Transcript of “As Our Kids Get Older – 5 Ways to Continue Building Lasting Emotional Bonds”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be responding to a question, a couple of questions, actually, that I’m often asked—and by the way, I love any kinds of questions that you send me, so please keep them coming! The questions are around, What does your approach—respectful parenting or the RIE approach—look like as children get older? Does RIE end at two years old? What do you do then? What approach do you go to after that? Sometimes they’ll ask me, Who does what you do, but for older kids? And by “older” they might mean kids beyond three or four or five years old. So I thought I would take this opportunity to clarify some things about this approach I teach and my background.

What I’ve called “respectful parenting” is my interpretation of Magda Gerber’s Educaring Approach, commonly known as the RIE approach. And RIE is R-I-E, that’s the acronym for the nonprofit organization that Magda founded with pediatric neurologist Tom Forrest in 1978 called Resources for Infant Educarers, RIE. RIE was created for the first two years of life, and all the specific guidelines that Magda offered pertain to those first two years of life. In that sense, it does end at age two. But the whole purpose of this approach, and the whole reason it’s focused on zero to two, is that this is a foundational approach. It’s a way of understanding our children as babies and our relationship with them, a nurturing healthy relationship, how to navigate that in the first two years and give our child the foundation that they need, and our relationship the foundation it needs, to flourish for all the rest of the years. So this isn’t now we stop doing this and now we’re going to start spanking our child or molding them like clay. This approach lasts throughout children’s adulthood, and I can verify that as a parent of three adults.

Another question I’m often asked is, Is there a RIE person for older years? And there is not a RIE person for older years, because there isn’t a RIE approach for older years. What I’ve done is interpreted and also used my experiences—not only as a parent of three very different children with unique needs and temperaments and talents, but also the many families that I’ve consulted with over these past almost 30 years now, who have children up to age 10 or so. And some of these have been in-person consultations, some have been telephone conversations. And I’ve mainly learned that this approach is still totally valid and works for children of all ages. This same approach that is focused on the first two years of life continues to work. Personally, I’ve never needed anything else as a parent with my own children. Maybe because I’ve put so many years into studying and training, and then practicing and teaching this approach, that it’s foundational in me, in the way that I perceive everything.

I find it so interesting, too, that all these studies show that in the first three years of life, children are learning more, developing more than in the rest of our lives put together. And yet these early years are the ones we don’t remember, right? Magda focused on the first two years because it’s the beginning, and if we can set ourselves up in the beginning, then we’re giving our child something, and ourselves something, that will last.

One of the reasons is because of what science shows, that this is the most important time for children in terms of their self-confidence, their sense of self, even basic character traits, many of them that we’re modeling and they’re learning them that way. This is a precious time. We could say the most precious time in terms of learning and brain development and our relational development. So that was one reason.

Another reason is that while most believe—I don’t know if this is still true because there have been so many studies showing what amazing learners babies are, but yet still I would say we tend to discount these early years. We tend to see babies in this very limited way. Maybe because they’re not talking yet, they don’t seem like full people we can interact with. We maybe don’t understand that they might not want to be in somebody else’s arms, so we don’t bother to let them know or ask them and get a vibe from them whether that’s welcome or not. We maybe talk down to them. We don’t treat them as whole people so much. And yet what Magda believed, and studies confirm, this is actually a time we should want to be extra-careful, because they can’t express themselves. They can’t share nuances about what they’re feeling or their needs. So this is a time, in Magda’s view, and I’ve come to agree with this, to be more careful in what we’re doing with babies. How we’re engaging with them, how we’re treating them, because they can’t express themselves verbally. That’s why she was especially interested in all the things that are going on with babies in the first two years.

So, because it’s foundational and because they can’t tell us, we want to give them extra respect instead of less respect. And that’s why she talks about welcoming a baby as an honored guest when they’re born, not just a cute little thing that’s maybe a little empty-headed in the way that we see them. I mean, I definitely did that. Some people are naturally able to see into a baby and see the person there right away, but I was not able to in the beginning. Now that I do, I can’t stop seeing that with every baby. It’s like once you open this door, you never want to leave and maybe you can’t leave, if you wanted to.

That’s why there’s often this confusion around why this approach is focused on the first two years and what we’re supposed to do later. But I do understand that, just as everything looks different as our children grow, the way that we’re engaging with them looks different. And that’s why in this podcast, I do love to answer questions about children that are up to eight or nine years old. I don’t often go beyond that, because my basis of experience for those years is personal. But what I thought I would do in this podcast is share how I’ve continued to interpret Magda Gerber’s approach and how it has served me beautifully as a parent. I mean, I am not always beautiful as a parent, but this approach has served me that way.

Let’s talk about some of the major points that continue as our children get older and how they look. I mean, all of this continues as children get older, but how it looks.

First: keeping faith in our kids’ competency. One of the amazing lessons in this approach is that babies are born, yes, very dependent on us, and that’s good. It should be that way, right? That’s how we’re going to begin our attachment with them. And there’s so much that they can’t do. But even at birth, they have competencies. And the interesting thing about perceiving our children as competent right from the very beginning is not only is seeing believing, but believing is seeing in this case. So if we believe that our baby can learn how to communicate with us, we will see that this actually is true, because we will act on that belief, meaning we’ll try to include our baby in communication with us.

We realize that babies also have thoughts and interests that aren’t just about us. I remember years ago someone commenting on one of my posts saying, “Well, if a baby is away from you, if they’re out of your arms, they are just waiting to be in your arms again.” Basically, they’re putting life on hold. And first of all, it implies such a limited view of babies, that they couldn’t possibly have an independent thought or interest. Those of us that observe babies know that that’s not true. But if we don’t believe it, we probably won’t see it. We won’t see that the baby is actually quite content, sometimes, in their playpen or safe crib or on the floor as they get older. And they’ve got a lot to do, they’ve got a lot to see, they’ve got a lot to take in. When we see this limited view, we become very self-centered in the way that we’re considering babies, right? It’s all about us, adding so much more pressure to an already challenging job.

When we do begin this—and none of these things I’m going to say can’t be picked up on later in life. That’s the whole point of this podcast episode, is to show you how you can pick this up later in life if you want to, it doesn’t have to be when they’re babies. But when we start it when they’re babies, it becomes so much easier for us because we’re already into the seeing is believing, believing is seeing. We’ve believed and we’ve seen, and that just builds on itself. Wow, my baby can do this. They learned to roll over to their tummy all by themselves. We saw them trying, we saw them working on it, we saw them using their body freely, doing all these interesting intermediate positions. They can do that. And then from there, they can scoot, they can crawl, they can walk. They’re communicating with us. They’re practicing cognitive skills. They’re building higher learning skills like focus, attention, and critical thinking. Wow. Why would we get in the way of that if we saw it, right?

So this is never about abandoning a child or forcing independence. I mean, forcing independence is not possible anyway, right? Because independence isn’t a specific action someone else can teach you. It’s a feeling that you have. It’s something you want to taste, even as a baby. You want to have moments where you get to decide what to look at, what to touch. And the sense of agency that this builds is very powerful for children and carries them through adulthood. What we can do is honor independence, make room for it, notice it, and know that that’s such a positive aspect of our children’s development.

Also, it’s not only that children develop self-confidence and a sense of agency, this I can do it feeling deep within them. But this is also such a healthy relationship dynamic, right? That I trust you in all these areas. You know better than I do what you’re working on. You know better than I do what interests you. So why would I get in the way of that? And when we start opening ourselves up to that, we realize that children of all ages, not just the older ones but the little ones as well, they know what they’re doing. If we could stay out of their way in these areas of development and just create the environment that allows them to practice whatever they’re practicing. Not indicate to them, either overtly or subtly, that Really what you’re doing isn’t important, you need to be doing this right now. Because this is what I’m worried about you not getting, or this is what I was told you need to learn at this age or whatever.

And this can carry through with walking, talking, the way toys work, climbing, toilet learning, reading, homework. Eventually applying to college, choosing partners, choosing jobs, and navigating workplaces and relationships. Through all these autonomous struggles and accomplishments, our trust in our children’s abilities keeps growing, along with their self-confidence.

Alternatively, if we don’t truly believe that our kids are capable of handling their developmentally-appropriate tasks without our assistance—we’re not talking about putting children in a situation that’s traumatic, these are developmentally-appropriate tasks—I mean, if they ask for our assistance, we’re going to find a way to give it to them, right? Assistance, which doesn’t mean doing it for them. If they’re not asking, let them explore it. That’s the best possible thing they could do. But if we’re worried that they’re going to be crushed if they get too frustrated or if they make a mistake or get disappointed or, God forbid, they fail, then we can perpetuate this cycle of dependency. That, again, puts so much pressure on us and creates less security in our child, less self-confidence. The feeling that they need us for all these things that they really don’t, but we both got caught up in it that way.

If you do find yourself caught up in a situation where your child seems to need you to do all these tasks for them, then just try backing off. Not all the way maybe, but a little bit. If your child thinks they need you to sit there right with them while they’re doing their homework and show them how to do it, then just back off a little at first. I’m going to stay here with you the whole time, but instead of giving you the answers—and I’m not saying to say all this out loud, but this is the way to maybe approach it—instead of me giving you the answers, I’m going to ask more questions to help you find the answer.

I remember when my son was I think 10, and he had to make a book report and he had to draw a picture for the cover of the book report of this dog that was a big part of the story. And he said, “I don’t know how to draw a dog. I can’t do it.” And I thought, Uh-oh, yeah, that is a lot. That is kind of intimidating, for sure. But instead of starting to draw it for him—which believe me, I have that impulse. I have all the impulses everybody else has, but I’ve learned to kind of let them go and trust. So instead of taking that on for him, I just asked him questions, like “Is there a part of the dog’s body that you could draw first? What do you feel like you can draw?” And he said, “The nose.” So I said, “Okay, why don’t you try drawing the nose?” He drew the nose and then I said, “Okay, what next? What else could you draw?” “The ears. The eyes.” And it went like that, and he drew this really cool dog. I mean, it wasn’t a perfect dog, but it was perfect for him, at that time, to be able to do that.

I’ve learned, starting at the beginning with my kids as babies, that we want to help. But true help really means doing less, so that our child not only does the task, but learns that they can do it themselves. We want both of those types of learning to happen at the same time, ideally, as much as possible. Not only did you draw a dog, but you can draw. And he wouldn’t have had that part if I’d drawn the dog. He wouldn’t have had either one of those, actually. So this dynamic, keeping faith in our kids’ competency, continues.

There’s a really common thing that we can get caught up in with teenagers, which is we have to nag kids to do homework. And we can put an end to that cycle by stepping back, letting go, and having faith in our child to cope with these age-appropriate situations. And in the case of homework, encouraging our child, if they’re struggling with that, to bring that to their teacher. Because teachers love that too, right? Staying out of parts of parenting that are not really our job, that need to be our child’s job. Developing these skills is one of them.

Along with that is the second point I want to make: encouraging that inner-directedness, that process orientation, and the sense of self that that builds—the communion with self. When children are drawn to enrichment—if we are privileged to be able to give our child enrichment beyond school, in terms of hobbies or sports, if we can make that happen—what I’ve learned through this approach is to let that belong to our child. To let it be totally our child’s idea, if possible. Maybe they were exposed to it, they went to go watch their friend play a soccer game and now they want to do it. Never starting to lead that ourselves. Because once we put ourselves in the position of leading that, we can create a dynamic where our child feels like now they’re doing it for us. Maybe they’re now realizing they’re more interested in something else, but now they’re stuck with this because we feel like they need to finish everything they’ve started.

I don’t agree with that. If we have a child that keeps stopping things they’ve started, I would actually look at who’s really starting those activities and if it really is our child. Because oftentimes we think we’re suggesting things to our child, like, “Why don’t you do gymnastics?” And our countenance is telling them, My parent thinks I should want to do this. Really trying to prioritize letting our child lead these activities, because this is this precious bell inside them of their calling, of their interests, of all the things they’re going to end up doing in life as they get older. And doing with full commitment, because they’re their choice, right? It’s not going to be full commitment if it’s our choice or our suggestion, even. Wanting them to feel that full commitment. And trusting that some children don’t want to do anything after school, it’s exhausting. That’s perfectly okay too, and maybe there are things that they’re doing that are just as valid as going to take a class somewhere.

This looks, as children are older, like they’re choosing their subjects in high school, their electives that they want to take. I remember doubting when one of my kids said they didn’t want to continue with French and they’d done so well in French. I might’ve raised an eyebrow, but I let that go and I trusted and it was the best thing and perfectly fine for my child to do that. He’s a college graduate now and successful at a job already. They know better than we do. And even if we think they don’t know better than we do, allowing them to know better than we do will teach them so many more important things than that they should take French. That belief in: I can do my life, with my parent’s unconditional relationship and support.

And children benefit so much from downtime, what’s known as downtime, which is just they don’t want to do all those lessons that their friends are doing or the other parents are telling us we should do. They actually learn better because they have more time to digest and integrate and assimilate what they’ve been exposed to. And that’s the real brain-building part of experiences.

The other week I talked about praise and being careful not to overpraise, so that children can continue to be self-rewarded as much as possible. Yes, our communities and societies do give rewards, and that’s okay. It’s more important that our relationship with them is unconditional and trusting. They can get all those glossy things other places, but it’s not what our relationship is based on.

The third thing: accepting children’s feelings without judging or rushing them. What I talk about here all the time, because it is so integral to their emotional health, to being able to set boundaries—which I’m also going to talk about today—and really for them to flourish in life: Letting them express all those intense feelings. If they’re expressing them through behavior that might be aggressive behavior or unsafe behavior or even just annoying behavior to us, then all the more we want to encourage them to share those feelings another way. Not by saying, “Don’t do that, do this,” but saying, “It seems like you’re feeling this,” or “Is this what’s going on with you? Because you keep yelling at me.” Or, “Are you worried about something?” In that open, intimate way that we want to talk to our children. Not judgmental. Noticing the feelings beyond the behaviors.

Now, there are lots of ways that we can discourage feelings or diminish them that are far more subtle and loving, even. So we might want to keep our antenna up for those as children get older. Because of course, we never want to see our children hurt or upset in the least. We might say, “Look at all the things you have to be grateful for. It’s going to be fine.” Or, “Ah, they didn’t deserve you anyway.” There were so many times I wanted to say that about a problem with a friend or other relationship. “Oh, they just don’t get you.” No. Just allow the feelings. For me, it’s been about practicing zipping it. I mean, that sounds terrible, but just wait and let them keep going.

Because my urge to say something is often an urge to try to make them feel better or stop, and that doesn’t make them feel better or stop. What makes them feel better is to express it all, the whole way. Because it’s not our power to make our children feel a certain way, unfortunately, or anyone else for that matter.

And I will say that one of the reasons I talk about this so much in my podcast is that resisting the urge to calm feelings never really gets easier, at all. And our kids are going to get their feelings hurt a lot in life. They’re going to get rejected by friends, they’re not going to make the A-team, they’re going to lose the debate, they’re going to do poorly on the test, get their hearts broken. And all of this is life. As Magda always said, If we can learn to struggle, we can learn to live. And that learning to struggle is lifelong learning. And just acknowledging, “Ah, that was hurtful,” or that was whatever our child said it was. So children receive this healthiest message that whatever their moods, their darkest moods, their harshest feelings, even towards us, are safe for them to feel. Will be heard, accepted, hopefully understood by us, if possible.

This is really the biggest secret I know of to fostering a close lifelong bond with our kids. Not just accepting them and believing in them with skill development, but accepting and believing in them when they are at their absolute lowest.

And four, just in case you thought this was about letting kids do whatever they want: remember that the basis for all the healthy freedom that I’m talking about giving children is: boundaries. This could have been the very first point that I made, because none of the rest of this will flourish if children don’t feel safe in our confident, empathic leadership. Making those hard choices sometimes that are going to upset them, but we love them too much to not put ourselves on the line like that. We love them and ourselves too much to not confront it. I mean, I don’t want to confront things unless I absolutely have to, but I learned that this is real love. Real love isn’t just saying, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care.” That’s saying I don’t care. And we don’t mean it that way. We just mean, I can’t deal with another boundary right now. And I understand that, I’ve felt that many times. And maybe we can’t right then. But knowing that even though our children won’t tell us they love us so much when we state boundaries or hold boundaries for them, that’s how they feel.

What I’ve seen over the years is that the children know that. And the children that don’t have that, that seem like they’re so free to do whatever they want and the parent just accepts them, they will seek boundaries somewhere else usually, not necessarily in safe ways. Because it’s not a comfortable feeling when you’re a child—or a teenager, going through all the changes teenagers go through—that you’re in charge of your whole life. Yes, you want to be in charge of your skills and your learning and your free time, as long as it’s safe and reasonable, but not in charge of how you treat people or in charge of how you act on your moods or hurt yourself or hurt people. If we feel in charge of those things, we do not feel the slightest bit safe or loved or able to blossom.

Our boundaries are very often the dynamic that children need between us to be able to share their moods and feelings. So we want to keep practicing reasonable boundaries, sticking up for ourselves, while welcoming our children to disagree in whatever way that they do, as long as it’s not hurting us. And that’s the hardest part, right? Meaning they have a right to feel however they feel about our boundaries. It’s not, “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” A parent shared with me that a teacher was saying that to her child. And no, that’s called stuffing our feelings. It’s that you’ve got a right to how you feel, and we’re reminding ourselves constantly, maybe, that them putting it out there is healthy and good. Much better for our child, and our relationship with them, than for them to hold it in.

As Susan David wisely shares—you know I always quote her here, I’m a big fan of her work, it’s very much in line with everything I believe. She says, “Research on emotional expression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger. Psychologists call this amplification.” She also says, “When we push aside normal emotions to embrace false positivity, we lose our capacity to develop skills to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” And I believe she’s referring mostly to adults here, but all of this applies to children. Because we continue to have the same basic needs from birth until death: the need to have boundaries and know our place in the world, to express ourselves fully, the need to be in communion with ourselves, to be inner-directed, the need to feel capable that we can achieve things when we put the effort in, with lots of ups and downs in the process.

One more point, point five: connecting during caregiving. You hear me talk about that with babies and toddlers and maybe preschoolers, but this is a way to keep nurturing our connection with children throughout their life. And it does look a little different as children get older. Mealtimes is the obvious one, sitting down to a meal without having our devices out, having that time together. Sherry Turkle, who’s the author of Reclaiming Conversation and has done a lot of research on this topic of technology interfering with children’s development of empathy and our ability to connect with each other, she has some great ideas for helping us as a family to limit tech use at times like that. But she also said, I really love this, she said: you can have it be certain rooms, i.e., We’re never going to have tech devices in the kitchen or in the dining room. I didn’t do that with my family, but I thought it was a great idea.

So, mealtimes, bedtime rituals. One of my kids wanted me to lie there with them while they fell asleep, even up to the age of, I think it was 10. And you know what? I was available. We don’t have to do that, but I did it. Only one out of three wanted that. But I’m glad I did it, in retrospect. I’m not saying everyone should do that, but there are some things you can do. Read books, sing songs (until they begged me to stop), of course, we did that for years too. Have those goodnight rituals that are special between you.

Then so many things can be caregiving: Band-aids. Medicine. When kids ask for help with homework or studying for a test, I consider that caregiving, even though I know it’s also skill-building for them and everything. But when my children would ask for help studying for a test, I would leap on that, because I could. If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t. But as kids get older, there aren’t that many opportunities, like there are when they’re little, to connect in that way. And caregiving in all these realms is one of the main ways.

Seizing on those bedtime rituals, seizing on the mealtimes, help with studying for a test, and we used to laugh a lot. I’d be completely focused at those times, I would not have a tech device anywhere near me. Just with them. Shopping for clothes or whatever they need. You want me to go with you? I’m there. It’s an excuse to be with your child as you get older, as they get older and you get older. Helping them with combing and brushing their hair, hairstyles, detangling, make-up for the prom. Taking kids to the doctor or for a haircut. My kids are adults now and they want to go to the dentist with me. Yes! I’m there, I’m right there. And we’ll go get something to eat afterwards and mess our teeth up again. But it’s the best. It keeps that flame alive between us.

