing or seeing? First and foremost, listen. To their perspective, to their questions, their feelings. Then, to the questions they have, offer honest, simple, age-appropriate responses and explanations. “You see me crying. I’m feeling sad because people are fighting and hurting each other, and I wish there was something I could do to help them make peace.” Another gift of being able to be honest with our children is that it affirms us, it helps us get our center and express how we’re feeling.

And saying, “I’m feeling sad,” it’s this small adjustment from saying, “I’m sad.” That’s a tendency that I still have, to have the feeling be almost my identity in that moment. But this is something I also learned from Susan David, to give yourself that distance as a person from the feelings. It’s a perspective that helps us remember that feelings pass through us, they are not stuck places. They have a beginning, middle, and end, as Magda Gerber said. So right now, I’m feeling sad. Susan David even says sometimes to say to ourselves, “I’m noticing that I’m feeling . . .” Even giving it a little more distance so that we can not only have a healthier relationship to our feelings, but understand them. It takes that little bit of distance to understand it instead of being just totally absorbed in and overwhelmed by it.

And then with children, we always want to do what I’m always harping on in this podcast: encourage them to express their feelings, or not. Maybe they don’t have what we would expect as feelings about a situation. Just encourage them to express it in whatever way they do, or not express it if they haven’t processed it enough yet. And of course, if we are in or near danger ourselves, we want to remind children with as much confidence as we can muster, “I’m here to keep you safe,” along with welcoming their feelings.

And we can model for our children, with them and with others, small acts of kindness. Here’s more from Susan David’s newsletter. She says:

The beautiful thing about compassion is that it’s a practice we can all develop. One way to become more compassionate is to notice moments in your daily life when you’re inadvertently withholding compassion. It’s easy to get so stuck inside our own heads that we miss opportunities to care for ourselves and others. We move through the world on autopilot, failing to realize the small ways we can contribute: taking on an extra household chore to support an anxious spouse, calling a lonely friend who just moved to a new city. These simple gestures may not feel heroic, but compassion doesn’t require us to be heroes. It just asks us to be aware of what we can do for others while honoring what we must do for ourselves.

And now I’d just like to end this with a prayer for the Middle East conflict by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Justin Welby:

God of Compassion and Justice,

We cry out to you for all who suffer in the Holy Land today.

For your precious children, Israelis and Palestinians,

Traumatized and in fear for their lives;

Lord, have mercy.

For the families of the bereaved,

For those who have seen images they will never forget, 

For those anxiously waiting for news, despairing with each

passing day;

Lord, have mercy.

For young men and women,

heading into combat,

bearing the burden of what others have done and what

they will be asked to do;

Lord, have mercy.

For civilians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, that they

would be protected and that every life would count and be

cherished and remembered;

Lord, have mercy.

For the wounded, and those facing a lifetime of scars,

for those desperately seeking medical treatment where there

is none;

Lord, have mercy.

For medical and emergency personnel, risking their own

lives to save those of others;

Lord, have mercy.

For those who cannot see anything but rage and violence,

that you would surprise them with mercy, and turn their

hearts towards kindness for their fellow human beings; 

Lord, have mercy.

For people of peace, whose imagination is large enough to

conceive of a different way, that they may speak, and act,

and be heard;

Lord, have mercy.

Mighty and caring God, who promised that one day, swords

will be beaten into ploughshares, meet us in our distress,

and bring peace upon this troubled land.

Amen.

Thank you for listening. We can do this.

The post Caring for Our Children and Ourselves in Tragic Times appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Problems with Punishments (Described by a Parent Who Used Them) with Michelle Kenney”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Michelle Kenney coaches parents who seek more calm and peace at home and want to move away from yelling, threats, and punishments into more connection. And as a self-described former yeller, recovering perfectionist, and reformed control freak, Michelle certainly understands the problems our punitive methods can cause, and the solutions, and also how to help others navigate the challenges of transforming their approach as she has done. I’m delighted to welcome her to share with us today. Michelle hosts the popular parenting podcast Peace and Parenting, and she’s the author of an insightful new book, Unpunished.

Hi, Michelle. Welcome to Unruffled.

Michelle Kenney: Hi, Janet. Thank you for having me. It’s so nice to be here.

Janet Lansbury: It’s really nice to meet you this way. You have a book, a new book out called Unpunished, and is that your first book?

Michelle Kenney: Yep, it’s my first book.

Janet Lansbury: So often we talk about the how in terms of parenting without punishments, gentle parenting, respectful parenting, conscious parenting. But we don’t often talk as much about the why. And that’s what I wanted to get into because you’ve had experience where you were punishing your children, right?

Michelle Kenney: Yes. I was a teacher and way back when, when I became a teacher, we really learned to reward and punish our students. And when my kids weren’t behaving, my oldest especially, I thought, I’ll just reward and punish her and then she’ll just whip into shape. And that didn’t work. She was not having it. And so we struggled for a long time before I finally decided that I needed to change things.

Janet Lansbury: Can you talk about how you realized it wasn’t working and what the effects were that you were seeing in her?

Michelle Kenney: Yeah. So I think the tipping point, and I talk about this a lot, is that she and her sister, who are three years apart, they were probably like two and five or three and six, and they were in the pool. And my oldest took my youngest and held her under the pool water. And I had to dive in and get them both and get them out, all of us screaming and yelling and me terrified that something terrible was going to happen. And at that moment I finally said, I have to change things because these are just kids and they’re obviously not responding to the way in which I’m coming to them. So in that moment I just said, I need to find something new. And I went on a rampage to change the way in which I was parenting them because I felt like we were on a really bad path.

Janet Lansbury: Did you feel like your older daughter was trying to get your attention with this kind of behavior? Like an unconscious call for help or, you know, I have all these feelings about having a sibling. Which happens, as we know, there’s a lot of feelings that that older child has to process around the situation. And if they don’t feel safe to process them with us, then it just gets all bottled up inside them and it can become rage or sadness or the whole gamut of emotions.

Michelle Kenney: I think that was the beginning of it. I think she displayed with aggression right away when she had a baby sister. And I think what exacerbated that aggression was my reaction to her aggression. So I started to really come down hard on her, correcting and reprimanding and sending her to timeout and really coming down hard on her because of my own fear that she was going to hurt her sister. And then also tied into my own sibling relationship, that wasn’t very good growing up. And so I was in this place where, if I didn’t get it to stop, they were going to grow up and have a horrible relationship. So, my own triggers. And I think she was playing out the relationship she and I shared on her sister. That she really was angry with me, but taking it out on Pia.

Janet Lansbury: Well, let’s shoot back to before Pia then, when it was just, what’s your older daughter’s name?

Michelle Kenney: Esme.

Janet Lansbury: Esme. So when you had Esme and when she became a toddler and started to have pushback behavior or whatever you want to call it. So that’s when you started using punishments with her?

Michelle Kenney: I did, but it was like she didn’t really push back. We had a pretty good relationship. She was able to follow directions and do as I asked, and really fell into line, so to speak, right up until right before I had her sister. And so I didn’t have a lot of experience with her really pushing the boundaries or trying out her own free will or anything, until her sister came. That was really the precipitous of it.

Janet Lansbury: Well, what did you mean about your relationship, that she was acting out your relationship with her sister?

Michelle Kenney: I think after her sister was born, our relationship —mine and Esme’s— changed. And I really became more punitive with her and more aggressive and more corrective. And so I think that was really hard on Esme. She didn’t know what to do with those feelings and she knew she couldn’t get them out with me because I would just punish her. And so she was playing out that dysregulation, for lack of a better word, with her sister.

Janet Lansbury: That’s what I thought. But then I thought maybe there was something in your relationship before that, that you thought that she was expressing through her sister.

Well, the situation that you have is, in my experience, very typical and instinctive. Especially when you had a child who didn’t show much resistance and everything was going along smoothly. And then you see this other side of them. I experienced this with both my children in different ways. You see this other side to them and it scares you and it brings up all these feelings of your own sibling issues or whatever. It’s so hard not to start bagging on that child or getting very stern with them. Because we’re shocked, right? It’s like, I never saw this side of you before. And it’s a side that comes from a lot of fear and hurt on their end, but it’s really hard to see that because they just can seem evil.

Michelle Kenney: Yeah. This loving, sweet, adorable kid who I love to the bottom of my heart is pinching and squeezing and hitting my baby. And you think in your head, This has to stop and I don’t know what else to do, so I’m going to get aggressive.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, right. Then that taps into our fear: What have I created here? What’s going on?

Michelle Kenney: And I think too, for me, when we brought Pia home, Esme said, the first day, she said, “She has to go live with the neighbors because she’s taking all my people.” And I think in some instances I felt like I’ve ruined my oldest daughter’s life by bringing this baby into her life because she feels so displaced. And so I didn’t know how to rectify it all in my head.

Janet Lansbury: She actually verbalized it?

Michelle Kenney: Yeah.

Janet Lansbury: Wow. That’s pretty amazing.

I have two older sisters and one younger one, so I know what it’s like to be the younger and the older. And when the oldest one —who is an intense, strong personality— when my mother came home—and my mother had c-sections with all of us, so she was in the hospital for a bit. And when she came home with second older sister, the oldest one was only 15 months. And my mother said that she turned her head away from her, she just did this very deliberate, I can’t look at you with this baby. And it’s so heartbreaking.

Michelle Kenney: Yeah. You know, I think that schism, it lasts, it doesn’t really go away very quickly there. That hurt is there.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. Because then you’re seeing this baby being taken care of and all this physical attention and the nursing and everything. It’s a hurt that just keeps flaring up because it’s right in front of you. And what you were talking about there sounds like another thing that I remember feeling, which is our own sadness around the loss of that relationship that we had with the older child that was nice and smooth and we were a team. And now, we see their heartbreak or maybe we don’t even recognize it as that, but on some level we know that we’ve totally rocked their world.

Michelle Kenney: And it changes. Your relationship changes. I felt the change, I felt more distant from her because I was caring so deeply for her sister.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. Well you have to make room for that other person. And then we feel guilt around that and that makes us even more reactive to the behavior, right? Because we’re not really entirely regulated in how we’re feeling.

Michelle Kenney: And I think punishments play a big role in the sibling relationship, but I think they also permeate, they’re everywhere. They really affect everything in your parenting. I don’t think it just stays in the sibling relationship, but it feels like it’s this hard thing that exists in every interaction that you have with your kids when you’re using punishments. It’s almost like you feel hardened toward them when you’re using punishments.

Janet Lansbury: Can you describe that a little more? What that feels like or how that looks?

Michelle Kenney: When Esme was doing something that I didn’t like, like being aggressive with her sister, and then I came down in this harsh manner, it almost put this wedge between us where I was like, No, you’re wrong and you’re bad and you’re doing something wrong and bad and I’m going to punish you. I’m going to almost retaliate against you because you’ve done this thing. So it made me feel like I was less loving toward her.

Janet Lansbury: And the chasm gets bigger and bigger, right? Because then that’s not working. And then you’re more frustrated and more angry and you feel more like that’s an “other” instead of your little girl.

Michelle Kenney: You’re willing to hurt them emotionally, yeah. Which is hard.

Janet Lansbury: And then that doesn’t feel good to us. And then our feelings of guilt and sadness and discomfort and the distance from this person that we used to be closer with. Even if we just started that with our first child when they became a toddler, we felt closer when they were an infant. And then now they’re a toddler and they’re saying no, and they’re not doing what we ask all the time. And they seem to not do things that we know they know how to do, just to spite us or whatever. But there’s always a reason behind that that isn’t about spite, it’s about their discomfort. 99% of the time it’s coming from their own discomfort, on some level. And then we feel, Oh, what happened to the baby that we used to be able to hug and snuggle and we had this bond with? It feels like it goes away, right? Or that it’s being threatened.

Michelle Kenney: Yeah, it feels like it. You just become distant. You’re not as close, you’re not as connected.

Janet Lansbury: And so how did you see your way out of this?

Michelle Kenney: Well, I went to a school event later that week and we were doing council in schools and we were being trained and we had to sit in a circle and talk about our kid. And I just started bawling, because I was feeling so ashamed and I think stressed around my relationship with Esme. And this woman came up to me and she said, “You should really check out Hand in Hand Parenting. You should check out connected parenting.” And she’s like, “I have a coach.” And I was like, “I don’t really care who she is, just please send her to my house. I cannot do this anymore.” And I was lucky enough to fall in love with that ideology and that kind of started my journey into this world.

Janet Lansbury: So Hand in Hand Parenting, that’s Patty Wipfler. She’s been around forever. And she knew, and I think studied also with, my mentor Magda Gerber. So we have a lot in common. And years back when we were first sort of online, we did some events together, but I haven’t been in touch with her for a long time. But yeah, that approach is similar in many ways, especially in that it values and makes room for the feelings a child has that are really what is driving their behavior.

Michelle Kenney: Yeah. So I became a certified instructor through her program. And her ideology really is, all expression is valid. And that embracing that helps a kid really offload the feelings that are getting stuck, that create the behaviors like Esme had. And once I started letting Esme have big tantrums and being there for her and understanding her and not punishing her, she totally changed. She became a whole new kid. And it was incredible, it was a drug to me. I was like, No, we need more tantrums, we need more connection, we need more everything! Because it was so profound.

Janet Lansbury: And how was it that Patty Wipfler and Hand in Hand presented feelings that helped you to make that adjustment in your own thinking? Because it sounded like you were thinking like most of us do, which is, Maybe my child is doing this on purpose, throwing a tantrum to get something from us. It’s manipulative. Or, This is just another sign that we’re bad parents. We should feel bad about this and we need to make it stop, stop, stop. That’s the focus that a lot of us have just innately: You’re upset, you’re my child, I’ve got to stop you. I’ve got to make it stop. How did you make that transition? Because this process is different for each of us, recognizing that, Oh wait, these feelings are our friends, they’re not our enemies or our problem to fix.

Michelle Kenney: There are a bunch of different things, but I think one of the most profound things, and I think what’s different about Hand in Hand Parenting, is that you’re deeply listened to as a parent. So when you feel that empathy that I never, ever encountered as a kid and didn’t really encounter as an adult too much either, except for maybe by my therapist, when you really feel empathically listened to and that becomes something that you cherish yourself, you realize how to give it to somebody else and you realize the importance of it. So I think the receiving of it makes you able to give it, and it helps you realize how deeply profound listening to anybody is.

Janet Lansbury: So when you go in the class, everyone’s sharing and they’re sharing their own experiences and everybody’s listening to their feelings around what’s going on with their child?

Michelle Kenney: Yeah. It’s something called listening time. And in one-on-one sessions and in group sessions, everyone’s able to share and be heard. We don’t fix, we don’t really try to tell people too much what they need to do, but just kind of hold space. And so it feels good as an adult to experience that.

Janet Lansbury: So they help you see how this is what your child needs too.

Michelle Kenney: Yeah. And when you give it to them, I think this is the other big piece is that I kept thinking, I can’t sit there during this one-hour tantrum with my kid who’s spitting at me and kicking and hitting. This is insane and ridiculous. But I was like, I’m going to try it. And when they come through the other side and you see them calm and connected and feeling better and saying, “I’m sorry, Mommy,” and hugging you and not leaving your side for the rest of the night, you think to yourself, This worked. This helped my kid offload all this crap that was stuck inside of them that they needed to get out. And that’s the gold about it, I think.

Janet Lansbury: I don’t know about you, but I still feel when I’m helping a parent with a child or if it’s my child —my children are all adults now, but it never goes away— this feeling that, Oh, this is bad. I’ve got to fix this, this is a problem. And, poor them, and I’ve got to talk them out of it. That still comes up for me, even though I’ve done this hundreds of times now. But I don’t. Because once you’ve done it once or twice, you have that memory of, Oh yeah, I remember what happened and it was the right thing to do. So just trust it, trust it, trust it. Just let it be, let it go. And it validates you again that that’s the right thing to do. So yeah, it’s amazing. But to me it’s just so fascinating that it never goes away. Those feelings of wanting it to stop, it must be some very primal, responsive feeling that we pass down generation to generation. It’s so embedded in us, you know?

Michelle Kenney: Yeah. I also too think nobody ever let me have feelings growing up. If there were big feelings in the house, that was a bad thing. That should not happen, that has to be squashed. And so I think I really brought that into my parenting. There can’t be bad feelings here. We’re happy and that’s the way it has to be. And I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure that we’re not having any upsets. That upsets are bad.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. So we had that modeled to us. We have not felt that for ourselves, that that’s okay for us to have the feelings. I got to see my mother in action when I had a baby. “Don’t cry, don’t cry. It’s okay. It’s okay. Don’t cry.”

Michelle Kenney: That’s my mom.

Janet Lansbury: So you see it right in front of you. Oh, that’s maybe why. That could be part of this.

Michelle Kenney: And then mainstream parenting still says, Shush the baby. Quiet the kid. That’s still way in our ethos.

Janet Lansbury: I know we’ve come a long way, though, because when I first started sharing online and Hand in Hand was one of the few, and Aware Parenting, Aletha Solter, she’s another one that was a champion for allowing children to have their feelings. But it was not accepted. And we’ve come such a long way. People are writing whole books about feelings and making their whole professional profile about allowing kids to have their feelings. And I think that’s fantastic. It gives me a lot of hope that we’re on our way to this getting more and more accepted.

Michelle Kenney: Yeah, I think we are. You have obviously seen more, but I even see it in the last few years. There seems to be a much bigger awareness around just being kind to your kids. You don’t have to spank them, you don’t have to punish them. And that’s huge for our society.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, it is. And then there’s also the backlash against that, that the pendulum is swinging too far the other direction. You’re nice to your kids, but you never want them to feel bad about anything that you do or make a boundary that they’re going to react negatively to.

Michelle Kenney: I think people don’t want to punish and don’t want to yell and don’t want to do these things, but they don’t exactly know what else to do. So then they end up just maybe placating a lot or making sure everything’s okay all the time and always trying to make their kids happy. And I think it’s because they haven’t quite figured out what to do instead, how to set the limit and allow the feelings, how to have the boundary and be okay with it. They haven’t quite got to that place.

Janet Lansbury: Right. And sometimes that’s a positive because they’ve went this far and there’s just a little more work to do.

