The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read: Notes
Introduction
This summary is fairly personal, mainly capturing the parts that were most interesting to me. IOW, it leaves out details from the book that don’t apply much to me, but which others may find interesting.
1. Your parenting legacy
Who we are as parents reflects how we were treated as children.
Something our child does triggers a strong reaction? Examine it. Often it’s an echo of the past (perhaps how our parents treated us). It is unfair to punish our children when they are not the source of our strong emotions, merely triggers.
We all make mistakes. It’s important in a relationship to mend the hurt. It is not the rupture that is so important, it is the repair that matters. Recognize the triggers in order to change your responses. You can use words an apologize.
Be vigilant about a negative inner voice. Avoid passing it to our children.
Avoid labels of “good” or “bad” both for yourself as for your children. Acknowledge that you’ll make mistakes. Be honest to yourself when you do.
2. Your child’s environment
Conflict is unanvoidable; what matters is arguing with respect and appreciation, acknowledging the differences and listening to the feelings.
An environment of love and trust —giving children a feeling of safety, security and belonging— is much more important than specific family structures.
Other parent is absent? Refer to them respectfully; appreciate the good, avoid emphasizing their faults. Children can internalize the criticism of their absent parent, see themselves as being “bad”. As they grow, they will likely feel pain; accept it and accompany them.
Having children changes many things. Find ways to be flexible and adapt. When changes cause resentment, admit it —even if just to yourself. Otherwise you risk acting out of resentment, rather than taking ownership.
Conflict? Learn how you and the other feel about the conflict, the goal should be understanding and compromise. Work one issue at a time (don’t save up your grouches and pour them out all at once).
- Acknowledge your feelings and consider the other person’s feelings.
- Define yourself and not the other. Use I-statements rather than you-statements. Focus on how the issue makes you feel, not attack or blaming.
- Don’t react, reflect.
- Embrace your vulnerability, rather than fearing it.
- Don’t assume the intent of the other.
To consider each other’s feelings requires goodwill. We replenish it by responding to bids for connection or attention, and finding solance in each other (rather than seeing them as adversaries). Key to successful partnership: be responsive and interested. Look for things to appreciate.
3. Feelings
It is vital to acknowledge, take seriously and validate your child’s feelings, so that they learn to have a healthy relationship with how they feel, the basis of good mental health.
When our parents take our feelings seriously and sooth us, we are liable to feel more optimistic about our feelings, which makes us less susceptible to depression or anxiety later. We learn to internalize that soothing and become able to do it ourselves.
Being comfortable with your own emotions is key to contain and accept your child’s.
Get in the habit of talking about emotions. Help your child build a language to understand them and express them. Encourage your children to express emotions and acknowledge them, including negative ones that you wish they didn’t have.
You will make mistakes. What matters is that you repair the damage. Apologize and change.
Acknowledge and validate their feelings, even when you disagree. Talk about how they feel. Don’t try to push the feeling away, try to feel with them. Don’t distract them away from inconvenient feelings —distraction is not sincere and is manipulative.
4. Laying a foundation
Your child needs you to believe in them so they can thrive. Start during pregnancy.
Two types of parents:
- Regulators. Adult-centric and routine-led. Infant must fit with them. Bring structure through routine.
- Facilitators. Child-centry, go with the flow of the infant. Always give the baby a predictable response.
Acknowledge your natural inclinations towards one or the other.
Plan the birth. Be prepared to have to make adjustments. After the birth, debrief.
Treat the babies as persons with agency right from the start. Talk to them even before they’re born.
We all have intrusive thoughts. It is important to be able of the talk about them. Otherwise they can become bigger and harder to manage. You need support from others in order to be at your best, to give good support to your children.
How people were related to as babies influences whether, as adults, they have easy, close and loving attachments, or needy, clingy, complicated ones; whether they find it hard to attach at all or kid themselves they are better off alone.
Four styles:
Secure. Babies whose needs for closeness and sustenance are consistently met. They grow up feeling that others are generally good.
Insecure/ambivalent. Needs are only inconsistently met. Won’t be able to take companionship for granted.
Avoidant. Often left to cry alone, you tend to give up. Later in life, you can’t allow ohters to get close to you.
Dismissive. Others abused you, even caused you physical harm. You’ll develop little or no empathy.
Babies in secure attachment style can be very clingy before they develop object permanence. That’s good.
Increased emotions make feelings seem to come from nowhere, but they are just an exaggeration of what you already feel.
Anticipate loneliness. It’s quite common right after birth.