And then just simple things, like when my kids come into the house or I’m meeting them somewhere, I drop everything. I’m up, I’m going in for a hug, excited to see them. Those transitions, those transitional times, remain sensitive times for all of us. You’ve heard me talk a lot about how difficult transitional periods can be for young children or even just getting up and getting dressed and getting to school in the morning. Keep helping your child. Yes, they can dress themselves, but if they want a helping hand, they just want moral support while they’re doing it, we can try to be there. And if we can’t, not giving them a judgmental response, “You can do that yourself.” But just, “You wanted me there and I can’t. But next time.”

Because what children can do and what they want to do, what their real need is—which might be connection with us before they leave for the day—are two different things. So when we can, prioritize those activities. The same when I’m parting with my children, I try to jump up. And I mean, I always saw them off to school and everything, but my son’s living at home now, and I try to wake up and make sure I say goodbye to him before he goes off to work. And hello to him when he comes in the door. I stand up, I’m so excited. Basically, any excuse. That’s how it gets.

I know it feels overwhelming now, that you’re doing all this stuff and everybody needs you so much. And mommy, mommy or daddy, daddy, and you could barely take a free breath. Well, I’m not saying you should be happy because you’re not going to have that later and that you should feel bad about the times that you’ve missed. Absolutely not. However, just know that as you grow, you’re going to find these connection points still and find these areas to trust your child. And all of that is going to bring you so many surprises and delight, laughter and amazement, really, at how capable your children are.

And if you want to get on this track and you’re not quite there, you agree with some of it, you don’t agree with other parts of it—that’s okay. You can always step into trust, step into connection. Those are always available to us, and our children want those more than anything from us. So, it’s a win-win.

Now, for those of you who would still like to check out resources that are compatible with what I teach, but for older children, the first thing I usually ask people if I get a chance to respond to them is, what topics are you concerned about? Because that will help me to guide them. I do have a whole list of books that I recommend, that are in my books and recommendations section of my website, janetlansbury.com. There are books covering a variety of topics, and many of them pertain to older children. Also, many of these authors have been on this podcast. So, check out all my other podcasts, and I hope you find the help that you’re looking for.

And by the way, Mother’s Day is coming up, and I’ve got a great gift idea for you: my No Bad Kids Master Course. You can learn all about it at nobadkidscourse.com.

Thank you so much for listening. We can do this.

The post As Our Kids Get Older – 5 Ways to Continue Building Lasting Emotional Bonds appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Every Child, Even a Tiny Baby, Deserves Time On Their Own (with Hari Grebler)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today it’s my great pleasure to host my very first parenting teacher and mentor, Hari Grebler. Hari’s parent-infant class, there’s no other way to say it, it changed my life. Gave me a whole new way of seeing, brand new direction, that eventually led me to train with Magda Gerber and find my passion in life, which is sharing this approach that’s made parenting so much richer and enjoyable than I could have ever imagined.

Hari studied with Magda many years before I did, and she still shares her wisdom and her encouragement about listening to and trusting our babies in her parent-infant classes. But recently she began sharing more online, on Facebook and on her Instagram page, Hari’s RIE Studio. For those who haven’t heard me mention this, RIE stands for Resources for Infant Educarers, which is the nonprofit educational organization Magda Gerber founded in 1978.

I’ve asked Hari to share with us today about a core element of Magda’s approach: developing safe play spaces for our babies and toddlers that help us to encourage their play beginning as early as possible. You’ve heard me refer to these as “yes spaces.” And first we’re going to discuss why nurturing play, beginning even at birth, matters to our children and to us. No one understands and can explain this better than Hari.

Hi, Hari.

Hari Grebler: Hi, Janet.

Janet Lansbury: This is such a treat getting to speak with you. As I introduced you, you didn’t hear that part, but you were my introduction to my passion in life. I can’t imagine why it’s taken me so long to have you on the podcast because wow, you are such a wealth of information and inspiration to me, to so many people that you’ve mentored. And thank you, I want to start by saying that.

And I love the work that you’re doing on your Instagram page, which really stands out to me. I mean, it’s interesting, you don’t have a lot of followers yet, but you are the one that’s out there saying really important, unique things. And I don’t find that on a lot of the biggest pages, there’s a sameness. And you are coming in very boldly with this perspective that I think is much needed. So I want to encourage everybody to follow you. And just, thank you. I have loved the content that you’re putting out there and the ideas that you’re sharing.

Hari Grebler: Thank you so much. That’s really sweet. I wanted to say when you were saying that about being bold, I mean, look who our teacher was.

Janet Lansbury: Magda Gerber.

Hari Grebler: So she was very bold.

Janet Lansbury: She was.

Hari Grebler: She said what she thought and we could say what we thought as well.

Janet Lansbury: Right. And she was kind.

Hari Grebler: Yes, she was.

Janet Lansbury: She wasn’t trying to be bold, but she just was because she was fearless.

Hari Grebler: And she really believed. She was the ultimate baby defender. My friends call me that sometimes. They’re like, “Uhoh, watch out! Here comes the baby defender.” Probably happens to you too.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, but you don’t do it defensively. You do it with such love for babies and care for the people that are taking care of them. Just like with Magda, it’s not that you’re trying to be controversial or abrasive. You’re just saying these truths that people don’t understand, and that will make our lives so much easier as parents when we do understand and embrace some of this perspective.

What I want to talk to you about today is creating a safe space for our children to play in safely and freely, without interruption if possible. And all the benefits of it and how we start this from the time that children are just a few weeks old, that we start creating this space and cultivating this time for them. Do you want to talk about some of the reasons it’s important?

Hari Grebler: I want to say this: When I had my first child, I noticed how much that he played from the very beginning, like in the hospital. And I remember saying that to a friend, a mom, and she said, “God, I never thought to put them down. I wouldn’t have even known if they wanted to play because I never put them down. I didn’t know I could.”

Janet Lansbury: And how did you recognize this? This was before you were introduced to Magda?

Hari Grebler: No, I taught for years and years and years before I had my own children.

Janet Lansbury: That’s right, I forgot that you taught long before you had your own children. Because if we don’t know that’s possible, how are we going to notice it, right? We’re not. I didn’t notice it until I started taking your class and then working with Magda and realizing. Well, actually, I realized the very first time I went to your class with my baby who was three months that, wow, there is so much going on there that I wasn’t giving any space to or allowing to happen with my daughter. With her thoughts, with her interests, her deciding what activities she wanted to do, which were just basically lying there and looking around on her back. But how we don’t know that, right?

Hari Grebler: I mean, I learned and studied. And I think when people come to my class, I just have to remind them that there’s no way they could have known this, because it is so counterculture. What Magda did and what Dr. Pikler did, it just really goes against the grain. So no one should feel like, Oh, I should have known that. Well, why didn’t I see that? Oh, a good mom does this. It’s not true. And I feel like what’s great about our classes is that we talk about not moving into automatic, not just doing what they’re doing and what was done to us and what we see everybody do with babies. That’s what people do, we just kind of do what we see everybody else doing. So I think RIE really helps you step back and notice. And how do you notice? Creating the safe space from the start is what helps you notice.

And also having the permission to put your baby down in a safe, cozy place. And there’s a progression. We don’t put an infant on the floor to play. There’s a progression to that. First, a cozy bassinet where they could play. And then they can move to a crib when they get too big for that. And then after the crib, that’s going to be around three and four months, and they can move to the floor, to a safe space that you create. It starts right from the beginning that we have to start a rhythm.

And that’s the other thing, babies that have grown up this way have this inner life. They discover what they love, they discover themselves, they discover their bodies, like their hand, What can I do with it? And that’s a really big deal, I think.

And I never can explain in my classes how my kids have always, how they wake up and go play, and I’m still asleep. And people sort of think I’m just lucky, but I’m not. I worked hard at that. And you probably had that too. And to this day, my kids are teenagers, they want their time by themselves in the mornings or whenever. The oldest one wants it all the time.

Janet Lansbury: And it’s such a strength to have that capacity for being with yourself, tuning in to who you are. Interestingly, I am also reading a book by Sherry Turkle called Reclaiming Conversation. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. It’s about technology and how that’s affected children growing up with empathy. And the part that I’m reading is all about nurturing our children’s capacity for solitude. She says this “is one of the most important tasks of childhood, every childhood. It’s the capacity for solitude that allows you to reach out to others and see them as separate and independent. You don’t need them to be anything other than who they are. This means you can listen to them and hear what they have to say. This makes the capacity for solitude essential to the development of empathy.” I really thought that was interesting.

Hari Grebler: I love that, I want to read that.

Janet Lansbury: It’s really worthwhile so far, and this is only the first section. “Solitude is where we learn to trust our imaginations,” she says. “When we let our minds wander, we set our brains free.” And interestingly also, she said, “today young people become anxious if they are alone without a device. They are likely to say they are bored. From the youngest ages they have been diverted by structured play and the shiny objects of digital culture.” So there’s that element to what she’s sharing.

Hari Grebler: Yeah, the bored part, I take issue with all these posts about boredom. So many of them show, like, a field or a lake. Why don’t we just let kids be bored? But we’ve created it. The adults are annoyed by it, right? But we’ve totally created it. It’s just like giving a kid a pacifier and then deciding that, Well, now you don’t have it anymore and I just take it away. And I don’t consider your emotional state, let’s say.

Janet Lansbury: Right, and the dependency, yeah.

Hari Grebler: The boredom thing is all about this… And then it also is about devices later. But before that, even. It starts so early where they don’t have a safe space. The child’s always getting interrupted, let’s say. No, you can’t do that. And no, you can’t do that. They have to move them away. So they can’t really get involved, it’s hard.

Janet Lansbury: Right. Or, Let me stimulate you, like I thought I was supposed to do with my baby. Because again, we don’t know that they can do anything on their own. We don’t know they’re capable of anything.

Hari Grebler: Right. And the stimulation is either talking to them constantly or showing them things or going places. And even going places, to activities, from really early ages. Sometimes people call me and I’m like, I used to have this question on one of my forms a long time ago. And I’d ask them, “Do you take any other classes?” And some of them, at eight months old, were in five classes. And I just said, “Could you wait and take my class when you don’t have so many classes?” So kids, they don’t have a chance to play free and safely, and they have a lot of activities. And then one day they wake up and they’re saying, “What are we doing today?” And it annoys everybody. “I’m bored. I’m bored.” Because they’ve gone to all these classes that have activities, not just gone and played outside or gone to the park to play, right? But they’ve gone places where there’s everything there and like you said, stimulation.

Janet Lansbury: And they’re just reacting and responding to it instead of creating it. Yeah.

Hari Grebler: It’s not fair to the kid. And also there’s a lot of kids that don’t have a yard. A lot of kids can’t go outside and all that. And I think that’s another reason why it’s crucial to set up a really great space for them to have for themselves. Some kind of playroom or playspace, if you have the space.

Janet Lansbury: Absolutely. And something interesting about this too is this idea of tuning into yourself and being with yourself and comfort with yourself. Studies show, and Magda knew this a long time ago, that it’s nurtured by not just leaving your child alone. It’s not about being alone, solitude could be with people. But it’s being allowed to be in yourself, in your own thoughts. And that it’s actually nurtured through this relationship of just what Magda said, the “wants nothing quality time.” Where I’m with you in your play space, and I am just observing, learning all this stuff about you and discovering you. And you’re knowing that you can flex your imagination and be yourself completely, with not losing my attention, with not losing me, my presence. And that’s actually how you nurture it, and that’s how it’s different than loneliness. Healthy solitude is a feeling of joy.

Hari Grebler: And the adult witnessing their babies playing independently can bring so much joy to the adult. And the knowledge of what their child likes, how long they play, are they tired. The other thing is you’re going to know their cry, you’re going to know what that means. And a lot of parents that I talk to, they don’t know that. And I feel like one of the ways to get to know your baby is exactly what we’re talking about, is creating this space. And where we coexist in that space or beside or close by or we have things to do. And sometimes we’re there, really just focused on them. But sometimes we’re just in that same area, let’s say. I mean, I remember as a parent, I’m doing some things, sometimes I would bring laundry in. Sometimes I was also getting things done, and there were times where I was just sitting.

But the simplicity of it is that you get to see so many signs, like when are they tired? And you don’t have to wait until they’re yawning and rubbing their eyes. After a while, you actually really know that they’re tired. They’re playing, playing, playing, and all of a sudden things aren’t just going their way so perfectly, right? Because people are looking more for that physical sign, a yawn or like I said, rubbing the eyes. But it’ll be more subtle. Did you experience that too?

Janet Lansbury: Yes. Because I didn’t like what you said about we don’t understand their cries. That was totally me with Charlotte, my first baby, that I brought to your class. That was another area where I felt, I am a terrible parent because I don’t know what these cries are. All I know is that I want them to stop right now, immediately, and they’re ear-splitting and they’re making me feel terrible. So it was very much my problem. Her feelings were my problem to fix, instead of really something that I could learn about her. And so it took actually a lot of time, because she was my first, it took time in your classes and learning about Magda’s work to be able to calm myself enough to start to see and discern.

But it was helped along by being able to observe her with all these other subtle things she was doing in your class, and see that she had thoughts, that she was nuanced, that she wasn’t just this one-note, simplified being. That she had all these levels and different things going on with her that were fascinating. So it’s about seeing them as this full human being, a person that’s not just a needy thing that we have to fix.

Hari Grebler: And I like what you said. You say, calm yourself, and I always say, get quiet inside. For me, automatically, just being with the babies, I just empty out. I don’t know, it’s just a thing. It’s always happened for me. I’m just right there, right present. I think that’s partly why I do what I do.

Janet Lansbury: I think it’s a practice though, that you, probably, because I do that too now.

Hari Grebler: Yeah, but I did that. I was always like, it just helped me. Well, before I started teaching, I taught nursery school, so I already had this experience with kids. And that’s what I loved about it, I always felt very present because you know me— personally, I’m not that quiet, I’m not that calm. I’m pretty impatient, I’m pretty hotheaded. Right?

Janet Lansbury: I guess. You’re not a picture of serene, no.

Hari Grebler: No. And nor was Magda. It just wasn’t like that. I mean, we are who we are, and that’s fine. And my kids know me, they do. But when they’re little babies, it’s so important to set ourselves aside, to quiet ourselves down. And like you said, calm ourselves. It really is. Or we won’t know anything about them otherwise.

Janet Lansbury: And we’ll get stuck doing a bunch of things that aren’t helping.

Hari Grebler: And nobody feels good. They’re just going through the motions. I had a funny experience with my son. I noticed he would suck two fingers on one hand and then two fingers on the other hand. Same two fingers, but some right, some left. And one day he sucked, I don’t know, it was either the right or the left, and I thought, Oh, he’s tired and I’m going to nurse him. Because he’s going to go to sleep and he might get hungry. It’s not really his nursing time, but I’m just going to do that. So I went into the bedroom, went to nurse him, and he moved off, pulled off and put his other hands in his mouth and leaned back to go into the crib.

Janet Lansbury: Wow.

Hari Grebler: And then he went to bed. And I called my mom and said, Is that even possible? And he did that a lot. And it really taught me, I can’t work on automatic. I used to call him the all-knowing head, you know what I mean?

Janet Lansbury: Yes.

Hari Grebler: Because he can’t move his limbs so much, but he could go, like, Get me in the crib! with his head. He did. So bizarre. Anyway.

Janet Lansbury: Wow. And that was something unique to him, that your daughter—

Hari Grebler: Oh, yeah. She did not do that.

Janet Lansbury: Your daughter didn’t do the exact same thing.

Hari Grebler: Yeah, she did other things. Yeah, they were totally night and day. But I got to witness that because of what I learned and how I could be in that moment and how he became more important, at times in the day, than me.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. I would notice with my second that, when you were saying they get tired in the play space, that’s normal. And they start to whine a little or fuss and tell you that they’re tired or they’re just showing you those signs, those early signs, which hopefully we get, like they’re kind of spacing out all of a sudden or whatever. But what Madeline would do was fall asleep in the play space, if I didn’t catch it very, very early. Especially if it was at my little outdoor play space that I had, she would fall asleep. But it just looked so blissful to me.

Hari Grebler: Heaven.

Janet Lansbury: It was like falling asleep on the beach when you’re lying out, having a good time, and you just fall asleep.

And so I tried to take a movie of her going to sleep because she would do it also in her bassinet. She would turn her head sort of from side to side. She was not expressing any discomfort, but to my previous lens, it would’ve looked like, I better put her to sleep now. She’s turning her head, and maybe that’s not good for her, or something. But she was calming herself. And I tried to get it on video, and every single time I tried, she would outlast the battery of the video in how long she went. She would just keep going. And again, she wasn’t stressed out at all or showing anything like that, but it just would take her longer. And I finally thought, okay, this is too private a moment. I’m not supposed to capture this, so forget it. I’m just not going to try. Because she would always outlast me in her process.

Hari Grebler: I love that because that’s what they want to do: enjoy their process, if we could just give them opportunities. And I feel like that gets so misconstrued out there. I did an Instagram about it and I said, what if we did give them these little micro-opportunities to fall asleep when they were ready? To play first, but not meaning that we have to let them cry or be alone.

Janet Lansbury: Right. You’re opening up space for what they actually want to do.

Hari Grebler: Yeah. What they can do. Can I give you one example of that?

Janet Lansbury: Yes, please. Because I honestly think that all of this has to do with the play space. Learning to observe and just allow our child to be who they are and how that helps everything. It helps their sleep, it helps their learning for sure. It helps their imagination, helps them develop this sense of self and ability to be alone with themselves and all of those things. So this is just another thing, but yeah, tell the story.

Hari Grebler: So when we came home with our baby, I thought to myself, wow, our baby, he’s heard Shlomo and I talking all these nine months. They hear you, we talk so much. And I thought, let’s put him in the bassinet. And we did, we put him in the bassinet. And then I invited Shlomo, here’s a chair, and I laid on the bed, and we just chatted. And within the chatting, he just sort of played. And then he got tired and fell asleep. And I didn’t do it to make him sleep or to get him tired or anything like that, but I just thought we could just be together like this. He could be there, we could be here, he can hear us. And then I feel like from that moment, he loved to play with that around him, us talking or people in the room, but not focused on him. I don’t know if you remember falling asleep in the car and people are still talking, when you’re little.

Janet Lansbury: Oh yes, I used to love that. Or in the house just relaxing and sleeping and you hear the voices. Or my parents would be having a party, a gathering, and you’re kind of like, Ahhh.

Hari Grebler: Exactly. And I call it a micro-moment. There could be so many of those because it’s a process. It’s not like, “Oh, does your baby sleep through the night?” No, it’s not that. It’s discovering what it is together and not alone.

Janet Lansbury: And being open. Being open to your baby’s abilities that they’re showing you, not what you’re trying to make them do.

Hari Grebler: Yeah. I feel like so many things have gotten, they took the fun and the beauty out of them. So sleep is a sound machine, a blackout curtain. It’s at a certain time, a certain way, or it’s being held or being wrapped. Even that, right? Even both extremes are still these automatics, to me. And all I’m asking is, just give a little micro-moment in between these things. And Magda didn’t really talk about that. It was something I sort of discovered, just about us talking and him being there and feeling comforted by our voices and our presence. But it doesn’t also mean that I have to be holding him all the time for him to feel secure.

Janet Lansbury: Right.

Hari Grebler: Hearing the sounds of the home is comforting. That’s what I’m saying about taking the beauty out of sleep. Let’s make it so quiet. Let’s put this sound on. Let’s make it so dark. Wrap them this way. Let’s wrap them that way.

Janet Lansbury: Right, it’s a totally adult-directed process that’s just a chore. It’s just another chore that we have to do in the day.

Hari Grebler: And they can watch me wash the dishes from their bed. They can hear us talking. They can hear a party or whatever it is. So anyway, that’s just my little rant, my micro-rant.

Janet Lansbury: Well, I wrote down here something that you said about observation. Well, first of all, I love this comment that you make, I guess it’s one of your central quotes that’s very Hari and I love it: “Babies are worth getting to know.” I love that. And then you say in another post, I think it is: “To observe. Clear your head, step into the present. What can my baby do? What does my baby want to do? Can I detach and sit simply? It is a practice that we all can learn.”

So I think we’ve talked a lot about the beauty of the space, why it’s so worth doing. What do we do? How do we make the space?