Michelle Kenney: Yeah, I think so.

Janet Lansbury: Is that what you find with the parents that you work with?

Michelle Kenney: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of different camps. There’s a camp of parents that, they want to do the right thing, they just don’t know how to have a kind, calm, loving, empathic boundary. The only thing they know from their past is to be harsh. So in default, they do nothing. And I get that. I totally get that. And it’s just an easy fix, really.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. We’re afraid that that harsh part inside of us is going to pop out, then we’re just sort of ambivalent and that makes children uncomfortable, obviously.

Michelle Kenney: I know. And yeah, it is tough. And so I think that’s also why the gentle parenting world gets a lot of backlash is because we see this group of people maybe out there who don’t quite understand the boundary piece. And so many people are like, Well, that’s permissive.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. Which I think it definitely can be.

Michelle Kenney: It can be, very much so.

Janet Lansbury: Can you talk a little about— you brought up before your sibling dynamic that you had as a child— I think that plays in very much to how we feel with these sibling behaviors and how we react to them and the triggers that we might have.

Michelle Kenney: Mm-hmm. I grew up in a house that was pretty punitive and shaming. Except for…  my parents, they really had this hands-off approach with siblings, which I see often. Like, just let them figure it out kind of thing. And so what ended up happening is that I was the older, stronger-willed child, and so I won every fight. I was in charge of everything and I basically just squashed my sister. And so she of course hated me for it. And we had this really terrible relationship growing up. Now since then, we’ve gone to therapy and figured it out and we are much, much closer now, but, you know, I’d already gone to therapy and I’d already figured it out with her. And so I feared so much that Esme was going to be me, and that she would ruin the relationship that she shared with her sister, that it just ignited me to this place of fear. And so I was bringing all that baggage right into my parenting, almost like a direct line. And it was really hard. And because I had two girls and my sister and I are two girls, it was like the perfect storm to be the bad recipe.

Janet Lansbury: I don’t think it’s a natural tendency to just want to totally dominate your younger sibling. My guess would be that that did come from shame and your own fear around the situation. I think your parents must have let you know very clearly that they didn’t think the way you were acting was okay, and maybe they turned a blind eye to it, but at some point you got the message. You were shameful. You weren’t feeling great about yourself, or you wouldn’t have acted like that.

Michelle Kenney: Yeah. I think my dad came down really hard on me and was very punitive. And so, I learned that. I learned how to be punitive. I learned how to get what I wanted by using fear and by using punishment, so to speak. Again, like Esme was playing out her relationship with me on Pia, I was playing out the relationship I shared with my dad on my sister. And I don’t want to say I didn’t know any better, but I was in a really bad place.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. You know, that wasn’t the healthy, happy side of you that was acting that way.

Michelle Kenney: No, it certainly wasn’t. I was dysregulated and having a really tough time in my own relationships in my nuclear family, the other ones. And my poor sister ended up being the fallout from that.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. And that’s a very typical dynamic that I hear a lot about. For me, it was my oldest sister, but she, I know for sure, had a lot of rage and fear and my parents could not handle that at all. They weren’t punitive per se, but they could not handle the feelings. So they let her know quite clearly through their words and actions that that wasn’t acceptable. And so she had to hold it in and act it out in all these other ways and gain control of herself by gaining control of us. And it was a very disruptive situation at home. But I also weirdly related to her, especially when there was a younger one, younger than me. It defined her whole life, really, as a very intense personality, but like brilliant, creative, all these things. And she eventually chose to become estranged from the family.

When I had my daughter and then a second one —and my daughter is quite intense, my oldest one, reminded me a lot of my older sister in positive ways—I was ready for her to have a hard time with the next one. I wasn’t going to let what had happened to my sister happen. And I knew enough then about emotions and what causes behavior, what children go through. And so I took a lot of care to give her the boundaries for sure, but help her find acceptable ways to share with me, for her to feel seen by me, empathized with.

Michelle Kenney: I think too of what you say about your sister, how she was kind of estranged from the family, I hear that a lot. Online, a lot of people share that they can’t be part of their family because they’ve been labeled “villain” or “the bad one” and they have a hard time coming back into that role as adults. And that it’s very painful.

Janet Lansbury: And I guess it’s the labeling that causes the punishing, but then the punishing continues the behavior.

Michelle Kenney: Yeah, it does.

Janet Lansbury: But the great news is there’s all this education out there for parents, though I’m sure it’s totally overwhelming.

Michelle Kenney: Yeah. But I think too, on the positive note, I know now, my daughters are 14 and 17, and the relationships that I have with them is like, it’s a dream. It’s what I wanted, right? It’s what I wished I would’ve had as a kid. And it’s such a beautiful thing when you can get there, having these good, connected relationships where your kids feel safe to share with you and where you still have ups and downs and hard moments and big feelings and all that stuff, but it just, it feels good. And so I know, anyone out there, if you just try to get rid of the punishments and infuse some connection pieces that you can get there too.

Janet Lansbury: Can you talk about what’s different about your relationship with your children than what you had with your parents?

Michelle Kenney: I mean, my kids, I don’t think they tell me everything. Maybe I’m delusional, and I think they probably don’t share everything with me, but we share most things with one another. And I know they feel safe coming to me no matter what, when anything goes wrong and they’re having a hard time, they come straight to me. And it can be anything. And I know they feel safe. And I never felt that way when I was growing up. I didn’t feel safe to go to my parents. I lied. I snuck out. I did all of the things that kids who are scared of their parents do. And so that safety and that trust, it’s beautiful.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. I feel something very similar to that, that I didn’t tell my parents much at all. And I was afraid to, and I thought I’d be judged for most of the way I was living my life as a young adult, for sure. And way before that, I think I got the message when my little sister was born that I have bad sides to me and I can’t trust myself entirely. And I was afraid of how I was going to be seen by them. And yeah, my oldest told me the other day or she was telling somebody else that was over, “My mom gives great advice,” and it made me feel like a million dollars.

Michelle Kenney: That is so sweet.

Janet Lansbury: The sharing is unbelievably different from what I had and the feeling that if things go wrong between us, that it’s not going to be the end of anything. There’s none of the threat that I felt with my mother for sure. There was a threat that she was just going to turn away from me forever if I asserted myself in a negative way towards her. If I asserted feelings that were not positive. And you know, it’s interesting, it’s taken me a long time to even realize all the things, because I didn’t have some really harsh upbringing or anything. I had a lot of love and loved my parents all the way through and just more things come to light as you go along in life. And I don’t know, it’s interesting.

Michelle Kenney: Yeah, when Esme turned 12 and I was doing this work, I was like, This isn’t working anymore. She is out of her mind and I’m going to have to go back to punishments because this isn’t working. And I remember talking to my listening partner and she was like, “No, just stick with it. Just stick with it.” And I kept thinking for that whole year, what if I get to the end of this road here with this kid and this stuff doesn’t work, I’m really going to be upset. And now getting to kind of the end —she’s almost 18— I feel like, thank God I stuck through all of that, because there are hard moments. It’s not always easy, but it works. It does work.

Janet Lansbury: Was she doing a lot of rejection-of-mom things? Yeah. I mean that’s definitely girls with their moms in those adolescent years. Totally. And I think it’s very healthy and, you know, it’s the toddler saying no all over again.

Michelle Kenney: Oh yeah. She was all in her will. That was for sure.

Janet Lansbury: And that’s how they grow more separate from us and more autonomous: I have to reject everything you are to be able to be myself. But it is kind of shocking. I remember that. And then I remember it for my daughter, the older one, it was 14 to 16, like on the clock. She turned 16, all of a sudden she liked me again.

Michelle Kenney: Yeah. They come back. I was like, Oh my gosh, you came back. Thank goodness. I was waiting!

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, you’ve got to stick with it. But it is scary sometimes. Can we trust? And I get that a lot from parents and I really get it. How’s my child going to learn that they shouldn’t do these things? Because you’re helping them not do them.

Michelle Kenney: Yeah. We believe the punishments will teach them right from wrong, which they really don’t.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. Well I’m so glad that you found another way and that you are doing this amazing work, helping parents find another way.

Michelle Kenney: Without people like you and Patty, none of us would be doing this, so thank you to you.

Janet Lansbury: I love this. It’s like trying to sell something that you know works, so you’re not trying to sell it, you’re just sharing it. You’re just passing on what was passed to you that saved your skin.

Michelle Kenney: We keep going, we keep going.

Janet Lansbury: Well, you’re wonderful and thank you.

Michelle Kenney: Okay, thank you. Take care, bye.

Janet Lansbury: You too, bye.

You can check out Michelle’s book Unpunished, along with her courses and other offerings, at peaceandparentingla.com.

And please check out some of my other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. And my books are available in paperback and on audio, No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting. You can find them through my website or on audible.com. And you can also get them in paperback at Amazon and in ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and apple.com.

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

The post Problems with Punishments (Described by a Parent Who Used Them) with Michelle Kenney appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Is ‘Gentle Parenting’ Too Extreme and Impossible?”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Okay, I admit I’m a little more nervous than usual about this podcast because I feel it’s going to be maybe more personal and revealing than what I normally share.

The impetus for this episode came in a recent Facebook exchange that I had with a parent, and the parent concluded “this ideal of gentle parenting is feeling more and more toxic and gaslighty to me.” In response to her comment, I finally had the chance to ask a question that I’ve been wishing to ask for a while now in light of this recent flurry of complaints in the press about gentle parenting. Maybe you’ve noticed some of them. And then I really, really appreciated this Facebook parent’s candid response to my question — my question that was in response to her comment.

I’m going to be sharing these exchanges and some of the thoughts that they’ve brought up for me. I really hope you’ll find this clarifying and encouraging.

The Facebook exchange happened in response to a post of mine from several years ago actually that I reposted called “This May Be Why You’re Yelling.” It describes some of the things that as parents might lead us to yell. Number one is: “you aren’t taking care of yourself.” It talks about self-care, not just the wonderful bubble bath or getting away with friends or a spouse type of self-care, but something more basic and crucial, which is knowing our limits and our personal needs and setting boundaries early, starting even with speaking directly and honestly to an infant.

I give examples like: “if you’re a sensitive person who can’t sleep deeply with a baby or a toddler near you but you’re co-sleeping because you think you should, maybe you’re not taking care of yourself.” Or, “if you want to wean your child or limit their nursing, but you feel guilty about that, then you’re not taking care of yourself. If you need to go to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, but you’re afraid to leave your fussy baby or screeching toddler, you’re not taking care of yourself. In fact, if you feel guilty about any self-care moment, you’re probably not taking care of yourself.”

I conclude: “we all give up much of our lives for our children, but it’s unhealthy for us and even less healthy for our kids to become an egoless parent, neglecting our needs and virtually erasing ourselves from the relationship. We need personal boundaries and our children need us to model them. This is what it means to have an honest, authentic, respectful relationship that will make limit setting in the toddler through teenage years clear and simple. Notice I didn’t say easy because it’s hardly ever easy.”

Oh, and one of the things I share first in that post is I say: “My sense is that we often end up yelling because we’ve actually made the very positive decision to give our children boundaries with respect rather than using punishments and manipulation. We’re working really hard to remain gentle and kind, and yet our children’s testing behaviors continue. Maybe we become increasingly frustrated, even fearful, feeling like we’ve lost all control without any way to rein our children in.”

Anyway, it’s a pretty long post, and I’ll be linking to it in the transcript, or you can look it up. Here’s the comment that I got on Facebook. She said:

This all sounds good on paper but doesn’t really apply in the real world. In the real world, taking a break to the sound of a screaming toddler is anything but a break and will leave you more frazzled. In the real world, tantrums are horrible to be around on a visceral level no matter how many books you read about childhood development. In the real world, many parents have little to no support and no amount of telling ourselves we are capable leaders can curb the sheer exhaustion we are feeling. This ideal of gentle parenting is feeling more and more toxic and gaslighty to me.

Before I share the question that I asked her, I want to talk a little about the press articles that have come out recently. They’re in pretty major publications. Assuming that they’re all written sincerely and not as a pile-on to a trend, I took them quite seriously, like I take everything. They all mention me as part of the problem, and they’re basically bashing the idea of gentle or respectful parenting, that it’s impossible. One of them even implies that there’s this harsh dark side to it all. A couple of the authors who are also parents, it sounds like they’re trying it, but they don’t feel like it’s working for them and they’re saying, “This is too extreme.”

Now, when I read these pieces, the first feeling that I had besides feeling a little attacked, the first feeling I had was I relate to what these people are saying. I totally relate to them. I remember feeling some of the feelings that they’re describing: that I just couldn’t possibly do this, that it was unrealistic, that somehow there was this expectation on me that I couldn’t live up to and it just made me frustrated and want to throw in the towel. I wanted to throw it away. I’m going to talk about the couple of those instances where I felt that way, but I felt like what I’m relating to, and I could be wrong, is this pressure that we put on ourselves as parents.

Some of us are more inclined towards self-judgment, and perfectionism, and it can get in our way when we’re learning challenging things. Learning a different way of parenting than the way that we were raised, breaking those generational cycles even in small ways is very, very challenging. It’s so courageous to even be trying, in my view. And it sounds like this commenter on Facebook was coming from that place too. This is just impossible. You’re expecting unrealistic things.

In these articles in the press, if I was to take a very unnuanced extreme take on those, I could feel this implies that they were maybe suggesting that it’s better to physically punish your children, and lash out at them when you’re frustrated. I don’t think that’s what they were saying, but I wasn’t sure what kind of alternative they were suggesting.

And so, that’s why I was happy for the opportunity to ask this parent on Facebook this question, “What would be helpful?”

Because believe it or not, and I didn’t say this on Facebook, believe it or not, all I’m trying to do is help. I’m sharing an approach to parenting that inspired me and helped me beyond measure. That’s what I’ve been doing since 2009, sharing what I’ve learned from all the classes I’ve taught with parents and children. When I get a little lost in what am I doing? Why am I doing this? What’s my purpose here? I often ask myself that question to focus me and give me the perspective that I need to know what to do next: How can I help? What can I share that might be helpful?

There’s no implication in what I’m sharing that if you’re not doing it this way, there’s something wrong with you or that I expect you to do it this particular way. It’s a very specific way that I’m sharing. I started calling it “respectful parenting” because I didn’t think people would know or understand or want to understand what RIE parenting meant. And also because I was using a lot of my own experience to interpret Magda Gerber’s RIE approach, even more for toddlers than she did and for older children, and all these details that I learned through working with parents.

So, I thought: well, if I say respectful parenting, which is about treating even a newborn with respect, maybe if I use this term, then it will make more sense to people. That’s why I started using that term. I’ve never actually used the term “gentle parenting” to describe what I do, but I noticed that I seem to be part of a catchall of gentle parenting. That’s how people are seeing this, that I’m one of the many people sharing about gentle parenting. I’m assuming that just means this non-punitive, not harsh, not lashing out type of parenting.

Anyway, I asked this parent, “What would be helpful?” And I said, “I’m also interested in the concept of,” quote, ‘gentle parenting,’ which is not a term I use. What does this mean to you?”

I thought she gave brilliant responses that were very enlightening to me.

First, she said:

Gentle parenting to me is the ethos of teaching and disciplining in an empathic way that is never punitive or emotionally reactive on the parent’s part. It sounds so lovely. It’s a beautiful idea to aim for. It’s also crushing to never be able to live up to despite having all the tools and knowledge because we are human and we are wired to be uncomfortable around screaming. We all want to do better, and we even know exactly what to do thanks to the many sources of information out there for parents and yet so many of us are stuck. I’m thinking about your question, what would be helpful? Maybe it’s just permission to be gentle-ish, capable-ish.

Wow. She really says it all there, and it helps me understand that I’m coming across as this voice of authority that’s telling you you should do it this way, and if you’re not, there’s something wrong with you.

Well, I’m a very imperfect messenger, no doubt, and I also have the problem of… Well, it’s not a problem. It’s a positive thing, but I forget that I’m not still this underground voice sharing for the couple hundred people that would follow me in the beginning where I could really speak my mind and be a little bold and share unique ideas without it being taken as that I’m any kind of voice of authority.

Well, to my surprise, a lot of these ideas that I’ve shared that were very weird to people, in the beginning, are now almost mainstream, almost conventional. Not because I did it all, but I think I had a part in it and it’s just happened that way. That is amazing to me, that ideas like you talk to a baby like a person, that you allow children to have all their feelings, that you don’t try to fix or squelch them, that a child can have ideas about what they should be doing in regard to play or exploring or spending their time even as an infant… Not all of these ideas, but a lot of them are now accepted and that’s fantastic. With it comes a responsibility that I don’t always take, which is, oh, so I actually have the power for someone to feel like they’re not living up to something that’s just supposed to be this way.

I also want to say though that everything this parent said in her comment and a lot of the things in these articles as well, I personally have felt in my early days in learning this approach.

This is one of the benefits of getting older. Between just aging and the work that we do on ourselves or even work that naturally evolves on ourselves, we become much more self-forgiving. I do, and these really strong judgmental voices that were always in my head when I was younger have very much weakened. They still have their say, but it’s not overwhelming, and other voices will usually win out.

I started taking RIE classes with my daughter when she was an infant. When I was first learning this, everything I was being taught was different than what I’d been doing pretty much. I took all of that as oh, I’m wrong. I’m wrong. I’m wrong.

Here I was putting everything into trying to be a new mom, and now this must mean I’m failing, failing, failing because I’m learning all these things that I could have done that I wasn’t doing. There was that to get over. At the same time though, I was so compelled and inspired to stick with it, and luckily that won out.

And then later on when my daughter became a toddler, I remember… Okay, this is 28 years ago, so we know that this had a big effect on me because I can totally remember the moment. I said to my teacher who wasn’t Magda, but another teacher who will go nameless, I said, “What do you do when you just find yourself yelling?” And my teacher said, “You’re yelling?”

And the way she said it, I believe she was probably just surprised. She didn’t have children at that time, so maybe it didn’t make sense to her, but the way it felt was so mortifying. I felt so ashamed. I broke into a million pieces, and I was never going to bring that up again. But what it did was help me to get a perspective: yes, I have a very precocious, strong, powerful toddler. She wasn’t even two yet, but still, why would I yell at this tiny person? What is threatening to me? What is overwhelming to me? How am I not taking care of myself with my boundaries with her that I’m getting to this point?