5. Conditions for good mental health
The first years are crucial for our mental health. Important indicator for good mental health: strong parent-child bond.
Dialogue
Take their perspective seriously. It is just as valid as yours.
Dialogue with your babies. Have “conversations” with gestures and facial expressions. This develops into the give-and-take of dialogue. The dialogue develops spontaneously and adapts. Observe and learn their language.
Reciprocity: Let them have impact. Give space for the baby to respond, so that the flow is bidirectional. Breath in sync.
If, when your child wants attention, you often think of something that’s more urgent, —chores or work or making a call—, and use this as an excluse to yourself and to them to push them away. Stop! Instead of pushing them away, engage and include them in whatever task you have to do.
Regularly using your phone/computer in front of your child deprives them of contact and can be very damaging.
When you’re doing something to babies, explain what is going to happen, then take a pause for them to understand it, and then start, narrating what you’re doing. Involve them as much as possible.
Invest now, benefit later
The more positive energy you invest upfront, the less you’ll need to invest later. By listening and engaging with them you’re improving their default mood through life.
You can’t spoil a baby with too much sensitive responsiveness to their cues. Time invested in the beginning gets the child used to having their needs for connection met.
If they ask for you for their games, try to make yourself available; they often only need you at the start, which enables them to gradually shift to playing on their own.
Love bombing: one-to-one time when, for a day or a weekend, your child is in charge of what you both do and eat (as long as it’s safe and legal), and you express your heartfelt appreciation and love for them. Can be used to reverse a relationship focused on negative attention.
It’s a good sign if they have a stage of only wanting you or a co-parent: shows that they can form strong bonds, important for happiness.
Giving independence
Trust your child to separate at their pace, rather than imposing your own. We don’t encourage their independence by pushing them away. When they know you’re there and available, then they feel free to separate: they can take it for granted that you’ll be there when they want to reconnect.
Sleep
Never leave babies crying at night alone. Sleep training (let them cry it out for a few minutes, increasing durations) doesn’t eliminate their need for you; merely eliminates their crying out for you, teaches them to give up trying. Trying to get them to sleep alone as early as possible has the potential to harm our relationship with them and affect their capacity for happiness later in life. They need to learn to regulate their emotions by being soothed by a carer.
Sleep nudging: gently force them to be at the edge of their comfort zone, gradually expanding it. Allow them to return to a baseline of comfort, but work to actively move it in the desired direction.
Proximal development zone
Don’t disempower your child by doing something they could learn to do by themselves.
Keep them as much as possible in Vigotsky’s proximal development zone (though doesn’t mention the term).
Children need independent play. Playing with children of different ages is beneficial. Don’t interrupt a child who is concentrating.
6: Behaviour: All behaviour is communication
All behaviour is communication; behind all behaviour there are feelings. Seek to understand them.
Rather than “good” and “bad”, it’s better to label behavior as “convenient” and “inconvenient”. People, especially children, act out in inappropriate, inconvenient ways because they haven’t found alternative, more effective, more convenient ways of expressing their feelings and needs.
Focus on the present problems rather than your fantasy about what may happen in the future.
Important skills to be able to behave conveniently:
- Being able to tolerate frustration
- Flexibility
- Problem-solving
- Take other people’s perspectives
To stop inconvenient behaviour, it’s helpful to suggest concrete alternatives.
In terms of how strict to be, try to be collaborative. This works better than being strict/authoritarian (e.g., keeps the relationship strong, teaches the child important skills). Work with your child to solve a problem together:
- Frame the problem in terms of your feelings.
- Help the child understand and express their own feelings.
- Validate those feelings.
- Brainstorm solutions.
- Follow through, repeating steps if necessary.
During tantrums, dialogue with the child, don’t disengage. Don’t let the child go through extreme distress alone. Try to see the situation from their perspective and offer empathy (doesn’t necessarily mean giving in to whatever triggered the tantrum).
Parental lies can be very harmful. Children have a good intuition that something is amiss —you dull their instincts. (See 📚: Never let me go, Kazuo Ishiguro: Quotes: Sensed deeper significance.)
Children will lie. Especially as teenagers. Try not to make a big deal out of it.
Boundaries: It’s important to define them early. State them calmly and firmly, enforce them respectfully. Set them in ways that prevent you from reaching your limits (the points where you can’t handle your frustration). Define them in terms of I-statements, not you-statements. Be consistent, so that your child learns to take you seriously.
Some additional information about dealing with teenagers.