Hari Grebler: Because you saw that post of the safe space, I got a question, a really good question. What to do with the baby before the play area? At what age do we start this play space and what should they do before? And that’s such a good question. Then I just wrote back, there’s a progression of the play area. The first play area would be the bassinet because it’s warm, it’s cozy, it’s inviting, and it holds the baby. They can only last so long in a bassinet, and then I would move them to a crib with a firm mattress. The baby should never be on a cushy kind of sunken-in thing, although it looks nice.

Janet Lansbury: No, definitely not.

Hari Grebler: It’s hard for them to move. So then it would be the crib. And then there could be a playpen or, around three to four months, when they start being interested in the world and other objects, that’s when I would have them come down to the floor. And the floor space evolves as their capabilities grow. The rule of thumb is they always need a bit more space than they might actually use. And we do that so they can be inspired. Inspired to move a little farther, inspired to go get that over there.

And it’s always better if a small space gets bigger than taking a big space and making it smaller for the baby. So if a child has already crawled all over the house, it’s harder to then make a smaller space. Not impossible, but just more difficult. So that’s the progression of the physical part of the space.

And you can take a piece of your living room, a bedroom. I personally took my living room/dining room. We have a little, little house, but that was one room. And I was able to gate my kitchen. That’s something real crucial in RIE, but a lot of people don’t want to do it. Magda used to talk a lot about gating the kitchen. Well, why would we gate the kitchen? Well, there’s accidents that happen, but also so we can go and do something fully and focus on. So when we go in the kitchen, we can cook. We don’t have to, Oh, there’s someone over here or rolling over here, or I’m worried about that and I have to tell them what to do. And it’s not like they can never come into the kitchen, when you have time to show them around. So I love the gated kitchen. I really think that helps.

The reason I did my dining room/living room, I wanted it to be like a family room/playroom kind of place where we gather. I could be on the couch and my children could be playing. And my room changed more than 50 times. I mean, that’s how much I’m about the kid. I’m not saying people should do this or everybody should. I’m saying this is what I did because I’m a total nerd in that way. I really wanted to put all this into practice, because I had been doing it for so long. I wanted the space, I wanted them to be able to crawl and do all the things that they did and I wanted to watch and I wanted to be comfortable.

Janet Lansbury: So what if people aren’t able to gate off their kitchen, which a lot of houses, unfortunately, that is difficult. I mean, I was able to gate off our kitchen and have a gated-in space, but I had to have these bookcases, very heavy, like standup bookcases, that I attached a gate to, and I had to form a space within this bigger space in my family room. Probably you would know how to do all this better than I did, but it worked for us.

Hari Grebler: That sounds perfect.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. And so interesting, it remained the place—way after the gates were gone and all that—that remained the place where the child wanted to be playing or reading or whatever. They really bond with their—actually, I think it’s bonding with themselves, but within the comfort and familiarity of those spaces.

Hari Grebler: Yeah. I mean, my kids loved their room and I really let them do anything they wanted, practically. I think what you did was perfect. And that’s what I always say. If it’s a big space and you can create it like a little room within a room. Outside, we did it once with a gate to the couch. I didn’t want them when they were really tiny to get into the small flower garden I had. So I had a couch and then I gated that from there. So there’s so many creative ways to do it.

Janet Lansbury: But you agree, I’m sure, with Magda that establishing those parameters are important before the child’s able to move through them. Because then that’s just part of their play space. People say, Oh, it’s a jail and stuff. It is if you treat it that way and like, Okay, now I’m going to put you in this place while I go do something. Instead of, This is part of our routine. Every day after we do this, this is the time that you usually spend in there. I mean, it doesn’t have to be every day, but most days this is what we do. And as Magda said, a matter of course, it’s just a matter of course. And you still might not like when I leave and go do something, but you know underneath it that you’re not being abandoned, you’re not being punished. This is your space and it’s freedom for you, actually. And then children do, I mean, I’ve seen that with my own eyes that children totally believe that.

Hari Grebler: Definitely. When I was in Hungary, when I went to the Loczy to visit, when it was the orphanage, I had studied for I think about 10 years before I went there, and then I went there and studied. What I noticed was the way we learned about doing the caregiving and being fully present for the caregiving, for babies, the more the same it is, this is how they don’t get bored. How they really have that inner life and count on it. I have to say, even in the morning, if I get up and my daughter’s up, she’s just like, “I need to be alone.” You know, if it’s too early. She needs that thinking time.

Janet Lansbury: She’s how old now?

Hari Grebler: Thirteen. She’s not happy to see me. She’s happy to see me other times. But in the morning, they’re really used to having space in the morning. And why it is is because we had a rhythm, a very, very strong rhythm. And that was: you wake up, you care for them, you change their diapers, maybe get them dressed or maybe not, feed them, nurse them. And then you’ve given them so much, and this is what I saw in Hungary, which is by the end of that caregiving, they don’t want you to talk to them anymore. Those babies, they’ll look away, they’ll put their fingers in their mouth, whatever. It’s like, Okay, I’ve got everything I need and now I go to the floor to play.

And then what I saw is when they pick up those toys, and I know you’ve seen it too, is they really see what they’re looking at. They look at the object the way they were just looked at, if that makes sense. And it was beautiful. I was just so blown away by that. And understanding what it means to be filled up, to then be able and have the desire to do what you want to do.

And I think I must’ve learned it in Waldorf, this idea of breathing in and breathing out. The breathing in being the caregiving thing where you’re asking them and telling them and expecting cooperation. And then it’s this, Ahhh. I go down to play. No one’s talking to me. I can play with this or that and any way I want to. And no one’s going to interrupt me. So there’s a balance to what we’re talking about. One cannot happen without the other. Independent play and wanting to be in your play space can’t happen if you don’t feel filled up.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. And I was also thinking when you were saying that, as slow as we try to maybe aim to be with the caregiving time and talking to them and listening to them and having that be a mutual experience, when they get to play, time goes even slower. When we’re alone in our thoughts, that’s when we can really slow down to our pace and commune with that. I mean, I crave that. I’ve started doing where I don’t go on my phone until after I’ve done this whole bunch of things in the morning where I’m just on my own in my thoughts. I’m kind of doing things and then I meditate. But I’ve put off just looking at my phone right away because I need more of that time, with the work that I’m doing right now, to get ideas, to have more space. I mean, I really couldn’t get enough of that, personally. Really, I want to go to the phone. I want to go to the distraction like anybody else, but I’m just doing that for myself, to fuel myself.

Hari Grebler: I think that is exactly what happens when we create this space for the baby. We give it to ourselves. It’s a gift as a parent that you give yourself. Here, I gave you everything during this time I was just with you, and now it’s your time to do this and my time to do this. And when they can know and expect, because you do it the same every time. That’s why I think that’s so important. I mean, I don’t want it to sound like, Oh, I can’t ever deviate, because of course you can. That’s life. But when they’re little, it pays for both, for the child and the adult. It’s a gift for both. Oh, I can go into the kitchen by myself to make something, right? I can take a shower because I know they’re completely safe and content.

And sometimes people say, Oh, they don’t want to be in there anymore. They don’t want to be in there anymore. You have to commit to the space. That’s really important. You have to commit. And that means when they’re needing you more, let’s say, go be with them. Go be with them, but don’t bring them out of the space. So that’s the mistake people make. They don’t want to be in there. I take you in my arms, I take you into the kitchen. I cook, I’m stirring. It’s interesting. You like being up. And then when I put you back in your space, it’s not as satisfying anymore.

Janet Lansbury: And even if we’re in the space with them and they’re kind of struggling, first maybe seeing, just while I’m sitting here, I’m going to hold you in my lap. Instead of, okay, we’re getting up. Every time there’s something wrong, now you’re getting lifted up and changed.

Hari Grebler: Or sat up.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah.

Hari Grebler: That’s what a lot of people… they start getting fussy in their place, and when you do that, you sit them up, you can get maybe 15 more minutes of play. But usually they’re just tired, if they’re used to this. That’s what I was trying to say before. If you don’t do all the things and you commit to this simplicity, it’s sort of raw because it’s just you and them, right? There’s not a swing or a this or a that to fall back on, in a way. You can even lie down in their space. They can even crawl over you on those times.

Janet Lansbury: Oh, I do that. Yeah.

Hari Grebler: Right. It’s fun, you can get your little massage.

Janet Lansbury: What you were saying about setting it up for ourselves… It may seem like this is such a chore or I’m being so giving, having this connected caregiving time, but this is what’s going to empower us, empower our child to be able to be separate. And then yeah, when they’re expressing things, I mean, this encouraged me to leave my fix-it mode that I was in with my first. I want to find out what they’re expressing. I don’t want to just try to change it. I want to know what’s going on here. And that takes a little longer and takes us not making those rash moves to just pick them up and rescue them out of the situation or whatever.

Hari Grebler: And when you really come down to it, there’s not that many things that the baby could be bothered by. They could be hungry, they could be tired. And you’re going to start to see what that tired means to your baby. Hungry, you’ll think, oh, I fed them. And yeah, they probably are, let’s see. Or maybe they want their diaper changed, they’re not comfortable. Or their clothes aren’t comfortable, even. Sometimes it’s bunched up and that could bother them. So you can always check those things. And then things get more simple. Kids are able to eventually let you know what’s bothering them.

Janet Lansbury: Because they know you want to know and they understand that’s your interest because it is.

Hari Grebler: Yeah, they’re valued in that way. And a lot of people say, Oh, well they’re just getting bored now. And no, I don’t accept that. I just don’t. That’s an adult idea. So then you do all these other things, and then that’s the way we create them needing to be set. Because once you start sitting your baby up, they’re not satisfied anymore laying down. It doesn’t take that much, too, for that to happen.

Janet Lansbury: But just so people know, and I know you know this, you can change anything. If you’re aware of what you’ve done and what it’s caused and what’s going on and you want to change it. Maybe you don’t want to change it, that’s fine. But if you want to, all you have to do is understand that they’re going to express, Hey, why aren’t you doing that thing anymore? And they have a right to. Try to welcome that.

And I always admit, or encourage the parent to admit, Yeah, I was sitting you up and you’re used to that. You’re probably wishing I would do that right now. But I realized this is healthier for you. So you can tell me how much you wish I was doing that and how mad you are at me. That’s okay with me. I always want to know how you feel. That kind of attitude. You don’t have to say all those words, but that welcoming and honesty about, Yeah, of course, not just, Oh, shh. It’s okay. I’m not doing this anymore and now we’re going to do this. Really owning it, because otherwise they feel almost gaslit.

Hari Grebler: Yeah. I want to add to that, too. So if I was going to change a habit, and I do believe wherever you step into these ideas is the perfect place, just like you said. You can change, it’s not like a make it or break it situation. But if I did do something like sat them and then I decided to not sit them because I learned, I would start out like that, on the back, let’s say. But if the baby got too upset, I would also not stay in that. I don’t want them to get too upset at first. But I would always start like that. So then the next time I would start again like that on the back, I would start again and again and again. And leave a little bit more time and a little bit more time.

Janet Lansbury: While you’re communicating with them. And then picking them up and holding them in your lap and not just swooping them up.

Hari Grebler: Yeah, all the things you said. I just want to add that I would do it little by little. So if I was going to change something about sleep, let’s say. I would start out the way I would like it to go, but they were used to something else. Okay, we do that something else, but start out first the way I want it to go. Little by little, longer and longer, for them to get used to it without them having to be too upset about it.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah.

Hari Grebler: Because we did it. It’s just like, okay, I’m a cigarette smoker, let’s say. I’m not, but let’s say, and then somebody just takes it from me and they decide I’m never going to have one again. And they decide how it’s going to go.

Janet Lansbury: It’s like the boredom thing, yeah. Okay, now you’re going to be bored.

Hari Grebler: You need to collaborate with me now a little bit. I need a little collaboration, a plan, how this is going to change. I can’t just change on the spot because you who gave me the cigarettes in the first place are now going to take them away. No, it’s not fair.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, I feel like it’s more, and maybe this is what you’re saying, but with sleep especially, I feel like it’s more being aware of where I want this to go. Because maybe in the beginning it’s just easier for me to do it this way, but I’ve always got my eye out: This is how I want sleep to go, because this is what I need and what we’ve decided for our family, and this is what I would like to happen. And so I’m going to keep being open to that direction, but not necessarily trying to even take a step there in the beginning if I’m not ready and I don’t feel like my baby’s ready. So it’s not like I have to start doing incremental things, but just knowing. And being open to what my baby can do, which that observation in the play space, again, teaches us.

I also just wanted to comment, you had talked a long time ago, wonderfully, about the physical thing of setting up the play space from the time that they’re infants and how that starts in the bassinet. And I would say also, especially based on my own experience, Charlotte, she first played in your amazing class that changed my life. My younger ones, I had to be open to them being able to do this, entertain themselves, and notice when it happened. Like you said in the hospital with your boy. In the bassinet one time, I came and she was waking up and she wasn’t looking towards me or anything, so I didn’t say, “Hi, time to get up!” She was looking to the side and I just let her look and was careful not to say anything, because I was holding space for this to happen. And with my son, it happened on the changing table, that we were going through it and I was helping him. And then all of a sudden he sort of looked off and he was just doing something, thinking something. And I let it go on for a while because I didn’t have to rush and be somewhere anyway, but I thought, Oh my gosh. So we want to notice those, so we can encourage them. It’s so easy to squash it all and not let it happen.

Hari Grebler: That’s called collaboration.

Janet Lansbury: Yes.

Hari Grebler: I’m doing something that needs to get done, but you’re interested over there. So I’m going to stop for a minute and be interested with you. It’s beautiful. Sometimes I’ll do snack, and you’ve done it a million times, and everybody’s looking at something else. And I don’t say, “Here, well, doesn’t anybody want some? Oh, here I am with the banana.” I look at what they’re looking at. We can all be so interested in it. It’s such a beautiful moment that it doesn’t need to be filled. And that is a collaboration.

Janet Lansbury: Right. And it’s also noticing that play happens all the time, if we want to call that play. It’s happening anytime.

Hari Grebler: It’s true. Yeah.

Janet Lansbury: So I also wanted to share, this is another one of your posts on Instagram. You say: “What do I mean, don’t introduce your child to boredom?” This is what you were talking earlier about boredom, I guess, and these are the ideas that you shared. It’s all about what we’re talking about today. “Let life unfold slowly and naturally. Don’t think you have to entertain them. Do age-appropriate outings, once in a while. There’s no rush to show them all the things. Let them notice and you can notice what they notice. Give them time to have their own thoughts. Give them plenty of time to putter around.” And then you say, “It’s unnecessary to rotate toys. It’s okay to bring a new one in here and there. It’s more a matter of providing open-ended.” There you go. That’s great advice right there.

Hari Grebler: Yeah, thanks. It sounded good how you read it. You read it too nicely. I’m like, I’m so intrigued.

Janet Lansbury: Who is that genius?

Hari Grebler: I know! Who wrote that? It’s just so nice, you know? I want people to see how sweet this is and simple it is.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. All this sort of simple wisdom that helps our children, helps us. And we only did the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the benefits of this. I really hope people will follow your Instagram page and your website, which is Hari’s RIE Studio, harisriestudio.com, and you can discover all the resources that Hari has to offer and be eye-opened by her perspective, which is just very sharp and unique. I don’t know, I think it’s a breath of fresh air personally, and I love it. So keep it up.

Hari Grebler: Okay! Thanks, Janet. This was really fun.

Janet Lansbury: This was really fun. Thank you so much.

Hari Grebler: Thanks for asking me.

Janet Lansbury: Bye.

For more on play, there are a ton of resources on infant play and toddler play on my website, janetlansbury.com. So please check those out under the topic category “Play.”

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

The post Every Child, Even a Tiny Baby, Deserves Time On Their Own (with Hari Grebler) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “What Science Says About Respectful Parenting (with Anya Dunham, PhD)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m joined by Anya Dunham. Anya is a parent of three, a PhD in biology who works as a scientist studying ecology. And she has done extensive research into the concepts recommended by Magda Gerber and me, respectful parenting. We’ll be describing these concepts in detail and speaking to some of the evidence-based theories on what babies need most from their environment and from us to thrive. Anya shares her findings in her book, Baby Ecology: Using Science and Intuition to Create the Best Feeding, Sleep, and Play Environment for Your Unique Baby. And I’m really looking forward to hearing more about Anya’s research and experience.

Hi, Anya. Thank you so much for being here.

Anya Dunham: Hi, Janet. I’m so glad to be here today. Thank you.

Janet Lansbury: So you’ve been doing extensive research on different aspects of parenting, particularly, or at least quite considerably, the type of parenting that I teach, which is Magda Gerber’s RIE approach, or I call it respectful parenting. And I thought it would be great to hear a little about what made you want to do all this research and write a book about it. And of course then I would love to hear more about your findings and how they’ve helped you and can help others with the parenting decisions that we’re all making, which is way too many. In the beginning it feels like a constant flow of decisions, right? So can you tell us a little about how you got into this and what you found?

Anya Dunham: Yes, of course. So I found your work when I was pregnant with my first baby, so just over 12 years ago. And then through your work, I discovered and learned about the work of Magda Gerber and Emmi Pikler. And the thing is that even though I always turn to research, I think of myself as a science-minded person, I actually embraced what I feel is at the very core of RIE without needing to see any science behind it. I felt that respect for children and delight in who they are, believing in that and accepting that as one of my core parenting beliefs, came very naturally to me. It was almost the same as believing that our children need our love and they need safety. And I felt that in the same way, they also need to be respected and to be delighted in.

And so that was how everything started for me. But what I thought that science can help us see and understand is the mechanisms and sort of the “why” between some of the challenging parenting questions. And sometimes it can give us a little window, a little glimpse into the babies’ minds, which is one of my favorite things. Because of that, I wanted to find out all about it, everything I could. And so what I did is, I started an almost 10-year-long journey into reading the science about baby’s first year. And I looked at the research through the lens of my research field, ecology, because I wanted to find out what do our babies need most from their physical and emotional environment. So from their surroundings and the experiences they have and from people in their lives. And then the process, as I read over many hundreds of papers, I came across many findings that support the core principles of RIE and respectful parenting. And so I thought that maybe I could share a few of the highlights today.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, I’d love to hear about that.

Anya Dunham: One of the first things that came to mind when I was thinking about it is just this large body of research, that so many studies have found just how sensitive, but also how capable and ready to learn and connect our babies are when they come into this world. And I think most people know that in the first trimester of pregnancy, babies are able to hear our voices, and especially the mom’s voice if she’s the one who carries the pregnancy. But I think what I find quite interesting, and what not everybody knows about, is how if a mom reads a familiar story to the baby, even in that first trimester, the baby can already recognize that story. And then after the baby’s born, within hours of birth, if they can see their mom’s face and hear her voice, they learn to recognize their mom right away. So what it shows is that babies not only hear and see enough to connect with us and interact with us, but also that they can pay attention, they can learn and memorize things, and they connect the voice that they’ve been hearing with the face that they’re now able to see. And I think that just really underscores and supports the principle of basic trust, that we can fully trust our babies to be initiators, explorers, and self-learners.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. For some people that don’t know, that’s the first of Magda’s RIE principles.

Anya Dunham: Yeah. And so just how ready they come into this world to learn, that we absolutely can trust in the process.

And then another principle that of course comes to mind is that babies can be active participants in care routines. For example, a study recently looked at how two-month-old babies respond to being picked up. And what was really interesting is that when adults approached babies in a way that was slow and visible, and when the adult’s intentions to pick the baby up were clear, the baby would respond and help with the smoothness of pickup. They would look at the adult’s face and they would sort of tense their body a little bit to help the adults. So it shows that they really can, from this very young age and probably earlier, as Magda Gerber said, from the very start, they can join us in meaningful ways.

Janet Lansbury: Absolutely. And those of us that have tried this and practiced it, get to see that with our own eyes. And what Magda added there was to actually verbalize it as well, “I’m going to pick you up now.” So that becomes connected to not only our body language and the child anticipating what we’re going to do physically, but also hearing the words connected with that. So absorbing the language at the same time.