Once I got over the shame and brokenness I felt, or at least start to get over that, I was able to look at where I needed to grow because I didn’t want to be a person yelling at a not-even-two-year-old. I knew it wasn’t the parent that I wanted to be. It didn’t feel good to me.

So, that happened. But all the voices came to me in that brokenness, in that shame: You can’t do this. There’s something deeply wrong with you. This is impossible. I wanted to throw in the towel, and I feel like throwing in the towel still a lot when some kind of situation feels too challenging. I don’t like feeling uncomfortable or inept less than other people or that I’m not living up to some kind of expectation.

But the expectations weren’t coming from my teacher. They weren’t coming from Magda Gerber. They weren’t coming from anyone but me.

I’m not saying that’s what’s going on with all these people that are complaining about gentle parenting, but that’s my experience. I’m so grateful that there was a stronger voice in me that said: Don’t let those voices win. This matters too much to you. Don’t give up on yourself. Maybe you can do this.

Now in terms of everybody else though, maybe what I’m teaching isn’t what inspires you or feels supportive to you. This is just one style of parenting. It’s not the only one that works. It’s not maybe even the best one for you. These are only suggestions, not rules or meant to be taken rigidly. We have to look out for ourselves in this tough journey, find sources that feed us, nurture us, that make our lives easier and more joyful as parents. We deserve that.

I understand feeling stuck and I understand feeling crushed that I’m supposed to live up to something. At least when I was learning this stuff, it was very unique. It wasn’t so popular. So, it was clear to me that I was wanting to live up to my own goals.

Now I realize that might be less clear and that’s harder, and it’s something that I want to take responsibility for as much as I can.

Yes, tantrums are horrible to be around. It’s really hard to let another person have their feelings. That’s why I’ve written and podcasted about that topic so many times and noted that it will always be challenging. It will never be reflexive for most of us. It just won’t.

But only we can give ourselves permission to be in a process and not perfect at every aspect. In fact, not even close to that.

Here’s the response that I shared with this parent after her comment, which I really, really appreciated. I said:

I hear you. I really do. As I was reading your comment, I was thinking exactly what you said at the end. I was thinking, where is she getting the idea that respectful parenting means never punitive or emotionally reactive? Where is this never coming from? People like me also talk a lot about repair and self-compassion and imperfection. I share what I know helps build relationships and lessen challenging behavior, and I try to share a perspective that can help us feel less reactive. But there’s no implication coming from me that if we don’t live up to this every moment or go through periods where we just can’t at all or don’t want to, we’re failures or doing something wrong. Gentle-ish, capable-ish is exactly where most of us are most of the time. The good news is that gentle-ish, capable-ish is enough to be a great human parent. I understand perfectionism and bagging on ourselves. I can go there myself, but those feelings don’t come from parenting advisors or other messengers out there. Mine come from me.

I want to talk a little about the ideals that she’s talking about living up to. I appreciated Magda Gerber‘s approach and its idealism because I started to see those ideals as signposts. They weren’t a destination even. They were just helping me go in a direction, baby step by baby step. If I didn’t have those signposts, I couldn’t be assured of the direction that I was taking.

But it wasn’t about achieving those signposts or not. It was about the journey, the process.

Yes, there are going to be frustrations and feelings of giving up along the way. Absolutely. But if we keep following these sign posts, maybe there’ll be less of that. There was for me.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being frustrated. It’s that it doesn’t feel good and it’s not the way most of us want to be with our children. It doesn’t feel good to us, but there’s no judgment on the feelings that we have in a process. They’re all just right, because they’re all our feelings, just like children’s feelings are just right. That’s what they feel.

This is definitely not about being robotic or stifled or I’m just fine all the time. No. Our children want a relationship with us. With all of our sides.

Speaking about frustration, maybe it could be helpful to let out frustration at children sometimes. My mother, I don’t remember her really yelling at us, but she would get very judgmental and angry about certain things, and there were two things. One was if we tried to tickle her… Whew! Or if we’d walk in on her in the bathroom, she made it very clear with emotion that those were boundaries that she was not going to allow us to cross, and we didn’t because that was scary.

So this isn’t to say that letting out our emotions on children is not productive. It can be in the short term, I think, but for me, it was helpful to know that we don’t need to do that. We can set the boundary without creating fear.

If gentle parenting is what this parent beautifully describes, which I would like to think, I love that, then it will only work if we have very strong boundaries. Very strong boundaries. I think maybe that’s missing in some of the conversations about gentle parenting, I don’t know, but maybe that is a problem out there that people should rightfully complain about because it’s just not going to work and it’s not going to help those children. Children need boundaries.

I also want to share one more story from my learning days. I’m still learning for sure. But in the early days when I was training with Magda, there was a conference coming up and this other parent and I were going to present a workshop at the conference from a parenting perspective. Most of these RIE conferences, they’re mostly attended by early childhood professionals rather than parents. But we wanted to do one for the few parents that might be there.

When we were talking about this with Magda, I said, “Well, what should we call it?” And she said, “Parenting Made Easier.” Immediately that came right off the top of her head. I’ve got to admit I was taken aback because that wasn’t the first thing that would come to mind for me about this approach that I was learning from her. To me, it was very thoughtful and careful, deep and challenging in many, many ways. But when I thought about it, I could see what she was saying.

And then a few years later when I had a three-year-old and then two other children after that, oh yeah, it totally made everything easier. When I would compare myself to the struggles other parents were having, all this care and thoughtfulness and mental challenge and emotional challenge that I’d faced learning this really paid off. This doesn’t mean it’ll pay off for everyone, or that this is your way, but it did for me.

When I hear people saying, “Oh, this is this impossible thing, and we can’t do it. It’s somehow judgemental of people that aren’t doing it,” I think of that. I think of how much easier this makes everything and therefore more enjoyable. Because if we’re struggling, we’re not enjoying being a parent. But it’s like moving that rock to the top of the mountain so that it can roll down the other side. It does get so much easier. It does.

Whether you follow some of the advice I give, follow advice other people are giving, whether you decide you want to do this non-punitive parenting thing or you want to find your own way that’s different, take a little from this, a little from that, this is your journey. My feelings about parents are all about trust. Just like my feelings about children. Trusting their process, trusting that you will find your way.

Am I the right person to help you? Maybe or maybe not. I trust you to know what works for you.

I think I would love to change the name of this podcast to Respectful-ish Parenting, Unruffled-ish. I’m going to consider that because that’s what I have learned to expect of myself and the best that we can hope for. It’s always an ish. It’s always a journey. Some days we feel it, some days we don’t.

So, I really, really hope that you’ll be good to yourselves and kind to yourselves and trust yourselves and definitely not give up on being the parent that you want to be because we really can do this.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, JanetLansbury.com. There are many of them and they’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in.

And both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon: No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting.  You can get them in eBook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play or barnesandnoble.com, and on audio at Audible.com. Actually, you can get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the link in the liner notes of this podcast.

Thank you so much for listening and for all your kind support. We can do this.

The post Is ‘Gentle Parenting’ Too Extreme and Impossible? appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I’m going to be sharing a success story that I received that exemplifies several important aspects of the parenting approach that I teach, and describes how these ideas are benefiting this family in some surprising ways. The letter talks about trusting a baby as a capable person and accepting their feelings. In short, we could say it’s about, in my mentor, Magda Gerber’s words, doing less, observing more, enjoying most.

The sponsor for today’s episode is JLML Press, which is the company that produces this podcast and also publishes my books, No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting.  They’re available in audio at Audible, in paperback at Amazon, and in ebook at all of your favorite ebook distributors. I’d love you to check them out and let me know what you think.

Okay, here’s the note I received:

Dear Janet, I grew up believing, and still largely believe, that I had the best childhood ever. There hasn’t been a day of my life that I didn’t know I was deeply loved and delighted in. However, I was raised in a conservative, evangelical community where spanking was the norm and sin nature was the engine behind all undesirable behavior, and the goal of parenting was to eradicate behaviors based on that behavior’s desirability to the parent. As my own faith evolved or devolved, depending, I knew what I didn’t want to perpetuate. But that alone did not give me positive alternatives and new tools. I felt like new wine in old wineskins, to borrow the analogy. I tried Attachment Parenting, but it was very overwhelming and seemed yet another impossible standard, another burden falling disproportionately on the shoulders of, in my case, the woman. How could the goal be to have a child that never cries? How can I be human and meet my own needs when I am the be-all-end-all for someone else’s needs, and sometimes multiple someone else’s?

I had read a bit about RIE during pregnancy, but so many articles just focused on: “you have to ask permission to pick up your baby and that’s ridiculous.” I missed the message. When I really dug in, it was truly a revelation. I really got into it before a cross-country flight to see my parents, and I was so concerned about how I would entertain, placate my baby for that long. Your podcast gave me all the tools and confidence I needed and helped me set appropriate expectations, not just for my baby, but for myself as well. And we had a sublime flight. I observed and let her explore and experience her surroundings, and was blown away time and time again, how long she would spend examining something as simple as the seatbelt buckle or tray table, or overhead lights.

Beyond that, it was the final piece in my faith journey because it gave me a developmentally appropriate lens through which to view my child. It has challenged me to better understand, manage and express my own needs and emotions, which, of course, makes me a better friend, spouse, coworker, and human. It has allowed me to be more compassionate. Even the conversations I had with my daughter when she was screaming in her car seat (“It sounds like you’re frustrated. Maybe you don’t like being stuck in your car seat. It’s hard to feel restricted or have to stay in our seats when we want to get out. As soon as it’s safe to do so, I’ll get you out. Until then, you can keep telling me how you feel about being in your car seat. I am a safe place for you to share your feelings, and that means I won’t be swayed off course, controlled, or angered by your feelings. You can always share them with me.”) Obviously, I’m saying this to her to reinforce it to myself. But having these little conversations has helped me regulate my own emotions and help me stay focused on the end goal, not the momentary frustration or that every-cell-in-your-body-is-screaming-to-“fix”-the-problem-when-your-baby-is-crying thing.

The difference between seeing tantrums as a behavior to punish versus seeing it as an outcry of emotion or overwhelm that is deserving of our presence, love, and compassion… that’s a paradigm shift, the positive implications of which are limitless.

You and Magda have given me such a gift: the ability to enjoy parenthood in a way I would not have otherwise been able to. And not only that but tools to care for my own childhood self and the tools to cultivate my own emotional maturity where it was lacking. This has benefited me, my child, my marriage, and all my relationships. It has also become a great way to connect with other parents. “Oh, you listen to Unruffled too?” Immediately, we’re at ease, knowing we don’t have to do “performative parenting” because we’re coming from the same philosophical starting point and won’t be judged because we aren’t running after our toddler constantly, but rather letting them explore at their own pace, navigating their own social dynamics in a safe but not micromanaged way. I could go on and on, but I feel I’m already past the point of TL;DR! Thank you again.

I am deeply touched by this note and so grateful to this parent for taking the time to share with me, especially these details, which I hope will be helpful for other parents listening.

The first thing I want to do is clarify a misconception that she brings up. I try to understand where this comes from. It’s such a common misconception that comes up all the time in various articles. It’s this idea that we are suggesting to ask permission to pick up a baby or ask permission to change a baby’s diaper. She wrote, “You have to ask permission to pick up your baby and that’s ridiculous.” And yes, it is ridiculous because a baby cannot answer that kind of question. And that’s not at all what we’re saying.

What we’re saying is to give your baby a bit of warning, to open up to them the invitation to participate in every aspect of their life. So I’m not just going to pick up the baby, I’m going to let my baby know and maybe ask if they’re ready, but not expect I’m going to get some clear answer. I am going to let my baby know, at least, “Hey, I want to pick you up now.” And I’m putting my hands out to them. “Are you ready?”

And why do I offer these questions? Not because I expect an answer, although babies do start to give answers once we’ve opened this door, but because I want my baby to know that I’m interested in their point of view. I believe they have one as a human being. From birth, they already have a perspective that’s worth considering. And I want them to know that I am interested in a relationship with this other person and that I want them to be an active participant in their own way when they’re ready. When they can. Children can’t really do that if we don’t open the door first and communicate with them with this respect and politeness. And empathy as to what that person might be feeling or thinking or ready to do right there.

As I said, I’ve thought a lot about how this misconception comes about, because it is very common. A lot of people think this about the RIE approach. And of course, they close the door on it. It’s so hard to imagine, and I remember this myself at first, it was so hard to imagine that a baby is an actual aware, sentient person. It’s so hard to see that and believe that. When someone suggests it, we only jump to what we know, which is, well, an adult’s a person, so you’re saying to treat a baby as an adult. That’s not what we’re saying at all. A baby is a baby. But because it’s challenging to accept babies as people, we jump to an extreme idea like we would expect them to act like an adult and respond in an absurd way that they cannot — giving permission for a diaper change.

A child is a person. They shouldn’t need to be treated as an adult to be treated as a person.

And as a person, we understand that they have their own unique interests that we should trust. Because we don’t know them. The only way we can know them is through one of the core practices that I recommend, which is observation, sensitive observation, noticing what our baby chooses, noticing what they’re looking at, what they’re interested in exploring. That takes us letting go of an agenda to entertain, to keep a baby constantly occupied, and ameliorate any kind of effort that may appear to be a struggle. It takes more of an open mind and believing in that baby, trusting that they are capable, that they have basic competencies. That’s what this parent does in the airplane example.

A baby’s a person with this innocent beginner’s mind and this incredible ability to learn and explore. It’s this wide-open, fresh perspective on the world. What that means is that they’re seeing everything for the first time. They don’t need a lot of entertainment. They don’t need us to wave toys or point things out to them. They are able to take in their surroundings. They have what researcher Alison Gopnik calls lantern attention. They’re taking in everything very capably, working to understand their world, exploring. They’re interested in understanding all these details that we ignore and take for granted.

The downside to that is that they’re very easily overstimulated because they’re absorbing everything without a filter, these filters that we develop as we mature. We’re less aware than a baby because of these filters. But the baby doesn’t have them so they get very overstimulated easily. And a lot of times when we do something with them, like take them on a trip, there’s all this novelty, but we want to keep them occupied, quiet on the plane, all of those things. And so we’re keeping them busy, we’re adding more and more stimulation when they’re already getting a lot.

What this parent did is she trusted. So she did less, but she says she observed and let her explore and experience her surroundings, and was “blown away time and again by how long she would spend examining something as simple as the seatbelt buckle.” Yeah, seatbelt buckles are pretty amazing if we consider seeing them for the first time and trying to figure them out, or a tray table or overhead lights. The parent had a sublime experience because she trusted her baby. She did less and she observed more and enjoyed seeing these things anew through her child’s eyes.

When we trust babies this way, what happens is that they are actually able to dictate just the right amount of stimulation for them. If we’re not adding it in, they’re not forced to take in more, and they’re going to take in just enough. So we won’t have those crying jags from overstimulation. They’re so common, especially in the first year. Gauging stimulation with our adult view is going to be difficult, and we’re going to be likely to overstimulate.

This is also why, with the RIE approach, we believe in simple toys and objects. We believe that those are the most encouraging to babies who want to learn and understand their surroundings. So, even though I know this is a small detail, just to give an example, we don’t put a mirror in their play area because they can’t understand a mirror yet. Studies show that children don’t really understand until closer to two years old that that is their reflection. So with the RIE approach, we don’t want them to be distracted by something that they can’t actually learn from. We want them to be able to feel that sense of comprehending their environment, mastering, discovering everything an object can do. That encourages them to seek more knowledge, to understand more. Instead of feeling overwhelmed that oh, there’s so much in my world that I can’t possibly understand.

So this parent’s note also mentions at the end how she trusted her child to be a capable explorer, physically, cognitively, creatively, and socially. She says, “We aren’t running after our toddler constantly, but rather letting them explore at their own pace, navigating their own social dynamics in a safe but not micromanaged way.”

What a relief that is for parents, right? We can trust that they know how to learn, that they are self-learners who will seek out enrichment in their environment. So we don’t have to be the ones to always come up with it and figure it out. And what do they need now? And what should we put there? And how do we stimulate them? How do we keep them from being bored? If you imagine really being a baby, how can you be bored? Everything around you is new and interesting and weird and different. But children do get overstimulated and overtired and will cry for that reason. And sometimes misinterpreted as boredom.

Through this practice of observation that this parent says she’s using, we’re able to see the world through our child’s eyes. That’s how we gain more empathy for our children. That’s how we understand them and feel compassion for them, understanding them better and understanding ourselves better. As this parent said, most of these ideas apply to all relationships, understanding where that other person is coming from. So as this parent said, these tools helped her to have the confidence she needed to set appropriate expectations, not just for her baby, but for herself as well, challenged her to better understand, manage and express her own needs and emotions, allowed her to be more compassionate.

Then she talks about the conversation she had with her daughter when she was screaming in the car seat. And I absolutely love this. Not that I would expect or would even suggest a parent say all of those things to a child at one time. I mean, maybe just one of those sentences, “Ah, it sounds like you’re frustrated. Maybe you don’t like being stuck in your car seat.” And maybe we would add, “I’ll get you out as soon as I can. But until then, yeah, I hear you.”

This parent said a version of that. But what I love is that she recognizes the self-talk here, because I believe it’s crucial to being able to do this huge task. This parent acknowledges the huge task of allowing and accepting and even encouraging our child to express their feelings without putting a stop to them ourselves. It’s a huge task.

And what this kind of self-talk does: “I’m a safe place. I won’t be swayed off course, controlled or angered by your feelings. You can always share them with me” is it helps bolster us and helps focus our intention on something helpful. It’s a relationship dynamic that will carry us through our child’s adulthood. You have a right to feel what you feel. Your feelings are not about me. I want to hear them. I want to understand them. I want to be that person for you, but they’re not mine to change. Obviously, I will tell you honest things that might reassure you like that I will get you out of there soon, out of that car seat. But we’re not trying to shut down our child.

