Parenting Beyond Power
How to Use Connection and Collaboration to Transform Your Family--and the World
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“I’m in love with this book! It illuminates the forces that make parenting so difficult, and helps us develop better relationships with our kids—and ourselves.”
—Hunter Clarke-Fields, MSAE, author of Raising Good Humans
Parenting is hard. But when we replace conventional parent-child power dynamics with collaboration, family life gets easier today—and we create a better world for all of us in the future.
When we see our children stalling, resisting, having tantrums, using mean words, and hitting, we want to just make it stop. But conventional discipline methods like time-outs, countdowns, and “consequences” teach children that it’s OK for more powerful people to control others—a lesson they take out into the world. This is how we learned White supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism from our parents—and we will replicate this with our children unless we make a different choice.
Research-based parenting educator Jen Lumanlan offers a simple yet revolutionary framework for rethinking our relationships with children. This new approach helps us to look beneath challenging behaviors to find and meet children’s needs, and ours too—perhaps for the first time in our lives. It involves empathetic listening, understanding feelings and underlying needs, and problem-solving with our children to find solutions to conflicts that work for everyone.
Family life becomes radically easier in the short term because behavior problems tend to melt away. In the long term, we’ll raise children who confidently advocate for themselves and treat others with profound respect.
Includes sample scripts, flowcharts, and resources to help parents learn and implement this new approach.
—"The compassionate guidance will be a boon to parents eager to move away from punitive child-rearing strategies."—Publisher's Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Your Parenting Mojo podcaster Lumanlan debuts with a mostly successful program on how to "move beyond traditional command-and-control parenting approaches like time-outs, punishments, and rewards." She suggests that rewards reduce children's intrinsic motivation to complete tasks and make it less likely they'll continue to do so once parents stop doling them out. Instead, she urges parents to identify and address the roots of children's undesirable behavior by talking with them about how they're feeling. Examples from families Lumanlan has corresponded with show the advice at work, as when she illustrates the importance of making children feel heard by describing how a mother curbed her four-year-old son's tantrums by telling him "she understood how hard it was" for him to have to share his mother's attention with his older sibling. Passages proposing connections between control-based parenting and white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism are a bit garbled (it's unclear, for example, why Lumanlan categorizes saying "I'm the parent; I know better than you" as white supremacist and "I'm in charge here" as patriarchal instead of vice versa), but the compassionate guidance will be a boon to parents eager to move away from punitive child-rearing strategies. This gives parents much to ponder.