Anya Dunham: Yes. And that was something that I found initially difficult to do when I first became a parent myself. Being an introvert, I found it somewhat challenging to speak to my baby from the very beginning. But once I did, it certainly became second nature. And what was very sweet is that when my daughter was about two, I caught her talking to her stuffed animals in the same way that I talked to her. And then eventually when her sister was born, she would speak to her in the same way that I would speak to her as a baby. And I thought that that was just such a lovely thing to see. For her, it just became second nature right away.

Janet Lansbury: I just have to say, I guess I’m an introvert as well, but everybody has a hard time talking to babies and believing that it matters, because they don’t talk back. Well, they do, but they do it in these very subtle ways that are hard for us to discern, especially at first. And they’re learning how to communicate. So they’re learning how to show us different signs with different sounds that they make that may all sound like crying, but there’s a very different tone to them or a different pattern to them. And they don’t know how to do that in the beginning either. So we’re trying to learn from them and they’re trying to learn how to teach us. But it does take this leap of faith. And it sounds like you sort of took the leap of faith before you did the research. That’s what it takes, because we’re not going to see the proof of our baby’s awareness until we try these things. Not just once, but regularly, predictably, so our baby learns them. It’s an interesting process.

It definitely takes more than just studies, even. Because I feel like all of these studies in the past decades that have validated the work that Magda and Pikler did through lots and lots of hours of observation of babies behaving naturally. But even with all of this research that’s been done that supports this, it’s like we’re not getting the implications of it yet, as a society. We may have heard about these studies, Oh, babies are learning language. They’re really aware. They’re really capable. But what does that mean? We still want to toss ’em around and pass ’em around and not speak to them. It’s really hard, it’s hard when they’re not proving it. But they can’t prove it until we take the leap of faith.

Anya Dunham: Yes, I absolutely agree. I think most people now have heard about the idea of attachment and how our sensitive responses help us bond with our babies. But there is one aspect of attachment, and something that really helps secure attachment, that is I would say a little bit less well known. And it’s this idea of “mind-mindedness.” In the scientific literature, it’s described as a way of seeing babies as people with minds of their own. So not just as bundles of joy and cute little things, but as people with their minds open to the world. And so parents who are mind-minded, even though they may not call themselves that, but they might be practicing this intuitively, they tend to be more insightful and they want to learn about what might their baby be thinking or feeling in the moment.

And of course, we never know for sure because the only person who really knows is the baby. But we can try to see the world from the baby’s perspective and that allows us to adjust how we are with them based on what they are doing, what they’re working on, and what they might be thinking about, as opposed to what we want or some preconceived notions we have or some general ideas of what a baby of that age should be doing.

Janet Lansbury: And that’s very hard to discern, by the way. Again, because the baby’s not speaking clearly to us about what they are thinking or need or want. The inclination to project, I’ve never met a parent that didn’t have it. I mean, I certainly do. So this idea of opening up to, Oh, but this person is totally separate and they have their own point of view that’s totally different from mine. And what is that about? It’s this constant question that we have to keep asking so that we stay open to it. But yeah, I mean that sounds great when you’re saying it, but I just wanted to add how hard that is.

Anya Dunham: Yeah, I certainly found it challenging myself. And it even comes down to simple things like, if I’m cold, does that mean the baby’s cold? Or if I’m enjoying a gathering but the baby might be getting overwhelmed, and things like that. And so it’s not relying on how I feel in the situation and thinking about, Well, how is my child experiencing this?, being their own little person, like you said. And so I think this really underscores the value of seeing babies right from the start as unique human beings. And also the value of sensitive observation, as Magda taught us and as you have been teaching us, which really allows us to get to know and understand our babies.

Janet Lansbury: And that’s her sixth RIE principle, by the way: sensitive observation of the child in order to understand his or her needs.

So where did this term first come from, mind-mindedness? I had never heard it until I read your book.

Anya Dunham: I believe it was Elizabeth Meins who coined this term. She has a number of papers looking at how mind-minded parents are with their babies and what impacts that this approach has on attachment security. Some of her work, for example, found that babies whose parents are mind-minded or who grow up in mind-minded environments, they tend to have a stronger physiological capacity to regulate their emotions. So it’s a little bit easier for them to stay calm or to return to a calm state. And they also tend to develop stronger bonds with their parents. And then it’s a little easier for them to recognize and understand emotions and needs of others around them as they grow.

Janet Lansbury: Which is the theory of mind. That was one of Alison Gopnik’s terms that she used, theory of mind, the way that babies can be like little psychologists sensing our moods and our thoughts and our feelings right from the start as well.

I think what you’re speaking to seems like the power of that —to help a child be more able to self-regulate and to thrive in the relationship and how it promotes attachment and bonding— I feel like that really speaks to the power of feeling seen, which is something that we all need. We want that in the world, in life, that there’s at least one person that really gets us. And definitely in our relationships, closeness is all about feeling listened to and seen as a separate person.

Anya Dunham: Yes, absolutely, I agree. What I found interesting from this research but also from my own experience and from reading your wonderful work, is how we can become more in tune and develop that mind-mindedness and mind-minded mindset through sensitive observation and through slowing down. That is something that I have found so incredibly helpful on my own parenting journey, is that permission to just observe my babies without the need to jump in. Seeing the incredible value that there is in just being with them. I believe Magda called it the “wants nothing” time. That was something that I found very freeing and very helpful, personally.

And something that I also learned through reading the research is that mind-mindedness and sensitive observation also helps us nurture our intuition. Sometimes intuitive knowledge, that gut feeling we might get in thinking that something is wrong or something is right, is sort of the opposite of science. And we start thinking, should I trust my gut or should I trust expert knowledge and advice? But what science shows is that we actually do best when we do both, because our intuition is a form of knowledge. It’s sort of our brain’s way of immediately, within split seconds, really, accessing the memories that we store within us and using those in that I just know kind of way. But even though it’s subconscious and automatic and it doesn’t require this sort of analytic reasoning or comparing options, it’s still a very real form of knowledge.

Janet Lansbury: Because it’s based on something that no research can give us, which is our experience and what we sense coming from this unique individual, our baby.

Anya Dunham: Exactly. So when it comes to our babies, the best source that our intuition can draw from is our observations of our unique child that we accumulate day by day by being with them and getting to know them better and better. That’s something that we cannot ever read in a book or learn from scientific papers. It’s something that we learn by being with them and nurturing our intuition. That’s a very powerful thing.

But sometimes what we think of as intuitive knowledge could be coming from another place. The intuition could also draw from maybe fears that we’ve been storing in our memories, maybe some biases we might have. And so what is really interesting and helpful, I think, is that science has found that deliberately considering evidence-based knowledge and accessing our intuition at the same time is possible, and that our brains can combine both even when we are not fully aware of the source of intuition. And so considering the science, the evidence-based knowledge, can help us filter out the irrelevant pieces, that are maybe our fears, maybe some old disproven psychology, maybe some memories that no longer serve us, and then use our observations of our unique babies wisely and hear our truly intuitive and unique knowledge that we have.

Janet Lansbury: I love that. That’s cool. I want to, though, ask you as the parent of three children, and I have three children as well— I’m just imagining myself listening to this podcast and saying to myself, Well, I have a busy life with three kids, or two other children, now I have this baby. How am I going to sit around blissfully observing and connecting with my intuition and doing all these things that sound very slow and lovely? I mean, how do you do it?

Anya Dunham: Oh, I know. I think that’s such a good question and it’s so hard. And I would say it’s hard to have that slow, kind of “wants nothing” time even with our first because it’s just something that we may be not as used to. With my first, I wanted to do the best I could. There was always some sort of worries running through my mind and, Well, how can I do best? and things like that. So eventually I learned to let go of some of that and just have slow playtime, just watching my baby play. And then, when my second and then third babies came along, it’s certainly so much busier, so much more challenging. And my third baby was born early in the pandemic, so that everybody was home. And it was certainly much harder to carve out that slow time and giving him the space.

And I think one of the gifts was understanding how important that space and free movement and uninterrupted play was to his development, and sort of setting aside the space where he could do that. And then also seeing the value of the family being together. And also we don’t necessarily have to spend large amounts of time specifically thinking like, Well, this will be the time when I will nurture my intuition. I think it comes organically through the day when we spend time with our babies changing diapers, feeding. It comes in these little tiny glimpses, sometimes, tiny snippets, but they accumulate over time into this very unique knowledge.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, I feel like in my experience, I was just realizing— well, I was all over the place with my first baby anyway, I didn’t know any of this stuff. But then with the second and third, realizing that your baby’s getting this whole different experience growing up as a sibling. That’s so valuable and incredible, right? And you just take your moment when you can, no pressure. You take those moments.

And you also take advantage of the caregiving routines, because there’ll be plenty of days where that was the only time that you connected one-on-one with your baby, when you have other obligations and children or anything. You take advantage of that. And there are moments there where you’re observing, you’re trying to slow down to be present in that moment. Maybe you’re breastfeeding or bottle feeding and your baby’s stopping to look around and you’re noticing how they’re enjoying a view of something that’s in the room. You’re giving them that time. And maybe those times are the only observation times and that’s beneficial as well for you. Any time that you have is going to add up. And it’s really about our openness to the idea that our baby has a perspective that’s totally unique and we’re just generally trying to be aware of that because we realize our baby’s a person and all these things that science has shown for a long time, but it’s just not quite gotten into the culture yet. It’s so interesting to me.

Also, when I was asking you that question and you were answering it beautifully, I was thinking about just this moment when your baby is maybe waking up from a nap or in the morning and you sort of come close because you’ve heard them make a sound, maybe. You come closer, but instead of just coming right in, Let me pick you up, you wait until they look towards you. Because they’re sensing that you’re close, they’re so aware and sensitive. And maybe they’re involved in something. Just not rushing that. And there’s often moments there where you catch a glimpse of what your baby could be thinking or interested in.

Anya Dunham: Oh, that was such a lovely description and it just brings me right back into those stages. I can remember that so well, when they wake up and then if I enter the room and then maybe they don’t see me for a moment. And so it gives me that sense of, Okay, maybe they’re looking at their hands or looking at the ceiling. And then when they see you, right, then they just light up. It’s a really wonderful memory.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, for me too. So what were some of the other surprising things that you discovered in your research?

Anya Dunham: One of the surprising things was just how connected everything is in the baby’s life. For example, the connection between sleep and learning is something that I think not everybody knows. We all do know that sleep brings physical rest for adults and babies alike. But for babies in particular, sleep is also important for learning because when they sleep they sort and consolidate the memories of events and people and experiences that they’ve had when they were awake. So the well-rested baby is more likely to notice new things and then when they go to sleep, they remember, they remember that experience better. And I quite like the analogy of a baby’s brain being like a librarian who only gets a chance to carefully sort and organize the books and the materials in his care after all the patrons go home and the library closes for the day and that’s their time to really get organized.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, but how do we get a well-rested baby? That’s the thing parents are going to worry about listening to this, because I know everybody worries that my child’s not getting enough sleep. And then of course our worry makes it harder for people next to us, that are absorbing our moods and feelings, to feel calm and like going to sleep. So it’s a tough one. And that could be a whole other conversation that you and I have, I know.

But Magda always said you can’t make another person fall asleep. And, what can we do? We can create the environment. Which of course is what your book is all about, creating the right environment or creating an ideal environment, let’s say, for nurturing our babies. But what does that mean in regard to sleep?

Anya Dunham: Yeah, so exactly. So the way I’ve looked at things in my book, and I explored the question of how can we create those most nurturing environments, physical and emotional environments, for sleep and also for feeding and for care and play. For sleep, in particular, it was exactly that. What I found is that, similar to responsive feeding, our best role as parents and caregivers would be to create the most sleep-conducive environments for our children. So that would be the physical spaces for sleep, but also a balanced daily rhythm that helps their bodies relax and develop the circadian rhythm and then kind of relax into sleep when the time is right. So we can think about our role in sleep as working on the environment. Because of course we cannot make our babies sleep, but we can provide the best conditions that we can, again, based on the science of sleep, but also based on observing our own unique babies and their unique needs for sleep and rest.

Janet Lansbury: There are even details, right? Yeah, there is science, because I remember reading it a long time ago when I was writing a post on this, how the free-movement aspects of Magda’s approach that she recommends, especially outdoors whenever possible, that the baby is in a position, usually on their backs, to be as free as possible to move their limbs, move their trunks, move their heads, and that that, just like with us when we get exercise, that helps a baby to sleep rather than being in a container the whole day.

Anya Dunham: Absolutely. So they get to that place where they’re physically tired in a good way. And also they’ve had experiences exploring and experimenting with what they can and cannot do when they’ve been able to move freely. And that helps them get to that place where they’re tired, just the right amount, not perhaps too tired, but full of experiences that then they’re ready to physically rest and then integrate those experiences into memory. And certainly free movement and being outdoors in the natural light, those are very, very helpful things for sleep.

Janet Lansbury: And did you look up any research on certain methods for instantly calming a baby? There’s an expert that talks about it, there’s this calming reflex and you have to do all this type of stimulation to put your baby into that. Is that healthy sleep or is that a baby kind of cocooning or shutting down to escape the stimulation?

Anya Dunham: Yeah, several papers that I’ve read talk about how sometimes young babies and even older babies might use sleep as an escape because that might be their only way to escape a really overstimulating environment. The only other way for them to voice their discomfort with environment would be to cry, but sleep sometimes might be their way of sort of escaping from this environment where they go like, I just can’t take this anymore. And so what sometimes happens is with very young babies, especially if it’s our first, sometimes we want to maintain that sort of on-the-go lifestyle because it feels good, it feels like, Okay, we have an easy baby. So maybe we can just be out and about just as we were before. And it might seem like the baby is sleeping great in their car seat or maybe in the stroller. And it might work for some babies or for some babies for a certain amount of time. But if it happens too much, for some babies it could lead to them being overstimulated and tired because they really couldn’t quite meet their sleep needs, especially if they’re moved from one device to another throughout the day.

Janet Lansbury: So is there actually science on that, that the quality of sleep that they’re getting is not as good or not as restorative or is there not science and we’re kind of guessing or wondering?

Anya Dunham: I tried to find studies that look at the quality of sleep in motion sleep environment versus stationary sleep environment, like in the crib versus maybe in the stroller or on the parent. And I actually couldn’t find any studies that empirically measured sleep quality, but there were studies that noted that aspect, that a baby might escape into sleep and sleep for a shorter period of time because perhaps the sleep rhythms were not quite aligned at the time. So it wasn’t maybe the right time for them to have that rest. And so they might have a little cat nap just to calm themselves down, but it wouldn’t be as restful and restorative.

Janet Lansbury: That makes sense. So overall, it seems that you mostly found science that supports a lot of the things that Magda taught and Pikler taught. Were there things you found that didn’t really jive with it or that were counter to those practices?

Anya Dunham: You know, I find that all or most parenting philosophies or approaches, they often are thought of as an approach plus a set of techniques. Sort of very specific ways of doing something. And then when I looked into science, there usually is more than one good way of doing things. There’s a range of good —and quite often a wide range of good— options. And so sometimes I see RIE misunderstood and misrepresented as just a set of techniques. And sometimes very specific don’ts and maybe nevers. Like, never carry baby in the carrier or never use the high chair or never breastfeed for comfort, things like that. And so I haven’t found scientific support for the very strict don’ts and the nevers.

Janet Lansbury: But that isn’t what it’s about at all.

Anya Dunham: Exactly, because there is strong research to support the benefits of free movement and sensitive caregiving and free exploration. And there are many ways to create those environments. And RIE, to me, if I understand it correctly, it’s not at all about the techniques or the don’ts, it’s the way to think about children and to see them. And that’s what’s really beautiful about it.

Janet Lansbury: And even in the principles, the seven principles, it’s not about, Do this! It’s presented as make time for this, you know, time for uninterrupted play. Because at the time that Pikler started observing babies behaving naturally, free to move, and saw how they developed their motor skills naturally the way that animals do, without being positioned or propped and all of these things, the whole point was that wasn’t happening in that time. And I think still being in containers is a fact of life for a lot of babies for most of their day. And they get used to that, you know, they like what they know, right? So what Magda said, and Pikler before her said, was, Make time for this, too. Make time for trusting your baby. Make time for an environment that’s physically safe, cognitively challenging, and emotionally nurturing. Make time for uninterrupted play. Make time to involve the child in a person-to-person relationship with you when they’re being cared for. So it’s with them, not to them. Make time for sensitive observation whenever you can. Make time for consistency. So it’s just an opening up to see ways that weren’t normally thought of in those days and still probably aren’t typically considered as part of baby care.

Anya Dunham: I love that. I love the “make time.” This is a beautiful way of saying it and I think it goes back to what we talked about a little earlier, about how sometimes it’s challenging with a bigger family and our busy lives and working parents, but not putting it onto ourselves as this immense pressure, but thinking about it like, this is what we can do to create that environment and make time for all those good things that really help babies be who they are and learn and grow.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. And by doing so, opening ourselves up to this gift that babies have to offer us: This gift of rediscovering what we had when we were babies or when we were children. Which is, what matters is I saw a leaf that was blowing in that breeze and what matters is the clouds had an amazing formation or the smell of my mother’s shampoo is incredible. You know, slowing down ourselves, our own life, to enjoy life more, enjoy our baby more.

Anya Dunham: Absolutely. It’s like we grow and relearn right alongside them, in a sense.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. And I think especially today with all the— you know, I’m on my phone all the time, looking. And you know, not just standing in line, I’m always doing something. It’s even more challenging but maybe even more of a gift to take those moments, it’s just moments, where all I’m going to do is be with my baby in this diapering experience right now. Even if it doesn’t work well and they’re crying and they don’t like this or that, I’m just going to have an honest time together and just do this. It does nurture us. It nurtures the real joy that we have in us, I think.

Anya Dunham: Yeah, I agree. It does.

Janet Lansbury: Well, you’re wonderful. Thank you so much for all this information and I feel like we could probably have a new discussion on each of these topics. There’s so many juicy ones here. But thank you so much Anya. And what are you working on these days?

Anya Dunham: So, I guess in the year or so since my book Baby Ecology has been published, I’ve had opportunities to dive a little bit deeper into some of the topics. Because putting the book together felt a little bit like putting together a big puzzle, connecting all these pieces of knowledge from different studies and seeing that puzzle put together, it just made me see the wide range of good options for sleep, care, feeding, and play. And so I call that the optimal nurturing environment, or “the ONE” for short. Which is not at all prescriptive, but it’s a range of these good options from which parents can choose what works best for their babies and their families. And they can choose what reflects their cultural backgrounds and then honors their specific family situation.

So over the past year I’ve spent some time diving deeper into what I call the 10 elements of the ONE, the optimal nurturing environment. For example, I looked into small pieces, but important pieces, like choosing and transitioning into daycare and then into applying that whole concept of the ONE, of the nurturing environment, to daycare settings.

And then I’m also always working on spreading the word about all the research that went into Baby Ecology through my website, kidecology.com. And I love hearing from readers, answering questions or just when people share their thoughts on any of the research that went into the book.

Janet Lansbury: Sounds great. Well thank you again and enjoy those three children. How old are they now?

Anya Dunham: I’ve got a 12-year-old, an eight-year-old, and a just-turned three-year-old, so life’s been busy.

Janet Lansbury: And it stays busy, but it’s sure fun and surprising to discover what new things you’re going to learn about your child as they grow and all the surprises. I love it. Alright, talk to you again, I hope. And thank you again.

Anya Dunham: And thank you for all your work and for the honor of being your guest today. It’s been wonderful. Thank you.

Janet Lansbury: You can connect with Anya and learn more on her website, kidecology.com. And be sure to check out her book, Baby Ecology.

Also, 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.

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 e-book at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or barnesandnoble.com and in audio at audible.com. And you can even 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. We can do this.

The post What Science Says About Respectful Parenting (with Anya Dunham, PhD) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Mental Health Starts in Infancy (with Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m hosting infant mental health and infant-parent relationship expert Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon. Angela’s also a fellow RIE Associate and now serves on their board, after serving a long tenure at the nonprofit Zero to Three. Dr. Fisher-Solomon has worked on national projects on home visiting, family childcare, Early Head Start, and more.

Today we’ll be discussing what infant mental health really means. It might not be what you think. So, what is it? What is it not? Why is it important? And what can we do to nurture it? Which includes understanding secure attachment, stimulation, infant emotions, and a lot more. I’m really looking forward to this.