A lot of times parents will say things that are acknowledging, but they’re saying words when what they really mean is: okay, I hear you, now please stop because this is so hard for me. And I understand it’s hard. It’s hard for me too. It’s still hard for me. But I know, and I’ve seen, time and again, how important it is, and how letting the feelings flow is the right thing and the best thing that we can do. Often, the only thing that we can do. To accept, to trust that it’s okay for our child to feel how she does. I mean, she has a right. She’s in a car seat. She’s stuck. What is there to like about that? Nothing. So yeah, I want you to tell me that. I agree with your right to feel that. It’s understandable to me.

Accepting, acknowledging, encouraging, trusting.

And feelings won’t always be understandable to us right away. Usually, they will later on… we’ll figure out what that was about. But following our instinct to try to put an end to the feelings often results in more frustration and disconnection for both of us. Instead, what this parent focused on, and what I highly recommend is: I am a safe place for your feelings. And that means ultimately my own as well.

I hope some of this helps. And I want to thank this parent so much again for sending me her note, and all her brilliant examples. I’m thrilled that she’s made a huge paradigm shift and most thrilled of all that she’s gaining exactly what I did from this approach, from this way of being with children, the ability to enjoy parenting in a way that I would not have been able to. That’s the exact reason I’m here, podcasting, writing, sharing with parents: to try to help make your experience more enjoyable. Parenthood is really, really difficult. We deserve to enjoy it as much as possible. And Magda’s teachings were also, for me, a paradigm shift that changed everything — gave me clarity, helped me feel freer with more ability to enjoy the day-to-day and the long term as well because of the relationships that I’ve been able to build with my children.

I really hope some of this helps. We can do this.

(The tools for traveling with babies that this parent refers to are here in Traveling with Babies, Toddlers, Preschoolers)

The post Surprising Benefits of Doing Less, Observing More, and Welcoming Feelings appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “It Will Get Easier – The Intense Struggles of a Parent with Childhood Trauma”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury, welcome to Unruffled. Today I have a very special guest, her name is Alwynn. She reached out to me in an email with the subject line, “Not yet a success.” Of course, I always love to read success stories that people share with me and it was interesting that she said “not yet,” so I was intrigued. I read her story of how her repressed childhood memories came to the surface, sent her into what she calls “a survival mode, merely existing as a mother,” and the memories that resurfaced for her were overwhelming and made it feel impossible to be the kind of parent she wanted to be for her children. Her message is one of survival and hope and I think will be a gift for any parent listening.

Hello, Alwynn. Good morning. It’s the evening for me, morning for you over there in Australia.

Alwynn:  Yeah.

Janet:  I just want to say straight out that you are my favorite kind of hero. You reached out to me with your subject line, “Not yet a success,” which I love in itself for so many reasons, that you know you’re in a process, and your goal is this beautiful thing… I’m just going to read it from your note here. Your goal is that you want to “spread awareness that it’s okay to not have it all together,” that others are not a failure if they feel that way. You said, “I want your listeners to know that no matter what it is that they are failing at as mothers, no matter what it is they’re doing wrong, there is so much they’re doing right.”

So anyway, this message that you’re so brave to be here and share with us is: you want to give hope. I’m just in awe of you, so I just have to say that starting out.

Alwynn:  Thank you, thank you so much. And I’m definitely quite emotional, even as I talk, because being willing to be seen is probably the biggest obstacle that I’ve had to overcome. I started out… I wanted to be a mother my whole entire life, and I guess I imagined it would be hard, but I just never imagined it to be as hard as it has been. I started out my journey and I became a mom, and I was really, really blessed to find a group called the Conscious Mothers. I didn’t have any idea about conscious mothering or respectful parenting. I was starting to really, really struggle with my toddler, and he was 16 months at the time, and I was really, really struggling with his behaviors.

I remember saying to someone, “I’m just angry all the time, and I’m just so tired of being angry, and he doesn’t deserve it.” And I remember people saying to me it was normal, that it’s okay to be angry, kids make you angry. And I think it upset me that that was normal, it upset me that everyone was saying that it was okay for me to be angry all the time, but I didn’t feel like it was okay, I didn’t feel like this was the way it was meant to be.

I had this vision of motherhood, and what it was turning out to be was not what I expected. And gratefully I had been a part of this group and explained the issues that I was having with my toddler. I was getting so uncomfortable with his emotions that I was considering self-harming, I hit myself over the head with a plate just so I wouldn’t hurt him, and I thought there must be another way, and that’s when they forwarded me onto your work.

I’ll be truly honest, when I started listening to your work, I think like many other moms and many other parents, all I felt was complete lack. I just felt I must be such a useless mom because where Janet is talking about as a parent feels like a million miles away from where I am.

But I wanted things to be different, and so I really tried to start implementing your techniques, and I really noticed that there was a difference. Yes, it seems so far from what I’d been taught, as in suppress children’s emotions and not see them as individuals. It got to a point where your techniques, the way that you were teaching parenting, I was failing at it, I was really, really feeling like I just couldn’t get it right. Why was I so angry? I know that my toddler and my children have these big emotions, but why do I feel so helpless? And why do I feel so hopeless all the time? I must be a failure, there must be something wrong with me.

Janet:  I’m so glad you’re being honest about this, and I’ve heard that before and it makes sense to me, your perspective on what I’m doing at first. What were some of the things that you were trying that you just felt you couldn’t do? Are there any specifics that you remember?

Alwyn:  Well, what I realized, I guess, is with respectful parenting it’s about giving them choice and it’s about being able to see them in all their big emotion. If they’re exploring you can say, “Oh, I can’t let you do that, but I can let you do something else.” But I found myself getting really angry.

I’ve listened to so many of your podcasts and other parents, and it made me so comforted to know that where kids were constantly going into the pantry and pulling out the food. And I was like, I should be reacting with love and, “Wow, I see you really want to get the food, but I can’t let you do that.” But I was reacting with anger and an anger that was so uncharacteristic for me. I just couldn’t bridge the gap, it was like from zero to 100. So I knew all the things I was meant to be doing-

Janet:  Well, I mean, we’re not supposed to love that, just to be fair. We’re not supposed to love that our children are doing those things.

Alwyn:  Yeah, but even, I guess, the distance and the spatial awareness that I could see that what he was doing was not a direct reflection on me and my parenting and who I was as a person.

Janet:  It felt threatening.

Alwyn:  Everything felt threatening. And so essentially, I guess what it got to, really, for me was I was able to be quite a calm person until I had kids, and then when I had kids two years ago I had a lot of suppressed memories of abuse from my childhood come up, and that really set me into a spiral, as you can imagine. Years of memories that you didn’t have before all rushing to the forefront, and every pain that I had, I literally just sank into a deep, deep hole, and I had these two kids that were under three.

Janet:  Wow.

Alwyn:  They needed me, and my kids were the most incredible fighters because they wouldn’t let me suppress them. They wouldn’t allow me to just put them in a box and say, “Leave me to just sink into a hole.” They fought every day, and by that I mean they kept on pushing the boundaries.

If there were times where I didn’t want to get out of my bed, my four-year-old or my three-year-old would go up and break something so that I would be forced to get up and take care of him, so that I would be forced to step forward and be his mother. I had so much anger, I had so much sadness, and I was seeing these kids, and actually with my inner child… I speak quite a lot about inner child because essentially all of us parents have wounded inner children.

It doesn’t have to be great things like abuse, it doesn’t have to be great things that we’re conscious of, but no matter who it is, we all carry some sort of wound from childhood that isn’t healed, and we carry that little child within us that never got to grow past that point.

And so essentially what I got to was I had two little boys who were screaming to be seen and screaming for safety and screaming for love, and they were reflecting within me a little girl who was constantly wanting to be loved, who was constantly wanting to be seen. And so it got into this fight, my toddlers were fighting my inner child, and who gets preference, whose needs are more important.

Janet:  Yeah. What happened when the memories came up for you? Was it just during the day, or were you in a therapy session?

Alwynn:  No. So when I started my spiritual journey, I guess eight years ago when I started having reoccurring miscarriages, I was given the message at that point that I needed to heal some trauma and then my children will come in, they needed me to be the strong healer. That was from a psychic.

Janet:  But you didn’t know what that was that they were referring to?

Alwyn:  No, I didn’t know what that trauma was. And so a few years ago I started having more dreams, started having more things come up into my life where I was like, these things aren’t normal, these things aren’t…  And I’d become a health and life coach at this point and so I was very adept at exploring my inner world, exploring what was not working or what I was dealing with.

So I went to a lot of energy healers, because I’m very much about energy, and I went to see psychologists, and many different avenues, but really it just started to come up organically in my dreams, in little flashbacks. But I was able to push it down for quite a long time and ignore that it existed, because I didn’t want to believe it existed — until it got to a point where my sister and I just, yeah, we had to sit down, and we both really just said, “Okay, we have to acknowledge that this happened, because it’s literally chasing us.”

And once we were aware and ready to face it, those little wounded inner girls, those wounded children felt more safe to show us and give us more.

Essentially, I feel like as parents, and as individuals, we give all of this energy to the children outside of ourselves. But I believe firmly, after everything that I’ve been through, the first person that we need to start with is that little child within us. Because I wasn’t capable of truly opening myself up to love, truly opening myself up to the possibility of being that safe, unruffled parent that my kids needed. I didn’t have safety within me.

So the biggest and most difficult part of the healing journey was when I got to a point where my anger was really, really, really bad, and through that period I really thought that my kids would’ve been better off without me. Because I was okay with the pain that I was feeling, but the only thing that I wasn’t okay with was how my pain was affecting my children.

And what I really, really wanted to share, especially on this podcast episode, is that I didn’t have a choice or an option on how I reacted to my children. I knew and I still know how affecting that is for them and how affecting it was for them for me to be aggressive, because I was.

I had a little child in me who felt so unsafe and felt so unheard and unseen that my children triggered me constantly, they were mirrors for all of the deep pain and sadness I felt inside. And they just really wanted me to love myself as much as they loved me, but I couldn’t love me. So I got so angry about that and I was aggressive and I was lashing out at them.

And I was thinking one day, what would Janet Lansbury say to you right now? You’re disgusting, you are pretty much hurting your children, you are so far away from a conscious loving mother.

Janet:  Oh gosh, I would never have said that.

Alwyn:  No, your response was great, actually, your response to… In my head, I took a pause and I said: You know what? Janet Lansbury would say that you are doing everything that you can be doing, you are fighting every single minute of every single day and you are alive, and that’s all she would care about right now.

I just got to the point where I decided that no matter what happened, I was going to live, and I wouldn’t leave my kids without a mom, I wouldn’t take my life no matter how hard it got, and it got very hard. There were times where I considered signing myself into a mental health institute because I was concerned that I was going to hurt them. There was so much within me that was just wanting to be let go of and released.

As I continued on this journey, day by day I just kept on saying to myself: Alwyn, you know the parent you want to be, and you’ve seen that it’s possible. Through the little techniques that I’ve used from your work I knew who I wanted to become, and I believed that yes, I wasn’t that person. And I still am struggling at times, but I believed that I could get there, that I had that vision of the mom that I wanted to be, and I wanted to be a safe mom. I wanted to be safe for myself and for my kids, and I wanted to be unruffled, not as something I put on, but actually just because I felt strong enough to give my kids that space to feel everything that they wanted to or needed to feel.

And so although I was quite angry and aggressive and I really hated myself in those times, now as I have come out the other side of it I realize that it couldn’t have been any other way and that I can’t compare myself to these moms who don’t have that deep, deep anger, because this is my path, and this was my journey.

My kids are the most incredibly beautiful, resilient, strong kids. And I believe that that’s because of me, because they watched me fall to pieces, they watched me repair, and I did a lot of repairing throughout that time, but it’s all because of the work that you’ve done, and the awareness that I had that kept me fighting for their freedom and my own freedom, because I knew what was possible at the end of it.

Janet:  So you’d gotten some glimmers, being able to practice some of the ideas that I’ve shared, you saw that you could occasionally feel yourself doing this, and giving your children space to feel their feelings, or whatever it was.

Alwyn:  Yeah.

Janet:  But it sounds like you were still being steered by-

Alwyn:  Wounds.

Janet:  Yeah, and you weren’t in control of yourself until you healed that. I’m so glad that you did.

And one thing that really helped you is you found this self-compassion — it’s so key to be able to do any kind of healing, or really just to even become a better parent, to rise up out of whatever our natural reflexes might be as a parent, to know that it’s a process, and we’re never going to be perfect at it. That you gave yourself that permission is, I think, such an important part of this for you, and for everybody.

Alwyn:  You know… of course this journey has been extremely difficult, but I am so incredibly grateful for it, because I now get to experience my children and love my children in a way that I had never actually been able to do before I healed. I’d never been open to allowing someone into my heart because I was terrified they would break it. And that included my children. I could never actually connect with them on the level that they deserved and I deserved.

And in order to get to this point, I had to let a lot of my expectations of myself go. The TV, I was very strict on TV, no TV, no sugar, I wanted them eating organic. But all of that I feel was so secondary to the real needs that they weren’t having met having a mother who couldn’t love herself enough to love them. In order to get to that beautiful, strong unruffled, powerful woman, I had to let the expectations of myself go, and the expectations of, but if they watch TV it’s going to be a cycle, and I don’t want them watching TV, I’m a terrible mother.

And I recognize that, you know what, that’s something that I can work on once I’m better, that’s something that I can face later once I love myself and heal myself more.

Janet:  Yes. Before we love, we have to accept ourselves. Here I am in these pandemic times, this is what I’ve got, this is where I’m struggling, this is what I need to survive this, my children watching TV or having lots of sweets, or whatever it is, that acceptance of just being in the process.

For a long time, I felt like I had to be the perfect one or I was nothing, and that there was no in-between. I mean, it was such a bind that I put self in, and a setup for failure, because you’re not going to be perfect, and I think a lot of us feel that way.

Just to say: hey, this is where I am right now, and I’m going to take care of me first because I’ve got to accept me first, and I’m going to do that for my children. So if I feel at all that it’s selfish, it’s absolutely not. It’s not selfish, that’s for my children. That’s the step, as you so clearly discovered, that’s the step to being the kind of parent I want to be with my children, loving them in the way that I want to. I’ve got to accept myself.

Alwyn:  You know, we are constantly judging ourselves and judging anyone else around us as mothers. It’s always looking for who’s doing it right and who’s doing it wrong.

A year ago the mother I would’ve been was the mother that you would’ve looked at and said, oh gosh, she’s doing it all wrong, she’s shouting at her kids, she’s angry, she’s manipulating, she’s X, Y, or Z.

But what I want us to all see is anyone that is acting like that with their children essentially is just wounded, they’re only hurt. No one wants to treat their kids other than loving and beautiful and respectful the way that they deserve, but in order to do that, we need to also, as I said, get to that point of loving ourselves.

But in those times, even as I was that parent who was angry and just not living up to any expectation that I had of myself, I was able to hold onto that one goal, that viewpoint in the future that I’ll just keep on taking one step forward, I’ll just keep on fighting and I’ll get there eventually.

And I want your listeners to know that no matter what it is that they’re experiencing right now, no matter what it is that they’re dealing with, whether it’s internal or external, whether it’s their kids or their partners, or whatever it is, to hold on to that slither of: I know I can do this. Because we can do this. We are empowered. We are way more powerful than we could ever imagine, women and men alike.

I want everyone to realize that if they can just take a step back and see that maybe it’s a need that’s just not being met within in themselves, maybe it’s a bit of sadness or a bit of grief that they hadn’t processed, maybe their child is just reflecting a part of them that’s wanting so badly to be seen.

I feel like we, as a whole collective, all deserve better, and if we keep separating ourselves — the good parents from the bad parents — we’re never going to get to where we need to get to. We need to all find the compassion, find the love, and normalize healing ourselves first, in order to change the generations, change the future, and become this loving, safe, beautiful space that we and our children deserve. And never mind any of that, to actually experience the depths of love that are available to us when we let go of the pain. Because it’s only now that I’m getting to experience that.

Janet:  What you’re saying there is so important, there are no bad parents, there are parents that are, like you said, wounded, they’re hurting, they’re struggling, they’re healing, they’re going through something, and they’re not bad, they’re in a process. So that same grace that we give to our children that I always talk about is the same perspective we have to take on ourselves first.

Alwyn:  Yeah.

Janet:  I was told that there are a lot of people that don’t have children that listen to my podcast, even younger people, because they are hearing a version of being raised that maybe they didn’t have that they could hear and relate to in terms of the healing that could happen to them, the way they could be perceived.

Alwyn:  That is just amazing that you just actually brought that up because that was my next point.

One of the things that I recognize in my own healing was that desire to be held and loved and mothered in a way that feels so safe and secure and loving, but it was such a difficult thing to imagine or feel when you haven’t experienced it.

I found, even just when I got on the phone call with you, I could feel the loving mother, the loving energy, and it brought me to tears even just as we began. Because to be in the presence of someone that can fully see you, even that child self within you, is just beyond beautiful, and to see, like you’re seeing, that opportunity to be raised and re-raised, because we can do that. We can re-parent or ourselves, or imagine Janet Lansbury as my mom. I’ve actually imagined you as my mom, by the way. What would she say to me right now? How would she want me to show up for myself? And even just feeling that embrace and that hug.

Because we as parents, we take on the world. We have so much responsibility, and sometimes just want to be taken care of, the way the little child within us really wanted to be taken care of. I believe so strongly now that our kids when they’re acting out, when they’re doing things that really, really trigger us, I believe that they’re reflecting the part of us that really is needing love.

I remember saying to you in the email that I  was really terrified. I was terrified that I was never going to love my child. I was terrified that I just hated him because I just felt so triggered by all of his behaviors and his actions, and I was afraid that no one would ever love him, and I was terrified of even admitting that.

And then I realized it’s not my little three-year-old that I hate, it’s not my little three-year-old that I think is not going to be loved. It’s me. I’m terrified that I am never going to be loved. I am terrified that I will never be seen. And he is ultimately just reflecting back all of that to me, so that he can say: here mom, please heal it so that you can love yourself exactly the way that I love you.

And as you’re saying, through that inner parenting process, even by listening to your podcast, it’s a great opportunity to reparent ourselves, because that is where it starts.