Hi, Angela. Welcome to Unruffled.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Good afternoon, Janet. Thank you so much for having me. It is such an honor to be able to sit and chat with you on one of my favorite topics.

Janet Lansbury: Well, the honor’s completely mine, let me tell you. I’m so thrilled to be able to share your wisdom and many years of experience with my listeners. So thank you for taking the time to be here. Like you said, I love this topic. It’s one that isn’t a part of the conversation in parenting as much as a lot of other topics. Why do you think that is? Do you have any thoughts about that?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: I think families, and particularly parents, often they shy away from the terms infant mental health because people often think about mental health as, Oh my goodness, if you say infant mental health, does that mean that something is quote unquote “wrong” with my baby? And it does not mean that at all. Infant mental health has what we call synonymous definition, which simply means social-emotional development in babies and toddlers, and that’s all it means. It is really just the capacity of a baby or toddler to experience, regulate, and express their emotions. It’s also their ability to form close and secure relationships and really to explore the environment and learn. All within the context of biology, relationships, and culture.

And so, on one hand, that’s a big definition in terms of the field. But to parents, when parents ask me, well, what exactly is infant mental health? I often just simply say, think of it as, how is your child developing their social-emotional skills? And then that leads into attachment and what does that look like? And basically, just how is your child’s overall emotional wellbeing, what does that look like? And then as an infant mental health specialist, we break that down.

Janet Lansbury: So what are some of the important practices that parents should consider engaging in with their babies and what signs from them are showing us that we’re on the right track? Can you talk about that?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Infant mental health, I have found, and in my research, really I link it back to what is happening to the baby in utero. Because infant mental health doesn’t just start when the baby is here, right? After the baby is born. It starts with the connections prenatally. So I often like to tell parents it starts there. What kind of pregnancy did you have? How did you feel about the baby? How were your emotions? Because we know that emotions during the journey of pregnancy are sometimes up and down, right?

Then once your beautiful baby has arrived, what is the connection? Because as soon as the baby is born, infants come into the world, as you know, seeking the connection of another human face, particularly the mother, father, or whoever is going to be that primary caregiver in the child’s life. And it often starts out with something as simple as the earliest connection, making eye-to-eye contact with the baby. Touching a newborn is like heaven. And making that up close, eight to 12 inches from the baby’s face so that they know by smells and using their other senses, they know who mom is. And a lot of research says they also know who dad is, particularly if the dad has been able to talk to the baby in the womb on a regular basis. So parents ask, how can I help my infant have a strong social-emotional capacity? I tell them, by building a healthy, secure attachment relationship, which in turn builds trust and security.

And in my research, which looks at confidence-building in babies, it’s really this —and we know this, you and I often talk about it in many different scenarios— the importance of going slow with an infant. Your language, your eye rapid movement, the tempo of your body language, babies pick up everything. And what we consider to be small nuances of how you interact with a baby, how you observe the baby. And that consistency really in fact is building the necessary skills for strong social-emotional capacity, which ultimately means you are building strong social-emotional skills, which lead to strong cognitive skills and so on and so forth. Because it is strengthening that particular developmental domain and the baby’s brain.

Janet Lansbury: Because it’s giving them that sense of calm and security that allows them to—

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Regulate.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, and then therefore have the capacity to develop cognitive skills and these other skills.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Absolutely. I mean, everyone wants their child to do well academically. Even if a baby is, let’s say two, three days old, it’s natural for a parent to think, I want my child to be able to read before they get to kindergarten. Or, what should I do? How can I make them and help them to have strong cognitive skills? You know, we as adults, we have societal pressures. So as parents we can’t help but start thinking further ahead. And you know, Magda Gerber used to often say about being in the moment, but it is understanding, and in the world of infant mental health we zero in on: to what degree is slow. Observation, being able to understand the developmental cues, being able to identify them, being able to read them consistently, and being able to meet the emotional needs of the baby. 

An example is, when we talk about regulation, if your baby is crying and you may come close, you have the best of intentions, but in fact the baby already could be overly stimulated and it turns its head away from you because it actually needs to shut down and have a little quiet time. So infant mental health is about helping parents to identify those cues and come alongside the baby, in a sense, so that the baby is dictating what it needs and the parent is better able to give them that.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. And that example of overstimulation, that’s one that’s I think so commonly misunderstood. And there are so many products that we’re offered as parents to maybe make our child smarter or learn faster or be less bored or whatever, that actually are very overstimulating. And I know that this idea of how sensitive babies are to stimulation, that got away from me a lot, even with my third baby. Because we can’t gauge that on our own stimulation needs, they’re so much more sensitive.

And it’s like what you were saying about slowing down, too. We can’t be with a baby in a way that’s really going to be helpful to them if it’s on our adult pace. Magda Gerber and Pikler talked about this a lot, and Heidelise Als, who did so much research with preemies, talked about how jarring it is for them when we’re on an adult, more rapid pace in the way that we talk to them or handle them. So I feel like those things, maybe there’s not enough information and support and reminders out there that babies are… their newness to the world and all this incredible learning potential that they have, they’re so open to the world and yes, everything is more to them. They need so much less than we think.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: You know, infants, their right brain develops much earlier than the left side of their brain. And the right brain is what controls their emotional development. Yes, they come into the world with over 70 billion brain cells. So they come into the world very, very smart. Their senses are heightened. But to your point, the one thing that is not always considered is, although they are simply brilliant and competent little people, their ability to take in information, it must be slow.

You know, parents often wonder, Why do I have to repeat myself, even to my toddler? I explained to them, because it takes them probably around the third time, sometimes the fourth time for it to register. You know, let’s say if it’s a toddler who is only speaking a few words, but if you are using hand gestures and you speak slow enough and use eye contact, even an infant, they’re going to understand you.

And I’ve had parents challenge me, that there’s no way my four month old can understand me and I give them little experiments. Yes. Why? You know, you speak to the baby in a certain way and then I begin to show the parent, Look at her eyes, look at her hands starting to open and close. Her breathing is increasing. She knows I’m explaining something. Parents sometimes think that they’re just little nuances, but they in fact have great meaning.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. That’s what I say to parents too because I often get that, Oh, what’s the point? And, They can’t understand. And I suggest, Try it. And people have come back to me and said, Oh my gosh, okay, I saw it. I saw my baby registering what I said, or I saw them responding in a way that proved to me or seemed to prove to me… It’s still freaky, right? They understood what we were talking about.

About stimulation… I was just imagining, for us it would be we’re in a stadium, really noisy, there’s all this stimulation, all this stuff going on. Which is I think how babies must feel just being there in the world. Because they’re taking everything in—every sound, every sight, everything all at once. And then yes, if we were in that stadium with all of that stimulation and all that sound and all that sight, then it’s going to take a little while for you to communicate with us because we have to tune some of that out just to be able to focus on what you’re saying. I don’t know if that’s a proper analogy, but that’s what came to my mind.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: It absolutely is a wonderful analogy. And I teach on infant brain development to college and graduate students and I often say to them that, there’s understanding brain development, you’re neuroscientists or something like that. But for a parent, they don’t necessarily need to know it to that degree. They need to know how a baby’s brain works, in that a baby’s brain literally depends on the social interaction in order for the right side of that brain to flourish and for the neurons and the connections to get strong enough. And to understand, to your point, that quieter environment, it gives the baby the opportunity to regulate itself. It’s hard, even for adults, for us to regulate our own emotions and our bodies and our senses if we’re, what did you say, in the middle of a stadium. You know, our ability as adults to be intentional, physically, emotionally. Why do we think infants are any different?

And if anything, because they haven’t been in the world that long. They’ve been inside the womb, this really safe, dark but comforting place where only they’re really dealing with their mother’s heartbeat. Even if it’s a water birth, however the child enters the world, it is still a shock. Because now they’ve got lights and they’ve got people moving around, they can’t really see clearly. So it’s a lot for their brain. And again, the right side is much more developed than the left side. The left side holds cognitive and language skills, it doesn’t really develop until closer to age one. So the right side is working a lot and babies need consistent but quieter sounds to begin to allow them to kind of regulate and get their own body rhythms. And we talk about, from Magda, telling a baby what you’re going to do before you do it and pausing and waiting.

All of those practices really help babies, it gives them time. And parents often find that if you give your baby that time and that consistency and you’re going slowly, you literally are helping them to build their social-emotional capacity. Because as they grow, everything is going to start to increase, right? And become a little bit faster. There’s such a big difference between an infant, a toddler, and then a preschooler who’s running around and jumping and going from one thing to the next because they have the capacity to do that. Between age four and five, Oh, he can sit and listen to a preschool teacher. Or the things where when you need them to wait, well, when you go slow in the beginning you’ve been building their social-emotional development, a.k.a. their mental health, they are better able to regulate their bodies. And typically it affects their sleep schedule, their sleep cycles, their feeding cycles, and their play cycles with their loving parents.

Janet Lansbury: Yes.

I wanted to ask you about something because when you brought it up, I got a little feeling of uh-oh, and I’m sure other parents worry about this. You talked about how our feelings around our pregnancy, and of course we all know —and some of us have experienced— postpartum depression, or that anxiety as a new parent or just after the birth of a baby. Well, we can’t help how we feel if we’re depressed during pregnancy, right? I had a very difficult third pregnancy. I think I was maybe too old to be having a baby, I don’t know. But I had a lot of negative feelings.

You know, there’s very extreme things that parents go through. And there are also situations where of course babies are premature, their brain hasn’t finished fully developing as a full-term baby’s would. And then there are situations where there’s adoption and the baby has, I believe, a sense of loss of leaving the person that smelled and spoke like that, that they heard in the womb, and going to someone else. What do we do if that was our situation? How can we help our babies to process that? Is it just being even more sensitive the way you’re talking about? Or can we expect certain things from them that we might not expect from a full-term baby where everybody was emotionally healthy all through it?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Sometimes parents are not able, they don’t necessarily arrive in the best situation. Or to your point, if in this case that there is a mother going through postpartum and she may not have the capacity to give her child the nurturing that it needs. That’s why this field is so critically important because a mom or a family needs support, no one can parent in a vacuum. And if someone has gone through various levels of postpartum depression or other adverse experiences that impede their ability to parent in a healthy manner for their baby.

Babies, unfortunately, they don’t really wait. You know, they grow every day. But they are incredibly resilient. And in the families that I work with, I often explain that you meet your child where they are. There’s no such thing as a perfect parent, we all make mistakes. And whatever the situation is, if you are able to get some kind of support, like if it’s postpartum, they have the amazing Postpartum Support International, that’s doing some amazing work around the country for not just mothers, but they have family groups, they have groups for fathers, they have LGBQT groups, different cultural groups.

Because, you know, you could have one vision for how your family’s going to look when you’re getting ready to welcome a new baby or a child into your family, and it may not turn out that way. So there are many different groups that I try to guide parents to. If I’m not mistaken, there’s probably infant mental health specialists and organizations in almost every state in the country. And many times those resources are free of charge.

And then if you ask, How does that affect the baby? You can only hope that there could be someone there, even if it can’t be the mother or the father, that it could be someone who could still give that infant a nurturing experience until the parent is ready. And when the parent is ready to create the bond, it’s still going to continue to have a major effect on the child’s life. If it can be in utero, if it can be from day one, that’s fantastic, but it might not be until age three.

I tell parents, you do the best that you can and if you’re trying to strive to get better, then a child’s brain is incredibly resilient and flexible. So it is not to think that just because there’s extenuating circumstances, that Is my baby just lost if I can’t provide this slow, nurturing, comforting? No. I would encourage parents to try to get support and resources. And in the world of infant mental health, we have something called prevention and promotion because of course if we can help offset some of those challenges, it’s going to be better for the baby and it’s going to be better for the parenting journey. So earlier is always helpful. Not always possible, but wherever you get the help at whatever time, it’s about the health and wellbeing of both the adult, of the caregiver, and the baby.

Janet Lansbury: That’s very helpful. So let’s say, in my situation where I had a lot of dark moods during the pregnancy, but then once I had my baby, I actually felt really guilty about the dark moods because he was just so vulnerable and adorable and, you know, there was no way I was not going to love him. He had a lot of crying, whatever that was. Colic, I don’t know if it was his digestive system. Not during the day, but in the night he would have lots and lots of crying and I tried a lot of things, a chiropractor, my diet, all of these things.

But I sometimes wonder if, do babies express those feelings that they absorb from us in the womb or maybe in the early days after birth if we’re depressed? Are there different ways that babies express that and process it out of their system with us? Or is that just as variable as all the different types of children there are, with their different capacities? Or are there some themes? An adoption situation, maybe, where they had that loss and now they’re in this really positive situation though? Is there anything that that looks like that we could look out for? Or is it just very individual for each child?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: You know, I get asked that question a lot. And one of the reasons I chose developmental psychology is because my outlook on babies, it’s from a scientific perspective, yes, but it’s also from a holistic and a spiritual perspective. Babies do because of genetic makeup, right? And stress that’s internalized in different hormones that we absorb in our bodies and so does that then get passed to our babies in the womb? Or if it’s an adoptive baby, is that baby coming with a genetic pattern for its emotional framework? In a sense, yes, the science has shown that babies do come, in a sense, with a genetic blueprint. And that’s under the realm of biology, right? But then there’s nurture. And the research shows nurture —which is, again, giving your baby the support it needs once you’re able to identify some of the issues— is stronger.

And so let’s say with you, your son may have had these issues. Or if it’s an adoptive child, they’re going to have some residuals because they had a birth mother at some point. But what I tell parents again is that the power of love is at the core and the center of babies. I know it sounds simple on one hand, but it does have the ability for recovery. If you’re the birth parent, if you have sad feelings that heighten your level of cortisol in your brain and the hormones or stress hormones, and your baby is born extra-irritable, it just seems incredibly tense and it can’t seem to regulate. There are steps in infant mental health in identifying what’s happening. Why is the baby tense? Is it muscle tone, is it irritable? So there are different screenings. And once those are identified, then we can come up with a plan to help a parent bring the stress level of the baby down.

If babies who’ve suffered, let’s say with alcohol syndrome, they recover. It takes work, but they recover and they begin to thrive. So yes, it’s an individual’s situation for both the adult and the baby, but just because it’s not an ideal situation doesn’t mean that the baby has to be quote unquote “stuck”. Does that make sense?

Janet Lansbury: It totally does, yeah. I love that.

You brought up cortisol. What should parents know about cortisol? I know there’s a lot of mixed advice put out there around if your baby cries or if your baby cries for too long or too often, that’s a dangerous thing because of the cortisol. What is the science on that?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Cortisol is a stress hormone. We have it, it’s in our bodies, and it’s there for a reason. It’s kind of a measuring stick and it helps to regulate other functions in our bodies. I agree with you that parents don’t quite understand about cortisol and crying in particular. But for babies, crying is healthy. It’s a way to express emotions. The challenge is understanding, where is it coming from? If all the basic needs have been met, sometimes there’s not going to be anything that you can do because the infant is also sometimes trying to regulate itself. However, as a parent, if you feel that, okay, I’ve done everything and my baby is inconsolable, then I would say call your pediatrician to make sure that there’s not anything going on internally. But crying in and of itself, again, once all of the babies’ needs have been met…

And sometimes parents aren’t quite sure as to, When should I hold my baby? Should I rock them? Should I do this, should I do that? To keep them from crying, you have to try to help the baby to regulate. And sometimes it’s taking your baby’s clothes off, warming up your hands. I’m a certified infant massage educator and what we do is called holding sacred space, speaking very quietly in your baby’s ear, looking at them in eye contact. I know you’re upset. I know it’s hard, but I am here for you. And same repeated soft motions that are rhythmic. Typically I found they work, bouncing and all of those things. If the baby is already overly stimulated, then bouncing them is sometimes only going to make it worse and then the crying becomes elevated. So the cortisol level in terms of stress has more to do with prolonged crying and not giving an infant acknowledgement or recognition that someone is there.

Janet Lansbury: And hopefully someone that can be as calm as possible, right? So we’re not adding to it with our own emotion for the baby to absorb.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: And you brought up an excellent point because when you know you’re stressed. In some of my parent-infant classes, I will say, It’s okay. Step over to the side, count to 10 or 20, take deep breaths. And I’ll give them a mindfulness exercise. And then come in. Because if you’re not regulated, it’s only going to add to the baby’s stress. If you’re stressed, then the baby’s going to be stressed. And if their baby’s not stressed, the baby will then become stressed. They basically mirror you and they mirror your emotional capacity.

Janet Lansbury: I love that you teach that in your classes. Can you talk a little about this tool that you’re developing? The FIOT, the Fisher Infant Observation Tool?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Called the FIOT, it’s been a baby of mine for the past 20 years. I was inspired by Magda’s work in talking about confidence and then there’s some other theorists that I researched that also talked about confidence, and Dr. Pikler. I was inspired and I wanted to look at confident behavior as an action verb.

So I looked at adult insecurity. They didn’t just start that way. We always go back into the world of infancy and early childhood. And so what I did was I studied insecurity and fear. Where is it rooted? What are the elements and the factors that contribute to confident and insecure behavioral patterns? And that is the FIOT. So it is a paper parent observation tool. But I created it to empower parents because for me I said, well it’s great in psychology and nurses and pediatricians, we get all these different screening tools and most of them are not culturally sensitive. So I created the FIOT.

Janet Lansbury: You created one that is.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: I had some amazing mentors who I think are far more brilliant than I am and more experienced. And we did the research and looked at, what are the differences in parenting styles, the differences in how we see babies and what does that look like across various cultural groups? And how can we ultimately bring this into the hands of parents to empower them? So the goal is to empower parents. It’s not a measuring tool, it’s more of an identifier. If your baby scores a particular number, here are some strategies to help you at home.

So if your baby is starting to show some insecure behavioral patterns, this helps you to offset that behavior. So you don’t have to wait until your child is three to start to wonder, Why is my child so fearful? Other than separation anxiety and stranger anxiety, which are all typically developing behaviors. So the FIOT begins to identify what that looks like. And it has gone through two levels of scientific testing and it has very, very strong scores. We are now in the final phase. We’re constantly looking for funding and perhaps partners at some point, because now it’s ready to be taken around the country. It needs a larger sample population before it’s ready for publication. But ultimately that is the goal.

Janet Lansbury: Wow, you’re amazing.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: It’s been a long process.

Janet Lansbury: I mean, congratulations. Especially because it’s been a long process. So does this also help parents notice if there’s neurodivergence or other issues like that? Can they notice anything like that at the infant stage?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Absolutely. Even though it is created for typically developing babies, people have asked me, would this be a tool if my child was on the autism spectrum? Just as an example. And what it has shown, because of the identifiers, so far is that it picks up on things that are not consistent, which in turn propels a parent to be able to wonder a lot sooner than later. And it has the chart, you know, typically developing should be doing this. And it also gives room for varying cultural groups. So how a particular culture, what their outlook is on parenting practices. It can be tweaked here and there to make room for that.

Janet Lansbury: It sounds like it might also do something that— this was one of my favorite gifts from Magda, she taught us to see this ourselves and help other parents see this. That it’s not just, My child isn’t doing this yet, it’s, But look what they are doing. They’re doing this. You didn’t realize that was a thing. Well guess what? It’s a thing. They’re sustaining attention on something. Or the way that they’re shifting their body. They’re maybe not rolling, but they’re preparing themselves to be able to do that, moving their head, extending themselves, turning on their side. You know, I love how we’re able to show parents in the classes and ease their mind that your baby’s really making some good progress here. Look at all the things they’re able to do that you never even thought meant anything.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Absolutely. And the FIOT doesn’t make a comparison and it allows parents to, you know, you don’t take it just once, right? You could take it more than once. So to your point, it’s not as though you’re looking for anything. It’s really training parents on how to observe without judgment. It’s almost like writing in a diary. You know, if you’re anyone that’s trying to lose weight, you weigh yourself and then you might weigh yourself again two, three weeks later. Then if there’s a big enough difference, it gives you time to pause and possibly correct if you need to correct something. And so it’s really the awareness and the awareness early on would in turn help babies and toddlers before they get to preschool. So prior to the age of three, to be able to offset. So it’s the awareness, empowering parents and then allowing them to make their own informed decision. The FIOT will give parents the opportunity and the ability to identify their own baby’s cues.

Janet Lansbury: Wow. Well, I’m excited for this to come out. So keep going.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: I will be sharing it at the World Association for Infant Mental Health in Dublin. I don’t share the tool, but I will be sharing different posters about the research and all of that.

Janet Lansbury: Wonderful. Well thank you so much for sharing so many wonderful tips and your perspective and insights. I really, really appreciate it. And I of course personally enjoy talking about one of my favorite topics with an Associate.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Yes. And if anyone wants to learn more about the FIOT, they could visit fiotbabiesconsulting.com.

Janet Lansbury: That’s F I O T babiesconsulting.com. Great. And is that where we can learn more about your work personally too?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: There are small-group classes, you know, similar to RIE classes, Resources for Infant Educators, but these classes deal with a lot of psychology, things that might come up for parents, as well as deepening cultural differences in how they see their children. So yes, there’s a whole series of components. The screening tool is just one of them.

Janet Lansbury: I want to take one of those classes. Maybe with my grandchild someday.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Listen Janet, when we get to the next level, you would be an honored guest.

Janet Lansbury: Wow, thank you. Good luck with all of this. I feel like you’re on your way to helping even more parents than you’ve already helped and more babies. A whole generation.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Thank you so much.

Janet Lansbury: Thank you.

You can learn more about Angela’s work and resources at: FIOTbabiesconsulting.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.

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 e-book at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or barnesandnoble.com and in audio at audible.com. And you can even 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. We can do this.

The post Mental Health Starts in Infancy (with Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “When Our Child Won’t Accept Boundaries”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be replying to a parent who feels like she needs a drastic change in her parenting approach because she has a two-year-old who resists all her attempts to set limits. And she says she’s suffering as a result and she doesn’t know what to do. Honestly, I relate so much to this issue and I hope my response is helpful.

Okay, here’s the email I received:

Hi, Janet-

I have a question. I feel like I am missing a step or steps. I’ve hit rock bottom. I’ve realized that I’ve been forgetting myself and suffered because I don’t have boundaries. I’ve always been the one helping, supporting everyone else to the detriment of myself. And now my two-year-old is making it very clear that I need a drastic change if I want our relationship to be a two-way street. I’ve read your book, articles, etc., but I can’t find the answer to my question. I don’t get what I’m supposed to do once I’ve set the limit and acknowledged his feelings when he reacts. Then what?

For example, I had to work in the kitchen at the computer. I told him, “I’m going to work now. I will close the gate.” I have a gate that separates the kitchen and living room. He right away started to cry and mumble angrily. I told him, “I hear you. You want to play with me and you’re upset that I cannot play with you at this moment.” Then he continued for an hour, and still going while I’m typing this.

What I’m missing is, what am I supposed to do during all this time? Am I supposed to not pay attention and continue my work? Seems to me I’m ignoring him. Or should I here and there acknowledge that he’s upset? I have to do this work and can’t sit close to the gate and look at him in his eyes for the hour he’s been crying. Or, is that what I’m supposed to do? I’m very confused with what to do during the crying. I feel that this is one piece of the puzzle missing. Even the neighbor came to knock on the door because of the hour-long crying and screaming.

We have moved to another country and my hubby is gone for three weeks, so I need to get things done. Your time and answer are greatly appreciated.

Okay, so I’m glad that this parent prefaced all of this by admitting an issue that a lot of us have, which is that she has a very hard time with personal boundaries. She’s not in the practice of setting them for herself. It sounds like her son has come into her life to help teach her how to do this, as children do. I’ve had a similar experience with my oldest daughter, where I really needed to learn how to assert myself and to accept that I’m not going to make people happy all the time with what I need to do. That really has to be okay with me, even if it’s my child. Maybe especially if it’s my child, because our children are looking to us to be their leaders, to be in a relationship with us, between two people, where both of us have needs and wants and our child’s wants don’t always take precedence over our needs.

Now, it sounds like this parent is expecting that she’s going to be able to go from zero to 10 here, in a way. Because she says she has difficulty setting any boundaries and disappointing her child, and now she’s wanting to zoom to what is probably the hardest thing for any child, which is to accept that their parent is right there near them and sucked into something else. Which is what our computers do, right? They draw us in deeply. Well, that’s going to be a hard thing to pull off for any parent and child. It’s going to be difficult for children to have us there, but we’re so engaged in a computer, and for us to be able to concentrate when our child is distracted by our presence. So we’ll talk a little about addressing that situation, but first I want to go over a little bit about how to approach setting boundaries.

The first thing I would do is take a look at why she doesn’t like to set boundaries with people. Often in this, there’s some element of the way we were raised. But when it comes down to it, it’s usually because we just don’t feel comfortable when others are not pleased with us. We’re much more comfortable with having that constant validation that we’re making other people happy. And then that becomes more important than taking care of our own needs, our self-care, and doing the things that make us feel happy. The problem with that is that it does create resentments, and these resentments really are our responsibility. They’re on us. They’re the fault of the person that isn’t setting their boundaries and is allowing that other person to walk all over them, in some ways. And what resentment does is it makes us not like that person as much, be annoyed by them, and that’s going to interfere with our relationship.

We don’t want that to happen to us with our children, right? And that’s the place I had to get to, for myself, to really make this shift. To bravely meet the challenge of setting a boundary that my child isn’t going to agree with. It’s for our relationship. It’s to prevent this kind of poison of resentment that my child doesn’t deserve and that I don’t deserve to feel. And what it also comes down to is, what does it really mean to love someone? Does it mean that we try to keep them happy all the time, that we never have any kind of conflict with them? Or is it to care for that person with the understanding that life isn’t about being content every moment? It’s about feeling a whole wide range of emotions, including being able to be in conflict with other people sometimes in our needs and our wishes.

I had to come to the realization that loving my child meant not just doing the easier stuff for me, which is laughing, playing, and snuggling and kissing and hugging. It’s doing the harder stuff— saying no, being a confident guide for them, getting yelled at, worrying that, Oh, maybe I was damaging my child by allowing them to express those feelings and have those kind of feelings. Feeling like I needed to fix them somehow, and that maybe it wasn’t safe to have my child upset with me. Maybe something permanent was going to happen in our relationship, they weren’t going to like me anymore, or they would abandon me. Something. All of those fears, it will help us to look at them and make peace with them. See that this is our stuff. And that really our child deserves to have the healthiest outlook, and that resilience that children naturally build when sometimes they get exactly what they want in that moment, and other times they don’t. They always get what they need in the end, but they don’t always get what they want.

Now, I know there are some advisors that will say this is a message that a child isn’t ready to get until some later age. But in truth, it’s a lot harder for us and for our child to have to switch into a different mode that they’re not used to, rather than gradually beginning that way from the start. And that’s why my mentor Magda suggested that even with our infants, if they need us, but we’re right in the middle of pouring that cup of tea for ourselves, and we want that one sip before we can go to them with love, then we do that. And then we come back to our child, Ah, I heard you, and I’m sorry I couldn’t be there right when you wanted me. I’m here now. Not feeling guilty, not feeling that we’ve done something wrong or that our child is unsafe in any way. Instead seeing this positively, feeling positive about this interaction.

It’s not something we’re trying to make happen in any kind of unnatural way or training. We’re not trying to make our child upset, ever. But we understand that through these normal self-care routines that we have, in some cases that are individual to us, what we need, and taking care of the house and getting food prepared for our children and all of those things that we as leaders have to do in the house, we will be disappointing our child a lot of the time. We’ll need to be causing them to be unhappy with our decision. And this is a dynamic that’s much easier and healthier for parents and children if we can begin it as early as possible.

But still, we can also switch into this at any time. Switching gears, and our child will then switch gears along with us, with a little bit of transition time probably, and some strong feelings. Generally, in the way that we engage with our child, our children will adapt very easily. But for us, it’s harder. It’s harder for us to change the way we perceive our role and the way we perceive our child and their feelings, and to bravely change those patterns and that dynamic that’s gone on between us. That’s the hard part. Children will usually shift almost immediately, but we have to do it first.

So all of that said, the type of interaction that this parent’s having with her child, I do go over this in a written post that this parent may not have read. It’s called Separating (with Confidence) from Your Clinging Child. And it’s just a very brief back-and-forth message exchange that I had with a parent about this very thing. Her child was a little bit younger, I think he was only 14 months. And she wanted to do her housework and he would just follow her around and be crying, a really sad look on his face. And it just seemed like he could not let go of her. What I recommend in that post is perceiving this as a healthy interaction between us. Positive messages that we can give our child, that we hear their strong feelings and that we actually want to hear that from our child. We always want them to express those hard things with us. We want to know how they feel. It doesn’t necessarily change the choices that we make as the leader, as the person who’s mature and who knows that X, Y, and Z have to happen for our life to be able to go in a healthy direction. Children can’t know that. They need somebody who does, and that’s us.

But to be in this what I call “disagreement” with children, it’s very, very healthy. It’s necessary. It teaches them that it’s safe to be in disagreement, to be in conflict, and to have feelings about that, and life goes on. And in fact, even in those disagreements, children can sense that there’s a lot of love and connection happening. Connection— it’s not just this positive, happy thing that we have. It’s about being honest and being able to be in respectful conflict and to be able to hear that other person’s feelings around that, even if they’re unhappy feelings and they’re directed at us. Especially if they’re directed at us.

So what this parent’s asking in this note is, what is she supposed to do once she set the limit and acknowledged his feelings and then he reacts? Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we could set the limit and then we acknowledge our child’s feelings, You didn’t like that I did this, and then they get it and it’s over? That was that. Now everything’s fine. That would be so nice. But my sense has been that children unconsciously use these experiences as a channel for strong feelings that they have. It could be about all kinds of things going on in their life externally, internally, and they’re venting. It’s like they open up that spout of the tea kettle and out pours all the steam that’s inside them.

So it’s not that they’re just reacting to the fact that we said we can’t play with them right this minute, or that we can’t give attention to them right this minute, or that we have to go to the bathroom, or that we gave our child the red cup when they wanted the blue cup. It’s not about cups. It’s not about us leaving, when our child knows that we’ll come back, or that they need us next to them every single second. No one needs another person’s attention every moment. Children would like our attention every moment, and they want to explore that, where our boundary is, but that doesn’t mean that they need it. Yes, they do need undivided attention from us periodically, where we give them that message: I’m so happy to be with you in this moment, and there’s nothing else I would rather do. That kind of attention children do need. I think we all need it. But not all the time. What children do after we acknowledge their feelings or after we set those limits, they will release some feelings, they will vent, they’ll object. And in that objection, they’re releasing all kinds of other feelings.

And even if we don’t believe that, even if we think they’re just objecting so strongly to that one specific thing, children need us to see that as a strong objection. That’s how we can see another real, capable person there. Which is the way our child needs us to see them, as a capable person. Not a person that’s completely weak and has no life at all beyond us, but an actual three-dimensional person that is capable of feeling a whole range of emotions, that is capable of disappointment that they don’t get what they want every time, that’s capable of occupying themselves. So it’s not that this child isn’t capable, it’s just that he’s having a hard time letting go. And oftentimes that’s because we haven’t completely let go. We don’t have complete conviction in what we’re doing. Complete conviction means we have to let go of what the other person feels about that. And if this parent has struggled her whole life with boundaries, which a lot of us have, it’s very likely that she’s not going to have enough conviction to be able to make a choice like this, where she’s going to be working on the computer in her child’s view.

But what I would do in this or any situation is set the limit: This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to close the gate. I love that she said all that, and then she says “he right away started to cry and mumble angrily.” So I would immediately respond to that verbally, Ah, I hear you. You really don’t want me to go right now. I would try to avoid adding on anything else, like, It’s going to be okay, here’s some toys to play with. I would really try to allow that feeling to be heard all the way, without us trying to adjust it or soften it. You’re saying no to me doing this! I hear that. And then, especially at first, I would definitely not expect to be working for more than, I don’t know, around 15 minutes at a time when she’s first establishing boundaries.

In fact, I would probably practice this for much smaller periods and shorter activities. Like, I’m going to the bathroom. Then he still cries and mumbles angrily. Wow, sounds like you really don’t want me to go right now. I hear that. Then you go. You come back, and oftentimes children will yell at us even more than they did when we were leaving. It’s like they’re saying, Hey, I didn’t give you permission to go and do that! How dare you go away from me? It’s much stronger than it can appear. It’s not pathetic, My life just fell apart. And I think it’s really important to make that distinction for ourselves, to see it that way. It’s important for our child and it’s important for us. Because to be able to set those limits, we need to see our child as strong and able to handle that. And our child needs to be perceived as strong, so that they can feel more capable in their world handling these age-appropriate situations. So walk away, come back, and if you get blasted when you come back, Wow, you really weren’t okay with me leaving. That was not what you wanted. Just say something that’s connected, empathetic. If possible, being willing to see and meet our child’s feelings at their full force and not be intimidated by it in any way. We see it as this strong, positive exchange we’ve just had, both of us asserting ourselves.

So this parent said she told him, “I hear you. You want to play with me and you’re upset that I cannot play with you at this moment.” And that’s a fine thing to say, if she was saying it with real connection. And she says, “then he continued for an hour.” So I’m not sure how this went on for an hour, if she actually tried to keep working for an hour, but I wouldn’t do that. I think that’s an expectation that’s not very reasonable, and with a toddler, it’s probably not going to happen. I would try to plan those longer periods of work for when your child is asleep, taking a nap. As my mother always used to say to me when she would call me during my children’s naps, she’d say, Well, I’m going to be quick because I know this is prime time. And it was. It was prime time for me to get some things done, to rest, to catch up a little. And not feel like everything I did meant setting a boundary with someone. It’s hard.

I mean, we’re not going to be able to do it all day long and we’re not going to be able to do it for an hour. But for the whole time, my child was unhappy with me. If it was a whole 10 to 15 minutes that I was going to take to do a couple of emails or whatever I had to do, every minute or so I would just turn my head and say, Wow, I hear you. You’re still going. You’re still telling me off. And that’s all. Giving that message of, I hear you, I accept you. Even, I’m sorry that I’m not able to please you right now. That can be said from a place of strength. Having that conviction inside, that’s the most important thing. The words don’t matter. The actions don’t even matter, as much as how we feel inside about holding onto ourselves as the leader. Having those boundaries, feeling good about them, feeling good about ourselves doing this.

That’s the challenge for this parent and for a lot of us, and that’s what I would work on. Reframing love as being a whole person in relationship with another whole person, your child. You’re teaching your child that other people have boundaries and your loved ones aren’t at your beck and call every second and aren’t afraid of your feelings. You get to have them, even if someone thinks they’re unreasonable. You have a right. And that loved ones know that your feelings are the healthiest thing anytime, anywhere that you express them. And if it seems like a huge overreaction, then there’s a reason for that. There’s been a buildup, and this is a healthy release.

So this parent says, “what am I supposed to do during this time?” And that’s what I would do: every minute or so, acknowledge that it’s still going on, from a place of comfort in your decision. She says, “I cannot sit close to the gate and look at him in his eyes for the hour.” So no, we don’t have to look at him into his eyes the whole hour, just every few minutes. Or maybe you’re not making eye contact, but you’re still acknowledging, I hear you behind me over there. I hear you still yelling at me. With your subtext, And that’s okay with me. Doesn’t shake me, doesn’t rattle me. I still know I’m doing the right thing.

Oftentimes with parents that I work with, they’ll have certain boundaries that are really clear to them. Like this one parent who said she felt very clear about holding her child’s hand in the parking lot. That was a clear one for me too. So with this parent, every time we’d be discussing a different boundary that she needed to set, like she needed to go to the bathroom or she had to do a couple of minutes’ work, I would say, You have to have the same belief in this as you did in holding your child’s hand in the parking lot. I had another parent that I talked to recently who’s a nutritionist and to her, it’s very clear that she’s not going to give her child sweets and that she’s not going to give her child dessert. But she has difficulty with other kinds of boundaries. So I said, You have to have that same assurance with everything you do.

You’ll find when you step into this role, you’ll start to believe in it, and slowly but surely it becomes a part of you. Or you just decide you’re going to feel safe doing it, or you’re going to try to feel safe. You’ll see that it works. It empowers you, it empowers your child, it empowers your relationship. And it will become very clear to you that this is love. I hope that helps.

And please know that wherever you are on your parenting journey, with boundaries, especially, I created the No Bad Kids Course to empower you to take your parenting to the next level.

Also, please checkout some of my other podcasts at janetlansbury.com. website. They’re all indexed by subject and category so you should be able to find whatever topic you’re interested in. And remember I have books on audio at Audible.com, No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting. You can also get them in paperback at Amazon and an ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple.com.

Also I have an exclusive audio series, Sessions. There are five individual recordings of consultations I’ve had with parents where they agree to be recorded and we discuss all their parenting issues. We have a back and forth that for me is very helpful in exploring their topics and finding solutions. These are available by going to sessionsaudio.com and you can read a description of each episode and order them individually or get them all about three hours of audio for just under $20.

I believe in you. We can do this.

The post When Our Child Won’t Accept Boundaries appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Janet’s No Bad Kids Master Course is available at NoBadKidsCourse.com and JanetLansbury.com.

Her best-selling books No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline without Shame and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting are available in all formats at Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and free at Audible (https://adbl.co/2OBVztZ) with a trial subscription.

Transcript of “How to Help Kids Behave in Restaurants, Church, Storytime, Music Class, and More”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be addressing a topic that I receive a lot of questions about, which is, how do we help our children to be at their best, or at least not be disruptive, in situations like a restaurant, a library storytime, church, music class, or any other type of class? Parents often reach out to me concerned because their child wants to run around during the storytime or can’t be in church or sit in the restaurant. So I hope that what I share here today will help give you some clarity on what to expect and also how to help our child to meet these situations, and therefore help us to meet these situations, with as much success as possible.

1. Have Reasonable Expectations

Okay, so the first thing we want to do when our child is in one of these situations, setting ourselves up for success, is to have reasonable expectations. And that means to not expect that our child is necessarily going to be able to thrive in any of these situations. What will help guide us in our expectations is seeing through our child’s eyes, our individual child, what we know about them. But what we know about all children when they’re one, two, three, sometimes even four, five years old, is that it’s not developmentally appropriate for us to expect that a child will be able to sit in a restaurant, sit through a church ceremony, that they will want to sit when somebody’s reading them a book in storytime, or pay attention to a music teacher or some other kind of teacher.

What children are geared to do in these early years is be explorers, inner-directed explorers. And they explore with all their senses. Often that means movement, not sitting still. They’re gathering all of this information about their world, taking it all in. They’re learning so quickly. Self-directed means that they instinctively know what they want to learn next about that environment, that their interests will often be different than what we might put out there for them. And the more that we can trust that, the better that system will work for them. And the more confident they will feel and motivated they will be to keep learning. So it is something that we want to try to implement for them, that they get to direct their learning.

The situations I’m going to talk about today are all ones where there is an agenda that is more adult-centered. That we want them to sit for this period of time, that we want them to focus and pay attention to what the adults are doing, as in the case of these classes or storytime or church. So we’re kind of putting our child in, I don’t want to say an unnatural position, but it’s not what they’re organically geared toward. If we can come into these situations with the expectation that it very well may not work out for our child to be there, or be there in the way that we want them to at least, that’s the way to start in setting ourselves up for success. Because even though some of these classes are meant for children, like storytime, when children aren’t the one choosing that—and this can be true even with an older child, if they’re in a lesson that they are doing because we want them to, or they’ve got this idea that we feel that they should want to but they’re not genuinely interested in it themselves—then that also becomes a mismatch for them in their development as self-motivated learners and explorers.

The less that we expect our child should be fine in these situations, therefore, the less that we try to control. Especially if we’re frantically managing, putting a lid on behavior, trying to help our child conform to a situation, getting stressed about it, right? Because if we have that agenda, if we feel that responsibility on ourselves and, Oh, maybe other children are fine with this, why isn’t mine?, then yeah, we’re putting a lot of pressure on ourselves that will immediately get absorbed by our child. So the less that we expect our child will be fine, the better chance our child has to handle it well and surprise us. Why is that? Because we are feeling and being able to be that calm, safe, empathic leader for our child. We see them, we get them. Instead of having those “shoulds” about our child. Because even if our child can do this sometimes, they can’t always.