Janet:  Yeah, well you said in that note, you said you would’ve just continued to blame your son, painting it with some brush, “difficult,” maybe ADHD, et cetera. But because of my work, you were able to look past that and know that “he was not anything but a struggling little boy looking for a safe space, love, and acceptance,” and from there you found yourself.

Alwyn:  Yeah, and that is ultimately it. I could have projected everything that I was feeling onto a label that I wanted him to be painted with. And it’s not wanted. But what I recognize most in this healing journey was that a lot of the times when I’m experiencing things outside of me, with my kids or even with my husband, with the people at work, whatever it may be, a lot of the time it’s a reflection of what I need to see within myself, or what I need to heal within myself. Sometimes we pass that blame onto other people around us. The kids are causing me to be stressed, my husband is causing me to be X, Y, or Z.

But ultimately it’s really an opportunity to go: okay, what is it that I’m feeling right now deep within me? What is it that I’m experiencing? Because my kid is just doing what they’re meant to do. They’re being a child, they’re not trying to punish me.

One of the things that definitely was big and strong for me was every action that my children took that you would maybe class as being naughty or “behavior,” what my inner child was saying was: you see, they don’t love us, they don’t love us, no one’s going to love us, they hate us. And so my reaction couldn’t be calm and unruffled, because the perception that I was having was: they’re doing this because they don’t love me, a very different perception to have than seeing them as wow, they’re really exploring.

Janet:  Yeah, and if you think about that objectively, well, why wouldn’t they love me? They love their parents more than anyone else in the world, almost no matter what. If we get a little distance on that, then actually they’re doing this because they love me so much.

Alwyn:  Definitely.

Janet:  I would love for you to share, because I think it could be helpful if you have thoughts about this, just some of the concrete steps that you took, things that you tried that really helped you as you’re going through this healing inside. And then what were some of the things you tried, even things that didn’t work. What kind of steps did you take when you were coming out of this with your children and shifting?

Alwyn:  So with regards to my own healing or with both?

Janet:  Well, both. But in terms of them, and being more the parent that you wanted to be. How did you turn the corner, taking what you’re learning about yourself, and then you shared the thing about getting the different perspective on your son, your spirited son, but were there any practices or steps that were helpful?

Alwyn:  I think that the biggest one was having the awareness. Having listened to your podcast, the awareness of what is really happening. Like, okay, he’s having big emotions, this isn’t about me. To be honest, in a lot of cases I actually couldn’t follow through with dealing with the situations adequately, in a safe and unruffled way. But also having that awareness was probably the biggest key. I was always able to repair, and that is never going to be as good as obviously just doing it right the first time, but I didn’t have that option.

Janet:  That’s right. No, no, no, I think this is perfect, this is exactly what I think is really helpful. So you started to get the perspective, but you would get it after the fact, almost, like you’d already yelled or done whatever it was, gotten sharp with them?

Alwyn:  When I would react, essentially I would go offline. My children would do something, I would be triggered, and it was as if I checked out. I didn’t have any control over my physical body. And essentially I would wake up afterward and I would be filled with so much grief and pain that I had just reacted and acted in such a terrifying way even to myself, never mind to a small little boy. But then straight away, obviously, I then would get down and be very upfront, I would say, “I’m really sorry. I’ve got a lot of pain inside my heart, and sometimes that makes me act in a way that I don’t want to act, but you don’t deserve that, and I’m really sorry.”

But the problem was, Janet, it was happening so often that the inconsistency of my parenting and my behaviors, nothing could repair the inconsistencies and everything that I was enduring. But what I guess I just kept on fighting for, as I said, was that inner healing.

So if I could say what was the most concrete thing that I would recommend for every single parent, there are definitely some resources I would most definitely share, but I have a coach, she is an inner child coach. What I loved about her was she would work with me on my inner child, but also factoring in my kids and their behavior and helping me to understand how my children’s behaviors were actually reflecting some of my own pain. And so she was helping me to interweave my parenting into my own trauma and my own feelings in order to have the awareness and the understanding and let it go so that I could be the confident mom that I wanted to be.

And so what I find so important is finding a practice or healing modality that works for you.

For me, as I said, I believe so, so strongly in inner child work, inner child healing, because I believe that’s where it starts, and also it links so much into our parenting because essentially we’re parenting a child within. It gives us the strength and awareness and ability to parent a child without.

And even if you’re 100 years of age, you still have a little child within you, and so I believe that one step is probably the biggest shift and change for me as a parent and how I parented the boys.

The awareness of your work was absolutely so important. Letting people know that you don’t have to get it all right, you don’t have to be the perfect parent in order to have the goal that, one day, you will get to that point where you feel like a confident parent. You can listen to podcasts from you and take what you can take for the moment and implement that as best as you can, but always come back to compassion, that deep sense of I’m doing the best that I can do, and if I leave the best that I can do on the table at the end of every day, then there is nothing else I could have given, and there is nothing else I have to do.

I know that my boys are very proud of me, and I know that they do not at all resent me, and I know they love me beyond belief because we’ve gone from a space where my kids wouldn’t even hug me, they were terrified of me, they would barely hug my leg. And now my toddler hugs me about 40 times a day and he says, “I love you to the moon and back,” I’d say about 50 times a day. He is just showing me in every moment, he just says to me without saying it: thanks for not giving up, thanks for fighting for us.

Janet:  Wow.

Alwyn:  That’s all he keeps saying.

Janet:  You’re the safe person they can share with now, completely.

Alwyn:  But I had to allow myself to go through that process.

So there are definitely some resources. Whenever you do the podcast and if you put it up on your Facebook, I would definitely love to share some resources beneath that podcast for anyone that’s looking to do this work. Or anyone that’s looking to just find happiness, because it’s n sometimes not even about the parenting. You might feel like your parenting’s going good or okay, but you might feel like your relationship with your husband isn’t the best, or you’re feeling lonely. All of this impacts us, all of it impacts our children, all of it impacts the collective, and so this work applies to absolutely everyone, not just parents, not just for our kids. Ultimately it’s for us so that we can have the happiness that we deserve.

And I believe wholeheartedly that in order to experience the biggest and greatest depth of joy and happiness that is possible in this world, you have to be willing and ready and able to experience the depth of sadness and pain that might be within you. But it’s worth it.

What I considered during that time was pretty dark and pretty deep, but believe me when I say the happiness is worth it, joy is worth it, connection with your kids is worth it. It’s all worth it, if you’re just brave enough to put yourself first and love you first, it’s all worth it, I promise.

Janet:  That’s so beautiful. Well, as one of your imaginary mothers, I’m very, very proud of you, and thank you so much for sharing with us today.

Alwyn:  You’re welcome.

Janet:  Just keep going, that’s all I can say. Keep going and keep shining your awesome light.

Alwyn:  Thank you.

Alwyn shares some afterthoughts to this conversation that I’ll be posting in the transcript on my website, and also some resources, including a contact email to connect with Alwyn for support. Those will be in the transcript and also in the show notes for this podcast.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, JanetLansbury.com. There are many of them and they’re all indexed by subject and category so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in.And both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon: No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting.  You can get them in eBook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or barnesandnoble.com, and on audio at Audible.com. Actually, you can get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the link in the liner notes of this podcast.

Thank you so much for listening and all your kind support. We can do this.

Alwynn’s afterthoughts and resources:

As I was reflecting throughout the day on our conversation a few things came up regarding what life looked like physically as I was and am healing with the kids. I wanted to just send it in case anything was of any use.

What I noted was to be an unruffled confident leader initially takes a lot of energy. Emotional, mental, and physical energy. Healing or living through any type of trauma takes all of someone’s resources and so what was left for my children was nothing but desperate cries “please just listen to me” “please don’t fight me on this” “please see I’m struggling and help me out” but you know yourself that children cannot hold that level of restraint and responsibility for their own emotions let alone their parents. They need us to be safe not the other way around. So my children would dump out the washing that took me a day to fold. They would spill the milk as I was using all of my energy to make the breakfast. They would hit out at me as I tried to force them into clothes because I just needed them dressed and I needed something to be easy. I would lash out at their big emotions, at their rejection “I don’t love you” because I couldn’t face or process my own emotions, my own lack of self-love and I resented my children even more. “Why can’t you love me” “why do you punish me” “why am I never good enough”. A vicious cycle of my children’s search for safety and stability vs my own. A clash of wills. A clash of needs. A clash of power Vs powerlessness

As parents through these difficult times a lot of our emotional, physical and mental resources are being spent holding too many balls up in the air and as we are doing that and neglecting our own needs there is little left to give to our children when they too are trying to navigate the murky waters of life. Dump on top of that: expectations of who we should be as parents and the guilt at not living up to them. Dump on top of that generational and personal wounding known and unknown and you have exactly what I described. A mother constantly shouting at her children to listen, to stop torturing her through constant resistance and persistent fights. And therein lies the biggest bottom line… We owe ourselves the compassion and space to find a way out of the dark, the exhaustion, the inner turmoil before we try correcting and trying to change our children’s “behaviours”. To try our best to let go of all of the things we have to do and only focus on the things we truly need to do.

Today, as I felt exhausted and drained following our call, my 4-year-old was “acting up” hitting his brother, throwing things. And again I found myself on the verge of tears as yet again I was reactive and very much the opposite of supportive and unruffled. I took a bath and asked myself… How do I do this? How can I help my beautiful boy, how can I support him the way he deserves and the answers that came were still the same…

By healing yourself first.

And so that’s it. I get up to face more unfelt, stuck emotions within me and hug my 4-year-old and pray that one day repairing won’t be such a frequent occurrence in my life, and I have compassion that I’m still fighting for that day.

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me.

Contact Alwynn: alwynnhynescoaching@gmail.com

Alwynn has recently begun a Facebook community HERE and she welcomes you to join.

Alwynn recommends:

Inner child work & healing: www.laviniabrown.com

Marisa Peer

Some of the therapies she used in her healing:

– Craniosacral therapy
– Energy healers (there are a few different types eg reiki, intuitive, but I always say go with your gut)
– Somatic therapy practitioners (works with trauma stored in the body)
– Hypnotherapy
– Ice baths/ocean swimming
– Meditation

“I believe that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. And so if you are someone committed to and ready to heal… I believe the right healing practice and modalities will come to you. Then it is about immersing yourself and taking control of your own destiny, your own path, and your own healing. No one can do this work for us but believe me when I say you wouldn’t want anyone to because it is only through taking responsibility for one’s own happiness that we can really see the strength that lay within us all along.” – Alwynn

(Cover photo by Sania Ahsan)

The post It Will Get Easier – The Intense Struggles of a Parent with Childhood Trauma appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Race, Trauma, and Hope – A Mother’s Healing Journey (with Cassandra Lane)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Cassandra Lane. She’s an author, a mother, a current editor of LA Parent Magazine, and so much more. I recently read Cassandra’s amazing book, We Are Bridges and I was absolutely blown away. It’s a lyrical, personal memoir centered around the racist murder of her great grandfather, Burt, whom she never knew. Cassandra recognizes how transgenerational physical and emotional trauma is actually embedded in our DNA and how it has shaped her own life and the lives of her family.

I’ve discussed on this podcast before the challenges we all face understanding and breaking generational cycles and Cassandra’s story is a powerful example. She shares her journey as a woman and a mother, candidly and courageously. As I said, I was captivated by her book and I just had to have her on. So I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Hi and welcome, Cassandra. Thank you so much for being my guest today.

Cassandra Lane:  Thank you so much for having me, Janet. I’m honored to be here.

Janet Lansbury:  Well, I love your book. It’s so beautifully written. I couldn’t put it down and I would love for you to share a little bit with my listeners — share about your story, why you wrote the book and where you are with it today. Can you do that? Would you share a little bit about the story?

Cassandra Lane:  Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your beautiful words about the story. Did you want me to read a tiny bit and then go into the synopsis or?

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, that would be great.

Cassandra Lane:  I’ll just read one page from the very beginning, from the prologue. I think it sets up for listeners who aren’t familiar with it, what the book is about. So this is from the prologue:

This story is a hybrid — a romance and a horror, a memoir, and a fiction — forged out of what is known and what is unknown. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” we sang as children of the South — as Black children of the South. It was a rhyming wall we erected to protect us from harsh words hurled at our bodies, their mission to shoot venom, to curl our brown frames.

he truth is that words, like sticks and stones, like ropes and whips, do injure. As we get older, we press to silence any and all language that elicits pain. But sometimes, buried in the suppressed language is an ancestor — the power in a name.

A different kind of hurt lingers in this stitched void.

I wanted a creation story for my family. Although what was lost (stolen) is long covered over by soil I will never be able to locate.

When I was young, that was okay with me — the freedom of not being bound to the past, to all that heaviness. But I am a mother now and freedom means something else to me entirely. I am pregnant with questions, laboring over the unanswered ones tucked in the bosoms of our nation, our ancestors, our living families, and even into my own heart.

Here, I gathered the sticks, picked up the stones, went searching for the rope. Like a bird building her nest there is filler — string, straw, scraps of paper. Anything to make it hold, make it stick.

So I think this beginning of the prologue captures what I was trying to do. I come from a Black Southern family — so many gaps in our history, as many African-Americans have shared that same story, although there are some families who can trace back several generations. The furthest back that we knew was where my great grandparents on my maternal side. And that story unfortunately was tragic.

My great grandfather, Burt Bridges was lynched circa 1904 in Mississippi. And my great-grandmother whom I remember very well was married off to a distant cousin and ended up migrating from Mississippi to Louisiana. She had one child and that was the child that she was pregnant with when Burt was lynched, my mother’s father. And after my mother’s divorce, I was only five years old, we moved back into her parents’ home. And I grew up in that intergenerational household with all those stories and all that history, the tragedies and the beauties. I remember being a girl and listening to my grandfather after he retired, he was a logger, after he retired from cutting down trees in the forest, he sat in his recliner. He didn’t have any hobbies. He didn’t know what to do with himself, he was in his eighties.

My grandmother used to beg him to pick up some sort of hobby, but basically he would sit there after breakfast and then he would get into one of his moods, just talking about the past mistakes that he’d made. And then it always inevitably ended with tears over the fact that he never met his biological father, Burt Bridges.

And as a kid, I just was so confused. Why is this 80-something-year-old man crying about something that happened so long ago? But as I came to realize, as I got older, is that the past continues to haunt us if we truly haven’t dealt with it.

And so in college is when I first heard recording of Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” and it just haunted me. I couldn’t stop listening to it much to my roommates chagrin. I played it over and over and over again. And I started thinking about how it wasn’t just a song, it wasn’t just history, this is something that happened to the people in my family. My great-grandmother was a lynching survivor.

I didn’t start writing the story though, until I left Louisiana for the first time to move out West here in Los Angeles. And I think it was a way to tether me back to my past. I was doing a lot of self-work therapy. I was married, having issues in my marriage. I was just examining myself in terms of race and romance and marriage. And I know that I’m not an island and that part of the reason why I was the way I was had to do with family history. And so that’s how I first started writing about Burt Bridges. And since there weren’t many facts, I started imagining a story around him, not only to capture the lynching, but to capture the love that was lost between him and Mary.

Janet Lansbury:  And you do that so poignantly in the book. Wow. How old were you when you first learned about your great-grandfather being lynched?

Cassandra Lane:  So when I would hear my grandfather crying in his recliner, 9, 10, 11, but I didn’t really understand what lynching meant. I didn’t really ask any questions. I was just always lurking around the adults instead of playing with my siblings. So I knew that his father that he grew up with was his stepfather. And I think if that relationship had been a healthy one, that there wouldn’t have been so much sadness. But unfortunately, his stepfather was very abusive to him. And so I knew that that wasn’t his real dad and that his biological dad had been killed, but I didn’t understand it in a racial context until probably high school. Getting ready to go off to college is when I was told probably by my mom or my uncle Cricket, that it was a racial murder, domestic terrorism — that he had been lynched. And they didn’t know much because great-grandma Mary didn’t want to talk about it.

The only thing that she really told the family over the years after much badgering is that his name was Burt Bridges, that he was this beautiful, fine man, that she loved him so much. And that he was very proud, what the White people called “uppity.” And they didn’t like that, and they were scared of him and they lynched him. And then she would say, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” And sometimes she would cry.

Even on her death bed in her nineties, she brought him up, and this is decades later after her second husband died in the 70s. And she’s still thinking about this young man and their love.

So yeah, I would say when I realized the context of it, the weight of it, I was probably in college or off to college.

Janet Lansbury:  And then you felt like these wounds, this trauma had in many ways been passed down and was still coloring your life, effecting your outlook on the world and the way you saw yourself.

Cassandra Lane:  Absolutely. And I do believe that, when we think about genetics and how they’re passed down. Traits. I mean, there are kids who didn’t grow up with their parents and yet they walk the way they did or speak or laugh the way another person in their family did. And so in the same way that those physical traits are passed down, I suspected that emotional traits, psychological wounds were also passed down. And of course, science has shown that that is true for a while now through epigenetics. So that was affirming to me to look at that science. Again, we already knew that we can’t escape our past no matter how hard we try, but I wanted to bring that out more in the book, through this one family story.

Janet Lansbury:  And then did you find that this was a healing experience for you in the end? I know that one of the big thrusts in your story is that you did not want to have children. You decided that quite young and you told your mother that, and then you eventually did. How old is your child now by the way?

Cassandra Lane:  He just turned 14 last week.

Janet Lansbury:  Oh, I was thinking he’s still quite a young child. Wow.

Cassandra Lane:  This book has just been a long project in the making.

Janet Lansbury:  Amazing.

Cassandra Lane:  Yeah. Several people have thought that, that, oh, he’s young. And so, no.

First I was super obsessed with Burt and what had happened to Burt. But once I became pregnant, which was in 2006, that’s when I started thinking about the women in the family and thinking more about grandma Mary, wondering what was that day of lynching like for her? Did she see the body? How far along was she in her pregnancy? How did she survive? How do you go on after experiencing that kind of racial violence? How do you have hope?

She was a farmer. She went on in Louisiana to farm acres and acres of land with her husband, John Buckley. She fed people who were poorer than she was. She could cook like nobody’s business. I remember her teacakes and just regret so much that none of us have the recipe.

But yeah, I think when I was pregnant and way out here in LA, so far away from any blood relatives and needing that connection to the women in my family is when the story took on this other layer of telling the stories of the women and how they survive, the strength that it takes, but also showing their vulnerability. So yeah, this story has taken a while because it’s just been so many life stages that I’ve gone through.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. The way that you imagined those details, and the scenes with your great grandmother and Burt, the part after he was hung and there she was expecting a baby, it almost seemed like you were really tapping into your DNA there because it was so vivid and seemed so real and true. And I know you weren’t writing it for this reason, but the service that you perform with that recapturing and all the details that you share about your story, it helps something that’s so important I think, for me, being a white person in the white community, wanting to be an ally in anti-racism, feeling strongly about this cause. But seeing also that we feel the momentum and then we forget as white people and then we’re reminded again and then we’re back in it wanting to help — those of us that do want to help — wanting to use our power however we can to help this cause. And what you provide is an injection of empathy that is long lasting. It’s like we need this kind of sustained empathy, I feel, to be able to make the societal, deeply embedded changes that we need to make.

And that’s why, although you’re not a typical fit as a guest on my podcast, mostly everybody is giving advice to parents or they have an expert view on an aspect of raising children that can really help parents, but you are providing this empathy. To me it’s really everything right now. We need this. And you provide it in a way that’s just so interesting and devastating, but wonderful to read. And just so full of just all the sensory aspects of your life. I mean, I’ve been reading a ton of books lately about racism and the Black experience and yours is quite different in that it really brings life to the feelings and the pain and the fear, the trauma. Anyway, that’s why I wanted you here so badly and was so glad that I found you and discovered your book. And then to hear that you work now for… you’re a managing editor for LA Parent?

Cassandra Lane: Yeah. Well, I became editor in chief this year.

Janet Lansbury:  Wow.

Cassandra Lane:  Well, that’s my parenting hat in terms of my career, my day job. And this is my lunch hour from doing that. But yeah, that’s what I do. I started off as a newspaper journalist and my career has taken different turns, but writing is always at the center. And since 2017, I’ve been at this magazine, which I love. And it gives me a chance to work with families, bring information and news and entertainment to families, work with so many tons of writers. I already had a huge writing community because of my creative writing community and many of those writers are parents. And we write about anything that impacts parents and families.

Janet Lansbury:  LA Parent was the magazine that actually serendipitously started me on the journey that I’m on professionally. A lot of my listeners have heard me tell this story in different ways. So I was a new mom thinking that it was all going to be natural and instinct and was going to know just what to do. And I totally didn’t. I had a very strong, intense daughter, who’s wonderful, she’s 28 now. And I was just totally thrown, overwhelmed, having panic attacks, really having a hard time. And somehow, because I live in LA, I picked up LA Parent Magazine and there was an article about creativity in children or something like that. So this is back in 1992, 1993. And in this article, was just one sentence from the person that ended up being my mentor, who I trained with and totally changed my life and opened up my eyes to a way of seeing infants and all children as whole people that we should treat them that way.

And anyway, that was Magda Gerber, but it all happened because of LA Parent Magazine. And sometimes I think, wow, what if I hadn’t read that? Because it was really just one sentence from her quote in this article that caught my attention and just felt so different from other things I’d heard. It was, “Take the mobile off of their bed, take care of their needs and leave them alone.” And I won’t  explain in this podcast what all of that meant, but there was a lot of stimulation stuff going on at that time where parents were supposed to stimulate and make your child into a super baby, a genius, by doing all this stuff. It was so confusing and just such a work for parents, that we’re supposed to figure out and we’re never doing enough, and we’re going to miss all these windows. And so her perspective about no, actually they don’t even need a mobile in front of their face was so different that it drew me to it. So anyway, that’s my little story about LA Parent Magazine.

Cassandra Lane:  I love that story because parenting advice has changed so much through the years, it’s so confusing. And to find a gem like that is just invaluable. So I’m so glad.

Janet Lansbury:  Thank you. Well, yeah, LA Parent changed my life. It definitely has that feel of a very supportive community paper. It’s not pressure inducing. It’s not shame inducing. It felt like we’re all in this together.

Cassandra Lane:  Exactly. Most of us on staff and that’s probably been the case maybe through the years, we’re parents. So when I write an article or a column, it’s as a parent and it’s like, hey, we’re in this together. We are struggling together. We’re celebrating our joys together.

Janet Lansbury:  I haven’t read it for a while, but I’m sure you’ve kept that spirit going and more. Has the magazine done anything about anti-racism for children?

Cassandra Lane:  We have. One of my first, I think my first feature article when I jumped on staff, I came from the Dodgers at that point, and the first feature article I did was about how to talk, and this is 2017, how to talk to your kids, for different age group, about race. And I told them, I don’t want it to just stop here this is an ongoing conversation. I talked to so many people and had so many resources and the story was so big. I had to pare it down. But as editors we did say, let’s make sure that this isn’t the one story for 10 years or five years or whatever, I constantly get pitches and also solicit guest columns about race. So yeah, I just think we can do more. And I try to make sure that I’m hiring freelance writers from a diverse background of ethnicities, cultures. I just think that’s so important.

Janet Lansbury:  Yes. Is LA Parent online?

Cassandra Lane:  It is, we have grown.

Janet Lansbury:  Oh, it is. Okay, good. I’m going to link like crazy to this. So have you had people come on and do… I mean, not that they could do what you’ve done in this book, but do they share their personal stories? Because I feel that is so important.

Cassandra Lane:  Yes. I asked people, please write from your first person personal experience. And there was everything from wrangling shame to a retired Black police officer who himself was profiled and arrested because he was mistaken for someone else. I mean, just heartbreaking, heartrending stories from a variety of voices. And for me, I love that personal piece.

I love what you were saying earlier, too, about empathy in terms of what We Are Bridges meant for you. It reminded me of a friend, who’s very open, very liberal, she’s an attorney and a novelist. And I would say she’s very activist in the work that she’s done, but she was an early reader of the book. And she said for her, it was so revelatory, which I thought was interesting because I see her as someone who’s very well read. Who’s very anti-racist. And I think what she meant was that here it is, we’re friends, she knows me or feels like she knows me, but there were all these deep layers, things that she hadn’t thought about.

And I think that empathy piece is so important, whether it’s in the stories in the magazine or news articles that we read in the newspaper or a book, because that’s the only way we really can truly try to bridge our seemingly different backgrounds and stories. And I would just encourage, in terms of anything that deals with race, to me, it’s so important to look at our intimate lives and our intimate lives are so connected to the intimate lives of our ancestors. So if I were white, I think reading We Are Bridges, that I would want to, even if it’s just in my journal, it doesn’t have to be public. Look into my own blind spots and also my parents and grandparents. There are some minor characters in this book who are white and I try to for a moment, get inside their heads as they were dealing with Burt.

But if I were white, I would want to really try to get inside my ancestors heads as well, even if it’s scary, even if I learned that one of my ancestors did something that was horrendous, I would still try to bring that sense of understanding, empathy and raw truth to those stories, because this is all of our stories.

Janet Lansbury:  And also it’s all of our children’s future that we really want to be, we need to be truly just, and it’s not going to happen until we correct this. I know what your friend meant, because no matter what, when our backgrounds have been so different, I can understand so much, but I can never quite grasp it. I can’t be in your skin. I can’t be in your story, but that’s what your book allows me to do. Yeah.

I did a podcast with Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt, who’s one of the world’s leading researchers on bias. And it was so fascinating, because she talked about how bias affected her and her child. It’s not just about white people being biased against Black people. We all have biases, it’s something that’s naturally developed.

Cassandra Lane:  And how do we start talking to our kids early on about that so that it’s not some shock later? I think about one scene in the book where I was best friends with this little girl, we’re in third grade. I mean, just every day we were playing together. And then one day my world is shattered because, and I’m sure maybe her world was shattered too… She came to school and said, “My mom says, I can’t play with you anymore.” Race was not the topic or even racism, this just wasn’t the topic at home, but I knew even with those unspoken words, that she couldn’t play with me any longer because I was Black. And I said, “It’s because I’m Black, isn’t it?” And she just hung her head. And I write in that scene that it was just a burden too heavy for her young neck.

I’ve often thought about her over the years. We never spoke again, we never hung out again. She became this popular cheerleader at that school, even though we were integrated at that time, we were still segregated in our little pods by race. It was heartbreaking for me.  But again, what did that do to her psyche? And as a parent now, even if she doesn’t hold those same views as her mother did, did she talk to her children about race and about their grandmother? And I just think we have to open those lines. Our children understand so much more than we give them credit for even at early ages.

Janet Lansbury:  Absolutely. And you both were actually disrupting bias right there by having a friendship. That’s one of the ways to disrupt bias, according to Dr. Eberhardt and her research, is that you have a personal relationship with someone of the other race. And that’s also the thing with empathy and your story is that when we can see each other as-

Cassandra Lane:  As human-

Janet Lansbury:  As human, with reasons for why we do certain things or behave certain way. Then that is a bridge, as you said, to each other. So there’s a lot.

I was raised more colorblind and I raised my children that way too. Now I know that that’s not enough — that we need them to know about racism so that they can be ready to stick up for children and be aware that this is an issue. But in my family, it was so much to the extent… and in a way we thought my mother was really cool for this… At the end of her life, she got into selling real estate, in her retirement age, or when we were all grown up, and she had a partner. But then that partner had to retire and couldn’t do it anymore. Well, my mother was ill with cancer and she still had clients that loved her and wanted her to help them sell their house or find them a house.  And she started working with this partner who we knew was much younger than her called Greg. And for years, she talked about Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg. And we never met him until after she had died and we were at her memorial and there was Greg and he was a Black man, and she never mentioned it. In her generation, that was kind of cool, but now we know that we need to do more.

Cassandra Lane:  I mean, think about how empowering and just interesting that would have been to you guys as kids to see this example of your mother in this interracial relationship friendship, and how that just could have gotten trickled down, not saying that you didn’t have interracial friendships. But I think when we model for our kids, in our day-to-day lives, that’s just so empowering.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah.

And this is another part of your story, though, just getting back to that. So you didn’t want to have a child, and then that shifted for you and you decided that you did. There is so much hope in that. Like, well, okay I do want to continue my line, even though we’ve suffered and had trauma. And there’s always hope that we can keep going and do better and that the world will do better by us. I don’t know. There’s just something so tender about that. What was that process like for you? Did you think about it or did you just-

Cassandra Lane:  Oh yes, absolutely. Because I’m the oldest of five, living in poverty, my mom struggled, she worked really hard. I had a lot of responsibilities and I associated child-rearing with poverty in my adolescent brain. And I knew that I didn’t want to be poor. I wanted to somehow get out of that town and just get out of poverty. I saw my mom struggle so much and I thought going to college would help me get out of that cycle and that not becoming a mom would also help me get out of that cycle. I ended up marrying a man who also staunchly was against becoming a father. He grew up in New York, also with a single mom, five kids. Had a lot of emotional and psychological stuff that he hadn’t worked through either. We were just both very ambitious, both storytellers. He was a photographer, I was a writer and that was going to be our babies, our creative projects.

And he also felt like he just didn’t trust that he would have the love that would be needed to raise a child, because of the broken parts of him. And mine wasn’t that, it’s just that I did not want to be held back from my ambitions. I loved kids, but I just thought, I just didn’t think that that was the route for me until I started doing that work and examining why I had made that decision.

Then I took… after I graduated from my MFA program, I took a job as a high school teacher at this school for kids who had gotten in trouble, kids who were struggling, they were on probation or had been on probation. And I just got so close to those kids. And I don’t know, the maternal parts of me started coming alive. I felt so much empathy for those kids, despite whatever they were in there for. Because I started going to their counseling sessions as an assistant teacher at the time and learning their backstories and just felt, wow, what can we do?

And then I started dreaming about this little girl, like repeat dreams. And I remember talking to my ex-husband and I said, “What if…? Why did we make the decision? And why did you make your decision? What if I’m meant to have a child?” And he was like, no, we absolutely are not having kids.

Then we went through our own stuff as described in the book. We ended up going our separate ways. And I met a man shortly after and wasn’t trying to become pregnant, but also wasn’t trying not to, apparently, and ended up pregnant. And at that time again, I had done some work. I wasn’t staunchly against pregnancy. I remember writing in that journal that I probably would never become a mom, but I would open the door to that being a possibility because I didn’t want to continue to make decisions in my life that were based in resentment and hatred. That opened that mental gate and then the physical gate was open. I discovered that I was pregnant. My boyfriend, now husband, second husband and I.

Janet Lansbury:  Well, that’s lovely. So you have enjoyed your journey so far as a parent?

Cassandra Lane:  I have.

Janet Lansbury:  Well, it’s been lovely to speak with you. I can’t thank you enough for your book and for you and for sharing with us here today. Really appreciate it.

Cassandra Lane:  Oh, it’s been so wonderful Janet. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

Janet Lansbury:  Thank you, Cassandra.

Cassandra’s book is We Are Bridges.

And if you would like to take action against racism, here are a few steps that I’ve had the privilege to take:

One is educating myself with books like Cassandra’s, being willing to look at my own racial biases. We all have them. And I will share other resources in the transcript here, including a few articles Cassandra recommends from LA Parent Magazine. You might also be interested in a couple of my podcasts, “The Power of Bias and How to Disrupt it in our Children (with Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt)” and “Raising Anti-Racist Children — A Holistic Approach (with Kristen Coggins).”

Two, I’ve donated to racial justice and anti-racism education organizations.

Three, I’ve looked at my workplace and other places where I have power to ensure that Black, indigenous, and people of color are represented.

Four, including people of color in my social circle and in the media and toys, et cetera, that I’ve exposed my children to.

And five, something that I didn’t do as I mentioned, which is teaching your children to see color, not be color blind, and teaching them about racism in an age appropriate manner. Exposing them to books is a good way to start and always answering any questions that they have.

Thank you so much for listening and all your kind support. We can do this.

Resources:

We Are Bridges by Cassandra Lane

“Having the Race Talk With Kids: Parenting Resources by Age” by Cassandra Lane, LA Parent Magazine

“L.A. Parents Weigh In on Racism” edited by Christina Elston for LA Parent Magazine (This is amazing! Very informative.)

“Advice for Parents about Anti-Asian Hate” by Dr. Dagny Zhu, M.D., LA Parent Magazine

(I was planning to share additional resources, but these are such a treasure trove that I want to keep the focus on them. Thank you again, Cassandra!)

The post Race, Trauma, and Hope – A Mother’s Healing Journey (with Cassandra Lane) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “My Daughters Weigh In on Respectful Parenting (with Charlotte and Madeline)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today, I’m very excited because two of my most favorite people in the whole universe are my guests on this show, and these are my daughters.

For a couple of years now, I’ve been getting requests to hear from my children. What did they think about their upbringing? And I thought that was a good idea. And it seemed like there was a possibility for this to happen over the holidays. So I put out a question on my Facebook page, asking what people would like to know from my children if they were to do an episode together. I was floored by the enthusiasm and all of the wonderful questions that people had.

Then my daughters had the thought that it would be better to do this without me in the room. That seemed like a good idea to me. So that’s what they did. So they’re kind of doing a takeover on Unruffled for this week.

I just want to say a couple of things to preface this. One is that we are undoubtedly a privileged family in many ways. However, the majority of points that my daughters bring up and that I share about, I truly believe can apply to families in every situation if they value these ideas.

Another thing I want to mention is my daughters bring up RIE, which many of you may not know is an acronym for Resources for Infant Educarers. So that’s R-I-E, but it’s pronounced rye, like rye bread. This is a nonprofit organization founded by Magda Gerber. It’s also used as a name for her philosophy (or perspective) on early childhood that is the foundation of everything that I teach.

So with that, here are Charlotte and Madeline.

Charlotte:  Hi, I’m Charlotte. I’m 28 years old.

Madeline:  I’m Madeline, and I’m 24 years old.

Charlotte:  We have a younger brother, but he couldn’t be here today.

Madeline:  Our mom gave us some questions that people asked on Facebook. We’ll get to some of them and use that as sort of a guide to our conversation. But overall, we will just be discussing our experiences being raised by RIE parents, I guess.

Charlotte:  Here we go.

When, if ever, did you become aware of differences between the way you were parented compared to your friends or peers? Did you have any thoughts on these differences at the time? What’s something you noticed your parents did differently than others that you’re thankful for or didn’t like?

Well, I think I definitely was aware in a school setting, as far as being able to choose activities that we wanted to do. We were never made to do anything. I think that’s pretty fundamental to the philosophy, but we were never made to take a piano lesson. Everything was totally, organically had to be our idea.

Madeline:  And we did take piano lessons.

Charlotte:  And sometimes our idea was to take piano lessons, and it would be for three weeks, and then we’d be over it, and then we didn’t have to take them anymore. I think actually, maybe there was a moment of try to persevere a little bit, but for the most part, we were allowed to do whatever hobbies we wanted to. And so I think Madeline was interested in mad science. So she got to take mad science.

Madeline:  Yeah. I feel like we got to explore a lot of different interests, which helped us gain a ton of new experiences, even if none of those ended up carrying… I still now, if I’m doing the crossword, I know some of the music answers because I took music either in school and a little bit out of school, and I learned certain things that add to my knowledge of the world. But at the time I was like, I don’t want to do this anymore, and I just sort of threw that away. But I still gained stuff from it and at my own pace.

Charlotte:  Yeah. I have friends now who say pretty confidently that looking back, they wish that their parents would have forced them to do the violin or some sport because now they would be really good at it. I strongly feel totally the opposite. It’s much more important to me than my parents raised me in a way that fostered the sense of: we trust you to choose your activities and pursue-

Madeline:  On a day-to-day basis-

Charlotte:  Your passion of the day.

Madeline:  … as well. Yeah. I feel like I’m one of those people who says that sometimes, kind of jokingly, but like if I actually think back and evaluate, do I wish that I magically had some skill? Yeah. But that totally discounts all of the time that I would have had to spend doing something that I didn’t want to do instead of being able to explore stuff that I did want to do.

But something that we’ve talked about recently is that when you’re a kid, you don’t really know how other kids are parented. You can go to a kid’s house, and they have different foods. They have different toys and stuff like that. But you don’t see the differences in the parenting until you’re older, and you can talk to them later about like, “Oh, what were your parents like when you were younger?”