So that open perspective, knowing that I’m putting my child into a situation that is not going to be the best organic fit, because I want to be in this situation, right? That’s why we do it, because we want it or we think that this is what we should do for our child. But if we can let go of that, it will decide our outlook on the entire experience and how we react to our child’s behaviors. I know that sounds maybe really general, but I’m going to explain with more specifics, I promise.

So am I saying, though, that being a calm, safe, empathic leader, does this mean that we’re just chilled out and we let our child carry on as they wish and run around and maybe be disruptive? Absolutely not, in my opinion. Because our child is showing us that they need our help to be safe and appropriate and not a bother to others. Our child can’t be the one that’s in charge of that. It’s kind of leaving them high and dry, letting them be this person in the room that they don’t want to be, that will feel to them like they are failing. I mean, children are quite aware of people’s energy and their feelings around them. So if other people are annoyed and our child is not behaving as expected in that environment, then our child is taking that in as This is who I am with other people, maybe. At worst, I guess. Or, I can’t face these situations because I’m kind of failing here.

So that’s the first point I want to make. Have reasonable expectations. Don’t expect that children can conform to adult-agenda activities.

     2. Know Your Child

Second, know your child. Consider your child’s temperament, their readiness, what they’ve shown you. And sometimes they’re maybe ready one time, but this other time they couldn’t handle it because they were too tired, too hungry, we were stressed that day, we were rushed. All those things can make it less possible for them to approach a situation.

To give you an example, I have two daughters and a son, and the son is the youngest. My daughters both were, amazingly to me, the kind of children who, even as babies and toddlers, could sit in a restaurant longer than just while they were eating. And they were also both the type that, they’d be at a birthday party and they’d be sitting there finishing their cake while the other kids were up and running around. So they enjoyed the whole meal experience. Then we had our son and he’s a very active temperament, loves to move his body. Even as an infant, he wasn’t able to be in a family diner with us. He wasn’t able to hang out like that, you know? So we would get takeout instead when we could. But we learned this by trying it and then seeing, Uh-oh, this is not going to work out. And then we didn’t try it again for a long time. I mean, he could definitely sit while he ate, but not in a restaurant situation. It was harder for him. Therefore, we didn’t take him out to restaurants. We would get takeout, we would go sit outside somewhere. We would go places where he could just eat and then get up and jump and go around, because we weren’t going to let him do that in a restaurant and be maybe unsafe and disturb other people.

So, knowing our child. They will show us what they can handle and what they can’t.

      3. Prepare and Inform Your Child

The third point: we want to prepare and inform our children, so that they have the best chance of meeting the situation with more confidence and maybe even eagerness.

Telling your child about the story time at the library, We’re going to go there, this person is going to read a story and all the children are going to sit on the rug and listen to the story. This isn’t a time to get up and run around. If you feel like you have to do that, then we’ll leave and we’ll try again when you want to. Or, This is what happens at church. We’re going to go in, we’re going to sit down in this pew. And we’ll hear music, there’s people singing and we’re going to sing along with them. You can sing along with us. Then there’ll be a part where we say prayers. So whatever we know about the situation. You’ve heard me recommend this a lot—going to a doctor’s appointment, going to a new school, getting ready for a new baby in the family—to give our children all that information. Just what we know for sure. Or we could say, I think there might be this. So not trying to pump them up or get them excited about it.

Maybe even openly sharing some of the downsides, like, Sometimes it feels hard to sit while people are talking and if you want to sit on my lap, you can, if you want to sit next to me, you can. But we have to stay sitting. Or in the restaurant, We have to wait a little while to get our food and we’re going to bring some crayons for you. If you want to color, you can, or draw, while we’re waiting. Or we can talk to each other or we can look around at all the people. Giving that kind of information. That helps children, even in the dull parts, to know that, Oh, this is all part of the story that I heard was going to happen. And it’s very empowering for them. Young children tend to love the idea of knowing something. Because so much of their world is overwhelming and they don’t understand it. So giving them as much as we can to understand, it’s a great setup for success.

       4. Prepare Ourselves With a Plan

The fourth point: we want to prepare ourselves. And that goes with that expectation thing. Preparing ourselves, which means we’re going to have a plan B, hopefully, ideally. What if they can’t be there? What if they want to get up and run around? If I’m with my partner, maybe you can take them out for a little walk or we can take turns or maybe we get takeout. I’m talking about a restaurant now, obviously. But having an exit strategy in all kinds of situations, even a party or a place that we know they want to be. Because stuff happens, and we’ll feel less disappointed and thrown by these things if we’ve included all of them in our plan. All the possibilities.

So now the next five points I want to make are under the heading of once we’re there.

       5. Allow Your Child to Engage on Their Terms

Number five is allow children to engage on their terms, following their interests as much as possible. Oftentimes as parents we have these ideas, especially if we’re excited about sharing something with our child, like the storytime or the music class, we kind of have an image of what it’s going to be like. There’s nothing wrong with us for doing that, right? The fun of parenting is getting excited about things. But it can be just as fun to not have expectations and be really open to learning about who our child is in those moments.

For example, I was doing an in-home consultation for a few days with this family and they took their boy, who was not even one-and-a-half I don’t think, something like 15 months, to a music class. I’m not sure what it was called. And the mom asked me to come along, so I did. What I saw was similar to what I’d seen with my oldest daughter when I tried this with her. That very sweet, lovely adult was the one directing everything, of course. I mean that’s the way most of us think we should do a class like that. So she was deciding what they would do next, the next song, and what everyone would do, clap their hands, or the way that she wanted everyone to participate. One of the reasons the mother wanted me to come with her was because her boy wasn’t really participating in the past and she just wanted my input on why that might be. He was a newish walker. He was interested in chair legs and pulling himself up. And he was just interested in the whole environment, as children are, exploring. He was listening to the music. I mean, how could he not, right? And seemed to enjoy it sometimes. But he wasn’t sitting there and following her direction. And actually most of the children weren’t, but the moms were kind of helping them.

When I saw this, though, and I think I even said this to the mother beforehand, it made sense to me that, yes, he’s doing really age-appropriate learning and exploring. And really there was nothing wrong with that there because he wasn’t disrupting anything, he wasn’t doing anything unsafe. He was just doing his own thing in this classroom.

And there was a point where the teacher was having them all drum on these rhythm instruments, they had little drumsticks that they were supposed to be hitting the instruments with. And she was showing them the beat that she wanted them to do. And there was this one little boy, he started doing this really quick bum ba bum bum bum with the stick, just waving his hand furiously. And I was a little disappointed because I thought that the teacher could have maybe let him take the attention for a minute. Oh look what he’s doing. Wow, you’ve got your own beat there! And maybe, I’m going to try to follow what he’s doing. In other words, encouraging that contribution, that participation, that children have to an experience. For me it’s the main reason to be in these experiences, is to see what the children are bringing to it or what’s holding their interest in that experience, what they’re learning about. And fostering their self-confidence at the same time: You’re doing something valid. This is interesting. You’re going to take the floor for a minute, we’re watching you, we’re welcoming this. Instead, this teacher did what I think is normal and, again, very well-intentioned. She kept going with her way, her plan that she wanted this to go.

So what I’m saying, as parents, is to be open to that. Your child may be in church, they love that red hymnal and they want to be the one to hold the book open while we’re singing. Or maybe they love the little nook in the pew bench and they’re just enjoying that. They’re meeting the experiences on their terms. And that’s gold, that we often miss. And that ends up kind of discouraging children when what we want is to encourage them to be there as themselves, bringing in who they are, as long as it’s appropriate.

       6. Encourage Engagement, Not Distraction

So six, under once we’re there: take them outside if needed, but as much as possible encourage engagement rather than distraction from the experience. So have boundaries in this situation like taking them outside of the restaurant or outside of the church, removing them from those situations as needed. But otherwise, as much as possible, encouraging engagement rather than distraction from the whole experience. You know, bringing in your crayons to a restaurant or having them utilize the ones that are there, or maybe even bringing a little small toy in that they can use at the table safely. That allows them to still stay in the experience.

But when we do something that’s really common these days, and I do understand it, we take out our phone for our child or a little tablet or something while we’re at dinner. We do whatever it takes, right? But if this is a regular practice, what we’re teaching is that, You can’t handle this experience with us. And we’re also teaching that it’s okay to not pay attention to what’s going on in life right now. It’s okay to just totally be somewhere else. Probably for most of us, that’s not a message that we want our children to have. No judgment if you do. But it’s sort of the opposite of encouraging mindfulness and presence and values that a lot of us have.

Now, if this situation is a car for a long trip or especially an airplane, then yes, these are kind of static situations for a child. There’s not more happening, it’s sort of a lot of sameness. That’s when I might give them something that removes them a little more from the experience. But still I would do that as a last resort.

And this is also something to prepare for, going back to those first points I was making. You’re going to be in your car seat and we’ll be driving. It’ll be a long time. Would you like to hear music? Which music should we bring? What kind of object would you like to bring, or a book that you can look at, or a toy? If you want, you can always look out the window. There’s going to be sights passing by. What can we do to help you be comfortable in this situation? And of course if our child isn’t able to answer yet, then we’ll have those options. But still, I would prepare even your baby for what’s going to happen. And, You know, you may want to go to sleep because you will feel sleepy in the car probably. And we’ll be there in the front, but we won’t be able to sit with you until it’s time to stop. So all of that honesty, putting it out there. If you’re like me, you want to avoid the negatives, but that really doesn’t help our child. So to be brave and say all of the stuff, that’s a gift that we can give children. And ourselves, because it will probably go better.

        7. Give Your Child Autonomy by Inviting Their Participation

Okay, seven: consider and invite participation for that healthy sense of control and autonomy. Again, following your child’s interests.

Maybe in the library, they can still be there without running around, but they want to stand or they want to be the one to choose a book to bring and see if the librarian will read that book. And if not, you can read it to them after. My children, we were able to manage church for all of them, somehow. But you know, it was touch and go, and we used Sunday school, too. In those cases, maybe one of you, if there’s two of you, or just you, if you’re a single parent, you go to the Sunday school and you miss the service for a couple of Sundays, so that you can help your child get accustomed to those people. Because nobody wants to be left—especially when you can’t express yourself that well yet—with people that they don’t know, that don’t understand them, that are going to have a harder time knowing what they need. It’s uncomfortable, right? So give your child time to get used to a situation, it will pay off.

So yeah, we used Sunday school and also involving them in the experience of church services. And sometimes when they were quite young they were able to do it, and I was always amazed. I just remembered, because my mother-in-law brought it up recently, my son, he was four years old and he was an acolyte. He was carrying, in the procession, this huge candle. What my mother-in-law said the other day was, “I remember when I went to church with you all once and saw him doing that. And there was this girl walking right in front of him with long hair, and I thought, Oh gosh, he could set her hair on fire.” But you know, he was rising so much to that occasion, as children do when we give them ways to participate like that, real ways, that he took that job more seriously than anybody else there. He was so into that.

So if we give them that purpose, based on what they’re interested in, it can really help them settle and enjoy. Children want to feel autonomous. They want to be involved, not be bystanders. Allow them to express their autonomy and their capability.

Another thing to do in all these situations is, if you have more than one child, invite an older child to help with the younger one. Do you want to be the one to sit next to your brother and help him stay comfortable in the service or at the restaurant or in the storytime? That’s a very powerful way for an older child to participate and feel autonomous, feel that sense of control. That’s healthy.

         8. Let What They Do Be Enough

And then number eight: let what they can do be enough. If they’re like this boy in the music class, if they’re exploring around the room, not disturbing anyone, it’s perfectly appropriate for him to do that there. Let that be enough. See that as a success.

         9. Create Shared Rituals

And finally, number nine: create rituals together with your child around these experiences. So with what your child enjoys, or what you enjoy and decide to introduce them to, have those routines that you develop.

For us, for example, my oldest daughter, we went to this little Mexican cantina in our neighborhood, and we tried to go once a week when we could. Well they had an old-fashioned jukebox there. And we tried that one time and I let my daughter push the buttons, and I think she was barely one. But this became our thing. We enjoyed Here Comes The Sun, we enjoyed La Bamba, and all these great oldies that they had. It was so exciting for her to know we chose the song and it’s going to come on. And to be a part of that and enjoy that together. So that became our routine in that restaurant, and I love those memories. It was an amazing time with her.

We also had, there was this little sandwich shop that we used to go to. And we would sit outside on benches, and the pigeons would always be there trying to get your food, and have our sandwiches. And then they had a little playground, very small playground. She would play on the playground a little while and then we’d walk to a bathroom in this little shopping center. So we would do that. It was a ritual that we both looked forward to and that she felt, again, that on-top-of-it feeling of, Yes, I’m a part of this because I know everything that’s going to happen. Pretty much, I mean obviously she didn’t know what children were going to be at the playground or how many birds there would be that day. But those rituals frame our whole experience.

And then all of our children, in the local restaurant, it was the cantina and this other restaurant that was right next door to it that was a Japanese place where they would have rice and miso soup and it was the most inexpensive meal and they loved it. And then there was a little fish pond outside and either my husband or I would take them out to the fish pond while the other one got to stay in and finish their food. And then everybody would come back and maybe eat a little more.

So find those rituals that work for both of you. And, if they’re like my children and most children, they’ll never get old. We’ll only miss them when we all grow out of those experiences and look back with nostalgia.

I hope some of that helps. And, as always, these are my opinions based on my training and my extensive observations of all different kinds of children over the years in my work, and of course my own personal experiences with my children. So you don’t have to agree, these may not be right for you. I would love to hear if you can write to me or share somewhere in a comment or review some of your ideas or what’s worked for you in these situations. I would really love to hear it. So I guess this is the first time I’m saying I’d love some feedback.

Thank you so much. We can do this.

The post How to Help Kids Behave in Restaurants, Church, Storytime, Music Class, and More appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

No matter how we approach raising our children, there are times we’ll feel physically, mentally, or emotionally exhausted. Maybe all of the above. We’re only human, of course, but it may also be that we’re taking on more than we need to — depleting our energy with roles and tasks that are better left to our child. In this episode, Janet offers ideas for lightening our workload by recognizing and trusting our children’s intrinsic abilities. Janet’s job description reframe can help save our energy, nurture self-confidence, and at the same time foster a flourishing parent-child relationship.

Transcript of “Is Parenting Too Hard? You May Be Doing To Much”

The post Is Parenting Too Hard? You May Be Doing Too Much appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Our children’s impatience and low tolerance for frustration can… well, test our patience! In this week’s episode, Janet responds to a question from a listener about how to teach a toddler to be more patient. Janet considers what patience really means to a child, how it develops, and how our expectations as parents and caregivers may get in the way. Her recommendations (as is often the case) may be surprising and counterintuitive.

Transcript of “Teaching Our Kids Patience”

The post Teaching Our Kids Patience appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

A parent who’s always been her toddler’s playmate helps her child over the hump to flourish in independent play. Another parent learns to set boundaries, shift her perspective, and accept her child’s meltdowns. Janet shares a special milestone and much more in this latest episode of Unruffled.

Transcript of “Independent Play, Meltdowns, Boundaries — Success Stories from My Inbox”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury, welcome to Unruffled. Today, I’m going to be sharing some very revealing stories that I received from parents. These are success stories. I find them also to be instructive and I think you will too. They demonstrate how respectful care really does work. I’ll also be sharing an announcement about a special milestone.

I am blessed to receive so much wonderful correspondence. And of course, I especially love the stories parents share with me about how they’re using this approach I teach, how it’s helping them, and how they’ve faced the challenges that we’re getting in their way. So I’ve curated a few here that I want to share with you today.

Here’s the first one. It’s about encouraging independent play:

I just wanted to say, thanks for all your help and support. I have two children, a boy who is four and a girl who is one. I first became aware of you when my son was around two-and-a-half. I have really appreciated your insight around self-directed play. I must confess I played with my son around the clock, taught him rather than let him work things out for himself, and prompted him with play. I thought I was doing the right thing and nurturing him.

He’s fiercely intelligent. He’s also very cautious. I’ve been really honest with him recently that I love him dearly, but that I don’t feel like playing or that I have things I need to do. We had a few months of upset around this, him becoming angry and saying he can’t play on his own. We’ve validated this. We treated his responses with kindness but remained calm and boundaries when we are not able or don’t want to play.

He’s now loving the independent play. I’ve seen such development these past few weeks, he’s had a hair salon, a shop, and he’s been using the sofa cushion as rocks and rescuing things. It’s a delight to listen to him talk in his made-up world. It’s also a great relief, understandably. Playing all the time was becoming tedious for me. And this was feeding into feelings of guilt. He played independently for hours yesterday.

So what did this parent do? She did the hard thing that really is what gets in the way with so many parents that I’ve worked with. They don’t want to say no to play. And there are all kinds of guilt-inducing quotes around out there on social media about how we should always say yes to playing with a child and how they need this time with us. So it’s hard to be honest.

The truth is that’s not our job to entertain our children. And our play does tend to, without us even realizing it, take over theirs, because we’re very powerful in this relationship. It’s not an even dynamic in terms of power. So with our best intentions, we can interfere with play both by the way that we naturally play with our child and kind of end up directing the play and also by not being comfortable freeing our child. And freeing our child often comes with boundaries. It feels mean, right? So getting over that hump to how positive it is, how freeing it is for a child to develop all these incredible things in their self-directed play, how therapeutic this is for them, how educational it is, how creative. We could never devise a curriculum for our children with play that would be as constructive for them as the one that they create for themselves.

I love that this parent took the plunge and allowed for those weeks of the feelings that her child shared, which could not have been comfortable for her. So kudos!

Okay, here’s another note I received about setting boundaries and allowing for a child’s feelings in response:

My wife and I have a foster daughter who is four, almost five. She’s been part of our family for just over a year.

I’ve been in childcare for quite some time and expected to be a bit more prepared for parenting. While there are certainly helpful things I’ve pulled from nannying and preschool work. I was nowhere as prepared as I thought I was to be a mom. She has quite a bit of trauma. The meltdowns are frequent and long. She has a hard time with boundaries. And while I can hold boundaries with my nanny kids, it’s been much harder to hold them with my daughter. I break at the first sign of her crying or being upset, particularly because of her trauma history. And I was giving in far too easily. Even when I knew better.

I started listening to Unruffled on the recommendation of a good and trusted friend. I wanted a better way of parenting, especially for her. I wanted to give her respect, love, and safety. I started with an episode surrounding “no,” and went back to start listening to them all.

All of my perspectives started shifting almost immediately. I could see she was venting her emotions and the trust that indicated.

I could see I wasn’t helping any of us by not holding boundaries. I started seeing where she was struggling and that it wasn’t “coddling” her to stop and help when it was too hard for her. That in and of itself was huge for us.

As the way I saw her behavior shifted, I saw everything actually getting easier.

Her meltdowns had receded for quite some time but recently resurfaced due to some big changes and some triggers. We were at a loss for what to do until I remembered that these were her venting her emotions.

So one night I held a boundary I wasn’t sure I could hold, but I could see her pushing it and I knew she needed the meltdown. I knew she was asking me to give her what she needed. So I held it and the meltdown started. I took her gently to her room where I knew she’d be safe if I had to step out and sat with her. I didn’t say much, just took breaths and sat, occasionally telling her that I heard her and I was here for her.

The meltdown ended so much sooner than any previous ones. And that’s continued to hold true, even when I’m not sure I should hold a boundary I do, gently and respectfully. My wife and I sit with her while she vents, giving space for her to have that and trying our hardest to sit in acceptance.

I used to get so frustrated when she’d have these big screaming meltdowns. And now I recognize that she’s just done venting and it’s okay to let her move on and be done.

I used to wanna rush her through meltdowns and just calm her down. Now I can see when it’s just too hard for her and I help her move through it. I don’t get frustrated and annoyed when she won’t listen. It’s easier for me to see that she just can’t. I pay more attention to her early cues and see where it’s going to be too hard. I walk her through things more. “Ah, this is too much for you tonight. I’m going to help you with brushing your teeth and putting on your pajamas,” et cetera. Instead of thinking, well, she knows how to do it herself. I see where she’s asking for connection instead of just seeking a negative “attention seeking” behavior.

Wow. So yeah, this parent is stepping up to hold the boundaries, realizing that letting her daughter release feelings with her is really the deepest and most bonding kind of connection that there is. We’re saying: I accept you as you are — your bright and your dark sides — and I help you when you can’t at that moment do it yourself for whatever reason. No questions asked.

It’s not that she won’t listen. It’s that she just can’t in that moment. Once we start seeing that way, we don’t go back. We’re uncovering another layer, and life with a child can be a little bit easier.

I also thought it was interesting and understandable that she said when she was a nanny it was a lot easier. Yes. It’s almost always easier for a nanny or a teacher to set those boundaries with children. Why? Because they don’t resist in the same way. They don’t have the same trust level where they’re going to push harder and share those feelings and maybe have those meltdowns. They’re not nearly as likely to do that with someone who they have a more professional relationship with and who’s not their parent or their primary caregiver.

And when a child does have trauma or any uncomfortable feelings inside, there’s going to be even more of that pushing to get the limits so that they can vent their feelings. So that’s where we can see the limit-pushing and the meltdowns as a high compliment that we’re trusted. We are their person. We’re the close ones to them. And with that understanding, the whole picture becomes clearer and easier. We’re still going to maybe get triggered by certain behaviors or certain feelings our child shares, but we have a place to go back to — a perception that this is all right, this is how it’s supposed to be. This is actually a positive thing that my child is pushing and pushing. And that I have to say no, and be the quote “bad guy” and allow them to get mad at me or frustrated in response or sad.

So, well done to this parent.

Okay. Here’s one that’s a little bit lighter and it’s about modeling respectful boundaries and the power of our modeling. This one came to me on Instagram in a message:

My husband and I listened to your podcast and really appreciate all of your work. So first and foremost, thank you. We had a laugh this morning when I was detangling my three year old daughter’s curls. And she very calmly looked at me and said, mama, I can’t let you do this. It is not safe. She then proceeded to show me safe ways to touch her hair.

So there you go. They’re listening. They’re watching and we’re teaching all the time just through caring for our children. It’s an organic process.

And they’ll show us the things that we’re not proud of that we do as well. That’s okay. Maybe that’s hard to take, but if we can see that as the kind of mutual training that’s going on there — they have this ability to reflect back to us where we need to grow and the things that we’re doing well that we can be proud of.

Okay, now I have a little milestone to announce. Unruffled has been going on for seven years. Seven years. Wow. It’s unreal to me. The time sort of flew by. I still have a million ideas for things I want to share about, and then I get new ideas from parents’ notes and messages every day. So I appreciate that.

And I want to take this opportunity to say, thank you for listening. Some of you’ve been listening for a long time. It’s an honor, and really a joy to be able to share with you this way.

Unruffled started on a whim. I was wondering at one point if audio might be easier than writing to answer readers questions and especially to demonstrate perspective and tone, which I found much more challenging to do with written words. And it matters a lot. Much more important than what we say is what we’re feeling when we say it — therefore, our tone, our manner, our attitude. That’s a little easier for me to convey through audio. So I thought, Hmm, all right, I’ll give this a shot. And then my husband, Mike, he agreed to try doing the engineering. And the editing was all new for him.

We were both really quite stunned that Unruffled caught on the way it has. And that I’ve had this added privilege of getting to have fascinating conversations with many, many eloquent, brilliant guests. So thank you to all of them as well!

I thought I should share, in honor of the seven years, the seven most listened to, most downloaded podcast episodes. And in the transcript of this podcast, I’ll be linking to all of these:

#1) “Finding Our Best Response to Children’s Turbulent Emotions.”

In that podcast, I respond to issues shared with me by four different parents. One writes that her two year old rejects her comfort when he has a meltdown, she says, “It breaks my heart. And I feel like I must be doing something wrong.”

Another writes that their seven-year-old says he doesn’t feel loved. Another email describes how a three-year-old’s tantrums last all afternoon and into the evening disrupting the rest of this family’s routine, and they all feel trapped by their three-year-old. And another one is a therapist who observes that their child holds in emotions in front of their family and peers.

I noticed that there was a common thread in all of these family situations, and I offer some specifics for how my overall recommendation to trust feelings and let them be applies in each of these cases.

#2) “A Holistic Approach to Baby and Toddler Sleep (with Grace Koinange).“

So, an incredible guest, a hot button topic. This was controversial as everything on sleep tends to be. What I found really interesting though maybe not that surprising is that Grace got hundreds of people reaching out to her for help. What that tells me is something I already knew, which is that there’s so much shame and judgment around this topic for parents, with their peers, with people online, even with experts who maybe have extreme one-sided views. These parents need help and they’re afraid to openly say that in a comment online. But what did they do? They reached out to Grace because what she said resonated with them and was hopeful for them that maybe some of the issues they’re having could be resolved and they didn’t just have to wait it out. There were changes that they could respectfully make.

#3) “Parental Burnout and a Reasonable Approach to Screens (with Dr. Meghan Owenz).”

You might be interested in Dr. Owenz’s book, it’s called: Spoiled Right: Delaying Screens and Giving Children What They Really Need. And in the podcast, Meghan offers some of the latest research on the effects of screens on young children, along with this whole host of practical alternatives. And we acknowledge that the many months of homeschooling and severely limited socializing and close quarters of the pandemic and exhausted parents have understandably caused most of us to rely more on screens to get those break times that we need just to survive. This podcast answers the question that many weary parents ask, which is how to manage all of this and what can they do instead of using screens.

#4) “How to Stop Feeling Frustrated by Your Child’s Behavior — A Family Success Story.”

This was wonderful. A family wrote to me a story where they shared their step by step process in dealing with their child’s very annoying, frustrating behavior. And as is often the case, it was their perceptions of the behavior which then dictated their attitude towards it that was getting in their way. So when they realized that and they shifted it, it not only made all the difference in ending this behavior, but brought them closer together as a family.

#5) “When Your Child Keeps Ignoring Boundaries and Breaking Rules, Try This.”

In that podcast there were three different families who had very different issues, but there was one common element that was missing. It’s a common one for us all to miss, actually. And similar to that #1 podcast on responding to turbulent emotions, I was able to offer specifics for how the families can apply this missing element to each of their situations.

#6) “It Will Get Easier — The Intense Struggles of a Parent with Childhood Trauma.”

This podcast is with Alwynn Hynes. She is a parent who actually wrote to me about how much she’s struggling to use a respectful approach to caring for her children with her own history of intense trauma. She is an amazing, courageous person. She has a very supportive Facebook group that she started after this podcast called: “Let Me Be Free: The Wounded Inner Child.” I’m a member of it, and I highly recommend her group. And she’s also coaching parents to help them with the struggles that she has faced and is facing.

#7) “Can We Be Angry or Sad and Still Unruffled?”

I hope you can guess that the answer to that is yes. A parent had written to me asking:

“I’m hoping you can clarify something for me that I’m struggling to understand. I know as parents, we should appear unruffled and be the calm, confident leaders for our children. As you’ve stated many times, I understand that this leads to them feeling stable and secure. I’ve also understood that it’s beneficial to let children see when we’re dealing with strong emotions rather than to try to hide them and pretend that we’re okay — that it’s helpful to know when we’re sad, disappointed, or frustrated, for example, as a way to model that everyone has these feelings, and to show how we handle them. What I’m confused about is what to do when those emotions are caused by our children.”

So that’s the question that I speak to in this seventh most popular podcast.

Those were the most popular of all.

Again, thank you so much for supporting this podcast. And I want to finish this episode with one more success story, which is about helping a child feel seen beyond the words that they say, beyond the way that they’re acting. Seen to what they really need and to feel that message: I see you, your words and actions don’t frighten me. I don’t take them personally. I don’t take them as facts or reasonable statements.

This parent says:

I just wanted to share a little proud moment. My son is three years old and I’ve been following you since he was about 18 months. We’ve had our fair share of challenges and always you give me peace and confidence with a respectful approach. Most recently, I spent a few hours away from my son, which is not significantly unusual, especially when his dad is in charge.

I did what I usually do and told him what to expect: Dad would give him lunch and pop him down for his nap. He happily accepted and was a charmer the whole time I was out.

I arrived back just in time for him to wake up and went in to rouse him. He was slightly grumbly, but that’s not out of the ordinary.

Slowly, slowly. He got more and more upset, telling me to go away, all the while trying to hit me. I did not go away as requested. I stayed and prevented the hitting, allowing him to express himself despite my husband saying, “Maybe you should leave him.”

As he let it all out, he slowly became more and more cuddly. After some time he went and took a book, sat on my lap and said, “Mum, Mum, you came back.” It was so beautiful.

Thank you to all these parents for sharing your stories and allowing me to share them on my podcast.

We 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 an 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.

The post Independent Play, Meltdowns, Boundaries — Success Stories from My Inbox appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Validating Feelings Isn’t Working”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Well, today I’m going to be talking about this idea of validating, or I actually prefer the term “acknowledging” a child’s feelings, and some of the benefits of that. And mostly also I want to focus on the common challenges because I hear from many parents that this isn’t working for them. And so I would like to try to speak to that and talk about some of the common reasons that this practice isn’t as successful as we might want it to be.

Okay. So first, I just want to mention why I prefer the term “acknowledge” to “validate.” Validating feelings, that’s of course something that’s helpful to do with children, but we’re not going to really be able to get to that point a lot of the time. So it’s asking a lot of us, I think, to validate feelings that maybe seem totally unreasonable and not very valid to us in the moment. Like when our child is saying, “I don’t want you to put those peas right next to my mashed potatoes!” or something like that. It will often not make sense to us when children have the reactions that they do, especially when they have behaviors that go along with those reactions like lashing out, hitting or hurting, or other things that are really hard for us as a parent to be able to validate.

So dialing it all the way back, as my mentor Magda Gerber did, to this word “acknowledge” can make this more doable for us. I’m just acknowledging that you feel a certain way about something or that you’re upset about a certain thing, but I’m not necessarily jumping all the way to how valid you are for feeling that way.

And from there, I want to talk a little about why I even share this practice — why it matters. I think a lot of times as parents, we can feel like: Oh, someone’s telling me that I have to do this to be a good parent. Or even: If I do this thing, I’m going to be a better parent. And I would say neither one of those are reasons why I share this practice. I share it for one reason: it will make our lives easier as parents. It will make challenging behavior less frequent. It will help our child to thrive and feel calmer. And therefore, we’re going to enjoy them more, we’re going to like them more. So it’s for very practical reasons, not some ideal that we have to live up to. Please take any pressure off of yourselves to do this because somebody’s telling you that you need to do it. This is only a helpful tool to make your lives easier.

The number one thing to know about this practice as with just about everything that we do as parents or professionals with children: it’s our intention that matters. Our intention is what children are sensing. It’s not about the words.

So are we doing this acknowledging thing because we feel we should? Are we doing it because maybe if I say this, it will make my child stop doing the behavior? Understandable to want it for that reason, right? But it won’t really work that way. At least not in a sustainable way.

Are we following a script? I like to offer some scripts because I find them useful or I hope they’re useful to help illustrate a perspective. But scripts are not what I’m teaching and I think they can do us a disservice. They’re so prevalent now on Instagram and places like that where if you just say these things, then your child’s going to feel better, you’re going to end the behavior. I think that’s a setup for a defeatist feeling for parents because it doesn’t work that way. It’s not unfortunately quite that easy.

It’s ultimately a lot easier, instead of trying to think up scripts, to start speaking naturally and organically in our own voice out of this perspective that we’re practicing. So everything that I’m trying to teach is about our perceptions of our children, their behavior, and perceptions of our role as parents or caregivers, or teachers. It’s about what we’re seeing because our perceptions of any situation will then dictate how we feel about it. That’s the only way to change our feelings: to practice seeing differently. And the way we feel about it, of course, affects our tone, and our actions.

I guess we can fake things, but it is not going to work the way we want it to. Because just as with all human beings, it’s those nuances, it’s those subtexts that children are hearing and reacting to.

So we genuinely want to have our goal with acknowledging as not to shut the feelings down, although acknowledging does sometimes help children to pass through the feelings and the behavior. But rather, to welcome them to be vented all the way. And to give our child these really important messages that will ease their challenging behavior. Maybe not in that moment, but eventually there will be less of it because we’re giving children these messages: I accept you, even though I’m not going to accept the way that you’re acting on those feelings. But I accept that you want to do those things like lash out at me. And I’m here to help you stop those behaviors. But I’m not judging you as bad for feeling as you do.

Because as we all know, and I think I’ve said a lot here, we can’t change our feelings. Our feeling’s just are. We can work on shifting our perception and our perspective so that we actually do feel differently, but in the moment we can’t change any feelings that we have. Neither can our child. The difference between us and our children is that we have a much more mature level of self-regulation abilities. So we still feel the feelings, we still might feel the anger or the frustration, but we can control the way that we express those things and the way that we act on them.

Well, children have a very minimal and uneven ability to control their behaviors. That’s what they need help with. And what also helps is for them to feel: It’s okay that I feel this way. It’s okay that this feeling that I don’t control is washing over me. It’s just not okay for me to hurt somebody because of that.

So when we acknowledge, we want to try to keep it specific, only what we know for sure, which is: “You didn’t want those peas next to that mashed potato.” We don’t want to decide emotions. So if we do bring up an emotion like about the peas and the potatoes, we could say, “Oh, that’s disappointing,” but not, “You’re disappointed.” So there’s a difference there. Or we could say it as a question, “Are you really disappointed that that happened?”

I think we can all relate to someone telling us how we’re feeling. We’re going to push back on that. We’re not going to feel understood. We’re going to feel maybe angrier at that person for trying to tell us how we feel. Children are no different in that way.

Another thing is that we want to be careful about talking during a tantrum because children go off into their own little world when they’re in the middle of these, they can’t really hear what we’re saying. There are studies even that measure tantrums that show when we talk during a tantrum that can actually escalate a child’s stress response. So we want to be careful about that.

As you get more comfortable with tantrums and with acknowledging and with really allowing feelings to be, encouraging feelings to be, then if there’s a gap in what a child is expressing, you may be able to acknowledge what happened as a part of helping them to feel safe, empathizing if possible, showing them that it’s really okay with us for them to feel what they feel — all messages that alleviate behavior. Practical messages to try to give our children.

Okay. So I have a couple of examples here from parents where we can talk about some of the common ways that we can get caught up and therefore acknowledging feelings isn’t working.

Here’s one of the most common ones: we’re not believing in what we’re saying.

Children sense that. So this is actually an example from one of the many articles that I discussed in another recent podcast where they’re complaining that gentle parenting isn’t working for them. This writer says:

“Lansbury and other gentle parenting experts advise sitting next to a child during a tantrum, narrating the feelings they are experiencing. ‘You feel mad because I won’t let you stay at the playground. You are really upset.’ The theory goes that a child who hears their emotions reflected back feels seen and understood, and ideally less ornery. When I tried it, the scripts came off as forced. My daughter just wailed louder.”

Okay. So a couple of things here. I wouldn’t narrate the feelings during a tantrum, or I would do it very, very sparingly. Although I would acknowledge after the fact: “You didn’t like that I wouldn’t let you stay at the playground. That was really upsetting for you.” I wouldn’t say, “You feel mad” because that’s telling a child how they feel. And I wouldn’t try to talk to a child in the eye of the storm because all they hear is that we’re talking to them and it can feel like we’re not accepting what’s happening with them. I think that’s why these studies show that their stress response can escalate.

Again, this is the problem with seeing advice that parenting advisors give as scripts and then focusing on those scripts instead of focusing on the perception that’s implied by that script. That’s the focus that’s going to actually help us to understand what we’re doing and for it to even start to feel natural, a little bit natural. It’s never going to feel totally natural for our child to be upset and for us to just allow that.

But this writer is accurate about the theory because yes when a child hears their experience reflected back, they feel seen and understood. And she says “ideally less ornery.” Well, yeah, they feel safer, and that calms them down. They don’t feel that friction coming from us or that lack of acceptance. Or that underneath what we’re saying with this script that we are really annoyed or we’re angry, or just, Ugh, disgusted, or over it with our child. All of those are normal feelings to have, but using a script with those kinds of subtexts is not going to have the effect that we want to have, which is to help calm that child.

Alternatively, if we genuinely acknowledge our child’s feelings or their struggles, or just their point of view, what we know for sure, that is the best way to help them move through and beyond those feelings. And that’s really all we can do to help them move through. The feelings have a beginning, middle, and end. The more we can encourage them to be shared, the sooner the end will come.

Another common reason that we can get caught up with acknowledging feelings in a manner that isn’t as helpful: we’re kind of washing over the situation rather than really connecting with the specifics.

So a parent shared an example of that. They said:

“My ultrasensitive seven-year-old will get more upset if I try to label her emotions. For example, if she said, ‘I want a cookie’ in a demanding tone, and I said, ‘It sounds like you are upset right now. I’m here with you.’ She’d start yelling, ‘I’m not upset! Stop saying that I’m upset! And it might tip her over into a full meltdown. How can we show these kids that we see and hear them during these sassy, demanding moments without aggravating the situation further?”

This is a great question. Let me think of an adult example of this. Let’s say that my partner threw away something that I wanted to keep and I found what they threw away in the trash and I was upset. I said, “Hey, don’t throw that away. You threw that away.” And they said, “Oh, you’re really upset about that.” That feels like they’re just trying to wash over what’s going on instead of saying, “Oh, you didn’t want me to throw that away.” So I can see why just saying a child is upset instead of saying, “You really want more cookies” is not going to be satisfying to that child. It’s not going to be a comfortable reaction for that child to receive.

So again, this is about just going to the facts and not trying to label an emotion.

This parent’s question, they say that when they told their child that she was upset, they said it might tip her over into a full meltdown. Well, tipping her over into a full meltdown maybe needs to happen there. I would trust that if that’s happening, that that’s actually what’s behind the cookie comment that it wasn’t so much about the cookie, but about this meltdown that was brewing. That’s hard I know, but I would trust that that needs to happen. But I would still speak only to specifics and not say too much, because as children get older, and this is another thing that can get in our way, sometimes we forget to evolve with them.

A parent was just talking to me about this the other day. She said, “Wow, someone came and talked to my child with all these words that I don’t use with them. And they really seem like they understood, but I still see my child as this little baby.”

We have these snapshots in our mind as parents, but our child is constantly evolving. We want to be able to evolve with them. And what that means in terms of acknowledging is that we want to say less and less as our children get older, because it also becomes kind of shorthand. We know certain things bother our child. We don’t have to spell it out to them. They already understand language. (Whereas a one or two-year-old is still developing language.) They don’t as much need those language models, which is by the way another benefit to acknowledging with younger children. We’re giving them the language to express themselves.

An older child might feel like we’re talking down to them if we’re still saying, “You didn’t like that I said it was time to leave the park.” We would say much less to an older child like, “Oh yeah, I know. You hate to leave sometimes.”

Something that reflects the intimacy that I have with that child. Again, that’s another benefit to not trying to follow a script because there won’t be a script for that. This is between us and our child, all these nuances that have happened in our dynamic, the shorthand we have with each other, and how well we know each other.

Another benefit to acknowledging in the manner that I’m suggesting here with specifics, saying only what we know, not saying too much, not deciding emotions, not trying to talk a child down through an emotional storm, another benefit is that we have a little moment to recenter. So we’re not trying to go all the way to validating our child’s feelings. We’re just reflecting back for our own clarity. “Ah, you want me to keep playing this game with you and I’m too tired.”

So I don’t have to empathize with my child’s point of view right there, but just by stating those facts, that gives me a moment. And maybe with that moment to kind of center myself, then I can.

We don’t want to expect too much of ourselves. And we only want to do this for the right reasons — to help ourselves. Not by anybody else’s standard, not by anyone else’s expectation, just because it actually does work. Not always magically in the moment, but overall it just brings us closer and closer and helps our child feel safer and safer in all the ups and downs that they’re going to have. Every child has them.

So please be good to yourselves. Baby steps. Just be, as my friend Mr. Chazz says, an “improvenist” instead of a perfectionist. And some days we’re not even going to be an improvenist, we’re just going to be blah, or we’re going to take two steps backward or 50 steps backward. Let yourselves be in a process because, with that kind of overall intention and expectation, 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 get them in ebook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or barnesandnoble.com, and in audio at audible.com. As a matter of fact, 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. We can do this.

The post Validating Feelings Isn’t Working appeared first on Janet Lansbury.