Charlotte:  Yeah. Whatever is in your household, you consider normal for a long time. I don’t know that much about how the brain develops, but there’s got to be a critical period for when you start comparing yourself to others.

Madeline:  It seems like middle school. I remember in middle school, all of a sudden everything was like… I was self-conscious in a bunch of different ways that I wasn’t before then, including what was at my house and what other kids had and stuff. But before that point, which is arguably the more important part in terms of the philosophy that our parents use, before that point, it’s not something that you notice every day. You don’t see other kids with their parents enough to understand what’s going on in their household, and you don’t care.

Charlotte:  Yeah. If you go over for a play date, you think of it more as like, oh, Catherine’s brand is to have a bunch of Cheez-Its there, or they always have this particular game. But you don’t feel that you’re less than because you don’t have that in your own house.

Madeline:  Yeah. So I don’t think you have to worry about your kids comparing themselves to other people in preschool. No child is that aware of those things or self-conscious about those things.

Charlotte:  Yeah. All right. Next question.

Madeline:  Next question.

Did we ever feel that we had been left out of something when we witnessed other parents play with their children in a non-RIE way, since we had not received that style of engagement/attention? This is this parent’s fear when not taking over and leading their child’s play.

This is a no brainer for me. No, not at all. Again, like what we were just saying, I think when you’re a young kid, you don’t really notice those things. And there was never a point when I was younger where I was like: ooh, I wish my mom would come and tell me what to play right now. Is it nice to be available for your child if they need another person to play with on their terms, with their rules?

Charlotte:  Yeah, let them be able to find you.

Madeline:  Right.

Charlotte:  Yeah. Anyway, it’s not to instruct anyone on how to be a parent, but to answer the question. Honestly, if I can think back to being a child and seeing the parents that really… I can remember specifically being in one of those clay pottery places, Color Me Mine or something, where you’re given a raw pot that you can paint however you want, and then it gets fired, and you have this lovely pot to take home or to give as a gift, and you can use whatever colors you want and paint however you wish. And I remember being there with my mom who was letting me do whatever I pleased on this pot, and looking at the table next to us, and there was a parent — it was like a very stark contrast. This mother was literally holding the daughter’s hand to help her paint a beautiful butterfly. And then finally the daughter just like gave up on trying to do anything on her own, having her own autonomy. So she kind of just lost interest. And then all of a sudden it was literally just the mom creating this piece of pottery.

And from what I can remember, my reaction was kind of like… this is dark. This mom is really intense. If anything, seeing a parent who was really obsessed with being a part of their kid’s play when I was able to kind of do my own thing, I looked at that as a bit much. I never felt, oh, I need more attention.

All right, next question.

Did they go through a rebellious period where they shut you out?

Madeline?

Madeline:  I definitely did, in high school, especially. And I think some of it was just some mental health stuff that I was going through at the unfortunate cross section of time in which a kid is even more naturally predisposed to start shutting their parent out. So it was sort of a combination of factors. But yeah, I definitely did. But I think the comfort that I had during that time was I knew that my mom wasn’t going to be offended by that in the longterm. She was never going to hold that against me. She maybe mentions it now, and we look back and laugh together.

I knew that when I was ready to come back and have conversations with my mom and be present and kind, then she would be there and ready to have those moments with me too. She was never going to hold against me the fact that I wanted to just sit in my room and ignore them all day or just be kind of mean or whatever. I knew that I was always going to be welcomed back in, which I think is really important because it’s totally natural. So many people that I know had that same phase with their parents, and not every parent is willing to take themselves, their personal feelings out of it and say… I know this isn’t about me. It’s about what my kid is going through right now. So let me just be there for them from afar where they want me.

Charlotte:  Yeah. Not trying to force it out of them.

Madeline:  Because that just leads to further pushing people away.

Charlotte:  Yeah. It’s like a rebellion, it feels like it’s like a long-term version of a tantrum.

Madeline:  Yeah.

Charlotte:  And you’ve got to let it happen.

Madeline:  Exactly.

Charlotte:  And play itself out.

Madeline:  Yeah.

Charlotte:  My only rebellion was that I wanted to dye my hair dark once, and my mom let me do it all by myself. And then it turned out striped.

Madeline:  And she regretted it.

Charlotte:  I regretted it. My mom didn’t.

Madeline: She learned her lesson.

Charlotte:  There’s my stripey haired daughter.

Madeline:  Next question.

Do we notice differences or similarities between us and peers in terms of handling hard situations or being able to navigate issues or feelings?

Charlotte:  I just feel that, maybe in comparison to my peers, let me say since high school, I have always had a really positive relationship to my emotions at every end of the spectrum. And I guess respected them in the same way that my mother respected them as a the kid, meaning if I am really in sadness, if something, if someone’s broken my heart, or I’m disappointed, and I have a regret or something, instead of trying to stifle it and push it away, I really do like to feel it. Because I do have a sense that if I don’t feel this thing, it’s just going to stay there bubbling under the surface, and I’m not going to be able to get through it.

So I’ve had friends who described trying to stifle their feelings, or repress them, or make an urge to make them go away, which I just really have never felt. It’s not great to feel sad or mad, but I really tried to feel them so that I can get through them. And I know that on the other hand is probably incredible happiness that can come through as long as I give time to the negative feelings.

Madeline:  I totally agree with that. I definitely have been taught that it’s okay to be sad one day, because most likely, nine times out of 10, I’ll wake up the next day with some distance and feel a lot better. And I just had to have a sad day, and that’s just what had to happen. And I feel like our parents gave us a lot of space to have that when we were younger.

Charlotte:  How do you feel that when you hear from friends about their upbringings? Do you feel grateful for the RIE approach?

Madeline:  I definitely do. I think anytime I talk to my friends about their parents and how they grew up, I can’t think of a single time where I have thought: man, I wish my parents were more like yours. Almost always, I’m like, I’m glad my parents weren’t like yours. I’m so lucky to have the parents that I did and to have been raised the way that I was. It’s hard to go all the way back to the core RIE stuff of infant and toddler and know really how that was different from my friends, but definitely the slightly older years that I do remember, there definitely feels like there’s a difference. And I always do feel like I come out on top in the parenting comparisons.

Charlotte:  Yeah. There were definitely times where I was frustrated maybe in the moment with, I don’t know, not being allowed to see a movie or something, but in the long run now, in hindsight, I realize everything actually was pretty perfect. And above all, something that I am grateful for is the relationship that this approach has fostered between my mom and I. And I feel like looking back everything that she did, every decision she made, her parenting style just totally above everything has made us have a really copacetic, mutually respectful bond that’s really special.

Madeline: Yeah. I agree with that. I definitely have a stronger relationship with my parents than a lot of people who I know and a lot of my peers in the long run. Even though I did have that moment of shutting them out and everything like that, it is now something where I feel like I can come to my parents with anything, and they will always be there for me. And if they need anything from me, I’ll reciprocate. Like there is definitely that mutual respect that is shockingly rare. And I don’t realize how rare it is until I talk to people my age.

Charlotte:  Yeah. I think that the trust element was really powerful. And I guess I always felt, and this has got to be since I was an infant, that my parents trusted me to make my own decisions. And of course-

Madeline:  They don’t let you drive off a cliff.

Charlotte:  Yeah, that can go totally overboard as being totally permissive. In no way, permissive. But just kind of through every phase of life, respectful and trusting that our instincts were at least a little bit right or just part of the process of our evolution as a human being. That’s something that’s really carried through and now has just fostered this great dynamic that I’m so, so, so grateful for, and I feel really stands out amongst my peers.

Madeline:  Great. Next question.

How do you think your relationships with your parents and siblings have evolved over time?

Charlotte:  Well, we touched on the relationship with our parents, and as far as how it’s evolved. It starts out being… a parent really has to parent because they have to make sure you don’t-

Madeline:  The safety net is a little tighter when you’re younger.

Charlotte:  Yeah. They have to make sure you survive. But then over time, we were then able to make our own decisions.

And I think you can touch more on our sibling dynamic. We’re all four years apart.

Madeline:  And so we all had phases of being really close with one of our siblings. Maybe you didn’t with Ben, the youngest, as much.

Charlotte:  No, I had it with you where you were my little doll.

Madeline:  So I had a phase first of being very close with Charlotte and playing together a lot. And then she got older, and then Ben got older, and so I could then play with him. And he was my-

Charlotte:  It’s like be the boss of them.

Madeline: Not baby doll. But when you’re an older sibling, you get to be a little bit the boss of the other.

Charlotte:  Madeline and I basically exclusively played school where I was the teacher.

Madeline:  Yeah. And I tried to do that with Ben and be the teacher, but it didn’t work as well. So we just sort of played with toys and went outside, and I don’t know, whatever. So I had moments where I was closer with Charlotte, and then moments where I was closer with Ben, and then moments after that where I just wanted to be close to nobody. And I think that there were conflicts during those times, but our parents never involved themselves to the extent of saying, “well, now you have to say, sorry.”

I think with my younger brother, I had a lot of conflicts with him where it would sometimes involve tackling each other, and someone would be in tears, mostly just for the drama of it, not because we were hurt. Of course, if we were hurt, that would be something different. But we had really some intense moments, and I never felt like I was forced to be sorry about it. I think I felt sorry about it when I realized, oh my gosh, what just happened with my sweet little brother? And because I was given sort of that moment to realize what had happened and feel bad about it naturally, rather than just being told, “well, now you have to say, sorry,” and it feeling super surface level, I was able to realize the impact that I was having on this other person who was smaller than me.

Charlotte:  Rather than being forced to save face just to soothe your mom. It can be terrifying as a parent to see your beautiful offspring mid tackle, but just trying to smooth it over and to force both parties to apologize or just to make nice is kind of…

Madeline:  Yeah. I feel like at the end of the day, the core of it is that I got to choose whether I liked my little brother or not. And at the end of the day, because he was my little brother, and he was sweet and fun, and we had so much fun together, I chose to like him. And now I adore him, and I think he’s the coolest person ever. But there were many moments where it might’ve seemed like I didn’t, and my mom could have tried to sort of selfishly say, “say sorry to him, say sorry to him.” And that wouldn’t have been genuine, and that would have fostered some sort of resentment. Whereas, because I was able to have the moment of naturally coming to that conclusion of feeling bad about something mean that I did to him, I was able to actually forge a genuine relationship with him that is now great because it got to be organic.

Charlotte:  Yeah. Next question.

Do we feel intrinsic motivation instead of doing things to seek approval?

Hundred percent.

Madeline:  Yeah.

Charlotte:  This was something that, in school, friends would talk about, “oh, my parents are mad at me for getting a bad grade.” Or, “I have to do this because my parents.” or, “They’re helping me with my homework.”

This was just totally foreign to me. And finally, as I was in high school, I was just fully aware of the situation being very different in my household than it was with my classmates, because my parents didn’t know if I had homework or not. They didn’t ask me. They kind of let school be my own territory. And whether or not I wanted to do an assignment was completely up to me. They realized that there are enough forces in effect at school, in that landscape, that you’ll be punished for a bad grade, and you’ll be rewarded for a good one within that context.

Madeline:  To be fair, we went to a school that was very academically…  that was placed in high importance. And it’s not in all schools, but in the school that we went to, it was. And so there were already forces at play that would make you want to do well. But in terms of our personal experience, I totally agree. And I think that our younger brother would also agree. We’ve all been very self-motivated, and we all want to do well. But I agree that I don’t really know why, besides just, we know that we can, I think. I knew that I was never going to be punished or rewarded either. I mean, I had friends who were paid for good grades.

Charlotte:  Yeah, my parents didn’t even get that excited if I did that well.

Madeline:  No, they sort of matched our level of excitement. So if we said, “Shoot, I got this grade, and I’m not that happy with it.” Then they would be like, “Oh, that’s too bad. But it’s not a big deal.”

Charlotte:  Because I think parents who would say, my kid is not doing well in this class, therefore I need to get them tutored in it. And they need tutoring because they need to get to this level. I think a lot of that comes from they feel like they’re failing if their child isn’t doing well. Maybe it’s just not the right time. Yeah. And I think forcing it, forcing it, forcing it is just another thing that probably breeds resentment between child and parent.

Madeline:  Yeah. I think school is the most clear example of intrinsic motivation.

Charlotte:  Yeah. And it’s something that can’t be taught.

Madeline:  Yeah.

Charlotte:  That’s what I read about in a psych book once. “Can’t be taught.”

Madeline:  All right. Next.

Someone said, they know it’s beneficial to limit screen time, but they’d love to hear the long-term benefits and our perspective on that.

I think the first thing that I’ll say is that screen time now is so different than screen time when we were kids — 20 years ago, I guess now, we were kids — because now screens are actively trying to take your child’s attention, whereas when we were kids, it was basically TV and movies. And then as we grew older, I think in a middle school-

Charlotte:  Computers got in the mix.

Madeline:  People started to get smartphones, and that’s something where the device is actively trying to get you to use it more. So it’s a lot more difficult to keep your kids away from it now. But that being said, it goes back to what we said earlier, which is that what is normal in your household is what kids see as normal. Our normal was we got to watch movies on the weekends, and we didn’t get to watch TV unless we were home sick. And so-

Charlotte:  I still feel sick when I watch TV. If I watch TV during the day, there’s something psychosomatic — I become sick. So that’s conditioning.

Madeline:  And I can’t just have TV on in the background because-

Charlotte:  I must engage with it. Because it was not put in front of us as a distraction or as something that would keep our attention while our parents could… I’m assuming while we were watching a movie, they did get to have some much needed “them time.” But that was never posed as a means to an end. It was just a nice little treat that we got to have. But TV, because it was something that we got to watch so rarely, to this day I have to actively engage with. I can’t just tune it out. Instead of being desensitized by watching so much TV, I’d say I’m super sensitive to it, I guess.

Madeline:  Which I don’t think is a bad thing, for the record. I think, at the time, did I wish that I could watch more? Maybe, because it felt like such a treat. It was like sugar in a way, in terms of, you want more because it’s exciting, and it tastes good. But it’s nice to keep that tasting good, and not for it to turn into this bland thing that doesn’t mean anything.

Charlotte:  Of course, it’s harder and harder these days because we now have phones –

Madeline:  Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. It’s like phones now, it’s totally a different game.

Charlotte:  Which you can constantly engage with and is more personal and is a whole other realm. It’s a screen, but it’s something that you’re engaging with actively.

But as far as how little we watched TV as kids, I can say a longterm benefit is if I have a moment of pause, and I have nothing to do, the last thing I think of is turn on the television. It’s ultimately, maybe I end up doing something a little more productive or more introspective.

Madeline:  Yeah. And in the moment too, if when we were bored as kids, we’d be running around the house going, “I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m bored.” And our mom would be like… “hope you figure that out, here’s some ideas if you want them, but none of them are going to be TV.” So we weren’t able to just pacify with TV. We had to figure out other ways of spending time, which I don’t know how that can possibly be a bad thing.

Charlotte:  Yeah. Friends who had households that were really overstimulating… We would have friends who had the new… because there were also video games, which we didn’t have. We never had.

Madeline:  Until we were older.

Charlotte:  Yeah. I never had one though because I was the first one.

Madeline:  Because you weren’t that interested anyways.

Charlotte:  I asked for a Game Boy every Christmas for four years. It just never came from Santa. It never came. It was Santa skipped over that line every time.

Madeline:  Well, I got a Game Boy when I was older because it was much more prevalent then, and I could make a three point argument why I ought to have one.

Charlotte:  I would just sneak it on the list and never got it.

But friends who came and had these awesome involved video games at their house, when they would come to mine, they would be, I think the word was thrown around, “I’m bored.” They were bored because they were used to being so overstimulated. But once they got in the vibe of the Lansbury household, and I showed them our playhouse, and I started involving them in a really, really, really upbeat game of house, they wanted to come to my house all the time.

Madeline:  Yeah. No, that’s true actually.

Charlotte:  Because it’s actually more fun, and you can sustain it for longer. You don’t get bored.

Madeline:  That’s true. I would go to my friend’s house who would have TV on all day, and I would get bored there. And there was nothing that I could do because my friend just wanted to keep watching TV. Whereas when they came to my house, we wouldn’t be allowed to do that. And so we’d have to play with dolls all day. And we could spend hours, and I would never get bored. So it’s just sort of a different-

Charlotte:  It’s not a mind-numbing experience.

Madeline:  Yeah, exactly.

Charlotte:  Anyway, that was a long answer. One more.

Was your mom always unruffled?

Madeline:  For the most part, I think. There’s never been a point where I feel like my mom lashed out at us for any reason, even if we were lashing out at her, which I think is what that comes down to really.

Charlotte:  Or when we’re in a state of stress, becoming stressful also.

Madeline:  Right. I’m sure that there was moments where she didn’t feel unruffled, but she never took it out on us, which I think is the important thing and the hard thing to do in that moment. But yeah, when we were having a tough moment, she would at least appear to me to be way calmer than I was when I was flailing around or whatever.

Charlotte:  Yeah.

Madeline:  And I think that that’s good. I do feel like even now, if I am having a really, really hard time, I do feel like my mom is that source of stability, and my dad as well. They’re both people who I can go to because, growing up, they were always the person who I could go to who would be calm and able to help me with an issue.

Charlotte:  Yeah. And I think I’ve been able to model that in my relationships as an adult. They’ve always let us feel the feeling, throw the tantrum, not get all worked up if we were in this high state of arousal. And I, now, in my close relationships, I’m able to model, I suppose, an unruffled approach when it comes to trying to manage other people’s feelings.

Our parents, when we were in a higher arousal state, they would, I think, not become very flustered or would just let us sort of feel those feelings and get through this blackout state where we’re so worked up that we can’t behave like ourselves or say anything that we actually mean. And as adults, everyone has their own version of little tantrums. And I’m always hyper aware of the fact that when a person’s in that state, I can’t trust anything they say, and that it’s something that they have to go through in order to come out on the other side. And so I try to practice my mom’s unruffled approach in my adult life. It usually works.

Madeline:  I think that’s all of the questions that we have ready to answer. So…

Charlotte:  Thanks for joining us. This has been fun. Thanks for letting us be guests-

Madeline:  Unruffled takeover.

Charlotte:  … on our lovely mother’s podcast.

Madeline:  Hopefully you liked us. Otherwise, you’ll never listen to another one again, but…

Charlotte:  No hate mail.

Madeline:  We probably missed stuff, but…

Charlotte:  Yeah, you can always throw us a follow on Instagram. Just kidding. I think that’s it. Hope you all are having a wonderful start to the new year.

Madeline:  Thanks for listening. Be safe, everybody.

Janet Lansbury:  Thank you so much, Charlotte and Madeline. It means a lot to me that you were willing to do this.

I also want to say that I was pretty surprised by my daughters’ conviction and effusiveness in some of the points that they made. What surprised me the most, actually, was this last question. Am I unruffled? Was their mother unruffled? And honestly, I would have thought my daughters would have said something more to the effect of, “well, my mom’s human, like anyone else. And most of the time, she was calm, but she had her moments, like all parents do.”

But they didn’t. So what this tells me is a couple of comforting things.

One, that our children’s memories tend to be forgiving. And two, we don’t need to be calm all of the time. We don’t need to be perfect. If we can embrace a respectful unruffled approach the majority of the time, that’s all that matters. Parents don’t need to be on their game at every moment, especially if we repair, we come clean with our children and admit our mistakes.

We really can do this.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category. So you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. And both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon: No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting. You can also get them in e-book at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or Barnes & Noble and in audio at audible.com. You can get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the link in the liner notes of this podcast.

Thanks so much for listening.

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Transcript of “Losing It – Understanding What Makes Us Snap (With Elisabeth Corey)”

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Transcript of “Raising Self-Directed Learners in Any School Environment”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. This week I’m thrilled to have Laura Grace Weldon back to discuss how her self-directed, free-range learning ideas can benefit children who go to traditional schools like mine did. And we’ll be discussing a lot of other things as well.

For those who aren’t familiar with her work, Laura Grace Weldon is the author of Free Range Learning which is a comprehensive guide for families interested in homeschooling and unschooling. In our previous podcast together, Laura shared an extremely compelling case for homeschooling. If you haven’t listened to that episode and you’re interested in exploring less conventional schooling possibilities, it’s really a must. The tile of that podcast is “Adventures in Free-Range Learning,” and I know you’ll be as inspired as I was by Laura’s experiences and discoveries. Her whole journey. It’s really incredible and I believe she’s a genius.

Laura agreed to join me again to explore the other side of the coin, conventional schooling, which is still the route that most families take by either choice or necessity.

Welcome Laura and thank you so much for being here.

Laura Grace Weldon:  Hello Janet. Thank you so much for inviting me again.

Janet Lansbury:  So in the personal story that you shared last time, you mentioned that your children were originally in school and you touched a little bit on how you were an advocate for their education and their individuality in that setting. Can you talk a little about how you managed that and what, if any, progress you were able to make?

Laura Grace Weldon:  I think like many really involved parents, I volunteer in classrooms, I served on committees, I managed to work with a group of moms in institute and all of day work program where we brought working artists into the school, which shows that our school had a lot of flexibility to work with us. I did plenty of things that weren’t successful, like try to change the school lunch room offerings to be healthier and tried to advocate for my kids when there were mandated things. I remember one was an all school Sea World field trip and I very politely said that my kids would be staying home that day because I didn’t want them to learn about marine mammals in a captive situation.

I think I was the only person who did that and considered crazy by everybody else but I think we always have the right to stick up for what we care about and whether that’s saying that there is no research showing that homework is a value in elementary grades and that we advocate for our kids to have less or no homework at that time. It’s something we have the right to do. Maybe to advocate for our kids not taking standardized tests, which more and more people are doing, is a way of sticking up for our kids. I know that I ended up having to take one of my kids out of the school and take him to Case Western Reserve University for IQ testing because they didn’t want to put him in the gifted program because he was not getting his work done because he was bored but that was one of the qualification is you had to be super responsible kid.

Janet Lansbury:  Oh my goodness.

Laura Grace Weldon:  Yeah, we just had to follow our instincts and do what we think is right, even if it’s hard.

Janet Lansbury:  What was your approach in those days with their after school time and their weekend time and their holiday time? Did they have the balance of self-directed learning and lying around and deciding what that time was about?

Laura Grace Weldon:  We always de-emphasized structure programs outside of school and in part, that was because so many of the families we were friends with, once their kids were school age, they were just gone incessantly. They were in travel soccer or they were in so many theater lessons or they were just gone. It was like our kids plans were completely unavailable unless you scheduled them in and it made me so sad for what childhood. So, I was the horrible mom who would throw away those little flyers that came in backpacks that tried to have all these enticing things to do and I even threw out the sports things, which I know is just unbelievable to so many people but when I tried to research it, it showed that, at least for elementary aged kids, there’s no real benefit to early sports and kids who start young are not any more likely to be high school athletes and about 75% of kids who are in league sports drop out by the time they’re 13. So, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me, which gave my kids all sorts of time to ride their bikes and read library books and go hiking and make their own little inventions and do kid things.

Janet Lansbury: Also, there’s this idea of allowing them to assimilate, even just for educational purposes. To be able to have time pondering what you’ve taken in, the learning experiences or the enrichment experiences that you had. I mean, children need a lot of time down to be able to absorb and throw it around in their mind and make sense of it and that is real learning.

Laura Grace Weldon: Right and that’s true for all of us. I think the more low-key approach makes it so much less stressful for everyone in the family and parents are not incessantly driving around and trapping the littlest ones in car seats and strollers to the older kid’s activities and everyone is just a great deal more relaxed when you have a low key approach.

Janet Lansbury: Definitely, and it gives them that space to figure out what they’re passionate about. So, my approach was more about really trusting them to know themselves during their downtime, during their after school time, weekend time and that meant, in a couple cases, signing up to do a sport or something that generally they did stay with and they didn’t ever complain about going to do these things because it was completely their choice. This was maybe one per child, a one day a week situation per child where they would have that after school. If they got an inkling that they wanted to try something, I saw that as a way to give them confidence in those voices inside and sometimes it was just, especially with instruments and thinking of one of my children in particular, she took probably four different instruments. Took lessons briefly in each of those instruments. We always let her quit and I know that’s controversial for parents. We trusted her to have gotten what she needed from that and move on to the next thing. Now, she doesn’t really play any instruments but she just graduated with high honors from college and she’s got a lot of talents and I’m sure she got something from those experiences.

Laura Grace Weldon: Yeah. Learning is never wasted and you took that approach where you were letting her explore and I don’t mean to say that we should just let our kids do nothing. What you were doing was letting your kids explore their passions, whether it was sports or music or whatever and I think that’s the key is we really pay attention to the individual child and some kids are more daydreamy and lie around on their stomachs and draw pictures and do make believe and some kids are more geared toward inventing things and building things and some kids are just driven to be with other kids and to sing and dance and act and that’s how we support their passion is make sure that they are exposed to new things but we still build in that freedom to explore those things and drop them if they’re no longer interesting.

Janet Lansbury:  So, we can still take a free range type learning approach, whether kids are in school or not, right?

Laura Grace Weldon:  Yes, absolutely. That’s actually how I ended up writing this book. I would be advocating to parents at a talk or at a gathering or something about less structure and more freedom and people would say, “Well, then, how am I reinforcing math and reading and how am I getting my kids to advance?” So, I would try to talk about what kids actually lean toward when we give them freedom and I ended up giving all these examples over and over, “Well, here are things that are open ended and unstructured to do and here are some other things.” And that became the last 100 pages of my book. I’ve got all these ideas that are appropriate for families or kids to do with friends or to do by themselves and they’re kind of spring board. So, say you want your kid over the summer to be doing work on math stuff and you don’t want to do worksheets. So, make up a secret code and sent messages. Sketch little maps, maybe a treasure map and hide some little silly thing or collect funny information about your family. Make a guess about how many times the cat sleeps here versus the time the cat sleeps there and you can chart it and find out. Track how much money you’re saving towards a big family event that you’re looking forward too. You can put math into all kinds of stuff.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. So, it’s meaningful to them and that’s how we all learn. When it’s meaningful, we learn quickly, we learn deeply, we learn best and it stays with us when we learn that way. So, how else have you supported your kids interests and passions besides their school time? Which for you, I guess, became all day.

Laura Grace Weldon:  One of the things I noticed is that kids seem so drawn to doing stuff with other kids and when left to their own devices, they kind of form these groups around interest. When a couple of my older kids were in a book group, my youngest and a couple other younger siblings of these kids were at loose ends and normally, I would have gathered them around in the books to remember something but instead, they started, in an impromptu way, making up and acting out stories. So, we called them the play rights and of course, every story they made up was constantly changed as they were then acting it out and they would come up with props, just from around the house or the yard and they had a hilarious, wonderful time and I ended up doing this for years and as they got older and were able to read and write, they would write down a rough outline of their stories and become more and more elaborate in the way that they acted it out and firstly, building all this emotional intelligence by arguing with each other about what was better and how to do it differently and stuff like that and it just seemed like this beautiful, organic group they had formed.

That happens often in a homeschooling, unschooling world, where kids get together and their parents help them to do that to expand on some interests like building electronics or learning darkroom techniques or something, and I learned slowly, but I learned that those things are most successful when parents don’t take over. If parents are super interested and, “Oh, let’s reenact Medieval History,” the kids usually are not the ones interested in doing it. It has to be the kid.

Janet Lansbury:  Absolutely, and I think that is why we love self-directed learning and why it’s so important for children because it does come from them and it’s a way of expressing themselves.

Laura Grace Weldon:  We had a bunch of boys who decided they wanted to do science club and the parents really ran this for a while and that we’d meet at different homes and the parents would have an activity out and all the materials and the boys would do mouse trap cars or some experiment and then the parent would explain if things didn’t go right and the boys were interested but they also wanted to play afterwards, and as the parents got more laid back and the boys got older, they just took over their science club and that became the play for them, is engaging in science and they would come up with these bigger and more elaborate projects they wanted to do and nobody was there explaining the scientific principles. Nobody was ruling over them, telling them how to do anything and they put so much rigor and depth into what they were learning and they made these marvelous projects. They build a hover craft that actually hovered. They built tennis ball cannons that shot amazing distances and that became this endeavor that was so important to them that they did this for years. They did this until they went off to college and I’m not sure if this is relevant, but a number of them did go into science fields. I can’t attribute that to science club but it showed the power of just stepping back and letting them do this on their own.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. For me, the joy in parenting has been the stuff my kids come up with and that’s been since they were born. Seeing that they were staring at something for a really long time that I never would have noticed and to them, it was interesting and learning about them through their self-directed activities and their passions and their hobbies, which there’s so many surprises along the way as parents and for me, that makes all the hard stuff worthwhile. That’s the gift in this, to get to be excited about the unfolding of our children. Seeing how powerful it is for them to feel that we appreciate them as they are. We’re not trying to make them a little more of a pianist or a soccer player. That we just get a kick out of exactly where they’re at and who they are.

Laura Grace Weldon: They’re still oriented towards their own wholeness and their integrity if we give them space to do that.

Janet Lansbury:  I was thinking of this before we talked today. I wanted to ask you if you’d ever had the sense that any of your children would have preferred conventional schooling at any time or did they want to go back, any of them? Did they ever ask about that or were they quite immersed in enjoying what you were able to give them?

Laura Grace Weldon:  I know a lot of homeschooling, unschooling kids are interested in schools if they hadn’t ever gone and I think it’s really nice to have the freedom in a family to say to your kids, “Of course you can try it out. Of course you can go back and see what you think or start school and see what you think. Some kids do go back in the junior high or high school years. Since my kids had been in school, they did not express any interest in going back into it because they were pretty familiar with what that was like and they wanted those structures to be done. So, it goes both ways.

Janet Lansbury:  In our last podcast, I had a longing for the ability to give that to my children. It really sounded so nurturing and so exciting. But we live in a pretty small community and for two of my three children, to have all the children they knew going off somewhere that they weren’t going, it would have been a punishment to them. They are both all about other people. So, I realized that the way you’ve done this, they have had incredible social experiences and a lot of opportunity for that. Where I live, they wouldn’t have had that.

Laura Grace Weldon:  Being in a small community and far from everything, I have certainly done my share of driving 45 minutes for anything that seemed enriching and fun and before my kids were homeschooled and after, I was always a big fan of having stuff at my house. It’s easier for me. Maybe it’s the hermit in me that’s like, “You guys come here.” When they were tiny, the thing that we did was family is we would do box parties, which was in BYOB, bring your own box and the coolest families brought refrigerator boxes or giant couch boxes or something like that and then the adults would sit comfortably in chairs and chat and drink and laugh and the kids would make things out of these boxes. Quite often, they joined them all together into mazes or cool castles or something and they could play the entire afternoon and well into evening just with nothing else but boxes. We always and still do have art parties, just because I like to have all sorts of cool supplies out and we have 50 people over and the kids do all sorts of fun stuff and the adults do fun stuff and those kinds of things are fun for me and it builds this sense of community that’s multi-age. I don’t know, it’s a different kind of a support that you can do whether your kids are in school or not.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, I loved having the children over at my house too, especially when they were very little and I was so into the philosophy I now teach and I wanted to be able to practice this with my children, with other children and if our neighbors were happy to have me babysit all the three year olds and it was great. I guess what I wanted to add to our talk last time was to reassure parents that they can still benefit from trusting their children’s passions. They can still allow children to explore all those things while also attending school.

Laura Grace Weldon: Absolutely.

Janet Lansbury:  The school that my kids went to, they had art and they had music. It was all much more structured then I would have ever designed it or wanted it, but they had this foundation from the early years that they could do these things themselves and that their way was the right way in terms of creativity, and those things were part of who they were, because that happens in the early years. That’s when children do get this core of self. I felt like they had a balance. They had a balance of when they weren’t in school, it was their time.

I was not going to tell them what to do or definitely not insist on anything and it helped them to keep trusting and it balanced out that time where they were in a structured learning situation. And I can also say, this definitely isn’t as true with public school, unfortunately, but at the private school, having that personal feedback and I guess you can call it assessment, but it was more the consultations you would have hearing about your children and how they’re doing. These people became my extended family, some of the administrators at that school. It was so reassuring to have them say, “They’re doing fine and this is what we see.” To have that outside assessment of your child that for us, as parents, we’re so in it that we really can’t get that objective sense of how they’re doing. So, that was a gift for sure that we were privileged to have. The way you did it, you had to trust even more.

Laura Grace Weldon: Yeah, I do think it’s so terribly important, public or private school to have a really respectful and friendly relationship with the teachers and staff. It sounds like your assessment situation worked out really well, but I also had kids who were underachievers and their grades didn’t match their IQ and to my regret of taking things away from a particular child, the things he really loved to do, all of his sciencey, nerdy, interest hand radio and model trains and stuff delayed to his assignments and some part of him was just, “I’m still not finishing these things. This is who I am. I’m not fitting into this structure.” And it’s that tug because your mom self is saying, “He’s already whole and himself as he is and the school is giving him this label and he is not enough.” It’s the structure and it is grievous. That doesn’t happen to every family but most creative kids do have trouble fitting into situations like that, and I know I read a study that the kids who were most deemed trouble makers in third grades were the kids who were very gifted. Often unidentified gifted.

I just finished David Sedaris’ book Calypso, which is another wonderful book of his and I had read about his childhood. Talk about a kid who did not do well in school. He had so much anxiety and so many compulsions and ticks that in school, he counted his steps, he hit himself in the head and he couldn’t stop himself from licking things, including light bulbs and light switches. He was deemed to be uneducatable. He talked on college and did odd jobs through his 20s and from an assessment rep, David Sedaris was doomed and here he is, this best selling rock star of an author who everybody loves. It is kind of interesting.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah and there are thousands of stories like that by the way, I’m sure you know-

Laura Grace Weldon: Yep.

Janet Lansbury:  Of very successful people and-

Laura Grace Weldon:  I sometimes think that as our kids get to the pre-teen, teen years, they’ve got 100 problems that are adults are telling them, “You can do better here and you need to be more motivated.” And I think sometimes that the kids who seem like they’re failing at challenges are actually just really looking for a worthy challenge, something bigger.

Janet Lansbury:  Self-chosen.

Laura Grace Weldon:  Yeah, and I think sometimes we have to talk with our kids about what really big challenge do you want? Let’s buy this beater MG. If you can fix it in three years, then you have your own car at 16 or how about you earn money this way and you and your friend can go on a backpacking trip when you’re 16 or some bigger challenge. Some service trip. It’s often the kids that you would least likely give those kinds of privileges who need them the most and rise to the occasion relies. Those are my regrets about what I didn’t do for this child that I kept taking the things away from because he wasn’t giving into the school mold.

Janet Lansbury:  We’ve gotta keep listening, I guess. We’ve gotta keep observing. Every child has interests and talents and things that they would focus on and have a very long attention span for if we can be open to that, but it’s hard when you’re trying to fit them into a mold that’s not working. I think these are all very hard choices that we have to make — these educational choices — and it feels like a big deal and I think parents should know that they can make changes, and it’s a process, and they don’t have to have all the answers, and they don’t have to get it all right the first time, and it’s okay. Children learn from all these situations. And if we stay their advocate and we stay on their side and believe in them and have that basic trust in them.

Laura Grace Weldon:  Right and it’s not an all or nothing. We don’t have to pull kids out of school because of a problem, we can just maybe a little fiercer in our advocacy for trusting them as who they are.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. Well, thank you so much Laura for talking with me again. I feel like we can talk all day and night and-

Laura Grace Weldon:  Well, thank you so much for including me and it’s always good to talk to you.

For more about the helpful ideas that Laura shared here today, please check out her book Free Range Learning. It’s available on Amazon and elsewhere and you can also check out her website lauragraceweldon.com and her Facebook community, Free Range Learning and please check out some of my other podcasts on my website janetlansbury.com. There are well over 100 and they’re all indexed by subject and category. So, you should be able to find whatever topic you’re interested in and remember both of my books are available on audio at audible.com. That’s No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and  Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting.  You can get them also in paperback at Amazon and an Ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple.com.

Thank you for listening. We can do this.

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