Listener Rachel also reached out with some questions, and due to my book tour schedule it took us a little longer to get a call on the calendar, but eventually - on a day in Seattle when I also had a coaching call and two two-hour workshops based on the book - we made it happen.

Rachel's questions go deeeep. She wanted to know:

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• If there are ideas I logically know are the right ones to follow but I still have trouble doing it;
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• How my parenting is evolving as Carys gets older (her own daughter is a year older than Carys);
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• Whether I think my view of parenting is possible within the social and political systems in which we currently live.
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Parenting Beyond Power

Do you want to change the way you parent and make a positive impact on your family and the world?

Parenting Beyond Power is your key to unlocking this transformative path.

Embrace a fresh parenting approach, nurturing collaborative and harmonious connections with your children, all while contributing to a more inclusive and equitable world for all.

So don't hesitate – start transforming your parenting journey today, and grab your copy of Parenting Beyond Power now to get started! Click the banner to learn more.

Taming Your Triggers

Do you often find yourself caught in the whirlwind of your child's challenging behavior?

Are you seeking ways to foster calm and connection in your parenting journey, even during the most trying moments?

Look no further—Taming Your Triggers will help.

If you:

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• Often feel triggered by your child’s difficult behavior…
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• Want to find out how to get your child to stop doing the thing that drives you up the wall
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• 
  
• Know you want to respond calmly to your child but can’t seem to do it in the moment…
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• 
  
• Want to parent with love and connection even on the most stressful days
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• Feel like gentle parenting techniques won’t ‘work’ with your child
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Then Taming Your Triggers is for you.

This workshop will empower you with the tools, insights, and support to navigate the ups and downs of parenting with confidence. It helps in all relationships - spouses and parents/in-laws too!

Join the waitlist to get notified when doors reopen.

Jump to Highlights

01:20  Introducing today’s guest and topic

03:51  Rachel asks how the content of Parenting Beyond Power differs from that of the podcast

07:19  Rachel appreciates the comprehensiveness of the book and asks if there will be another on the topic of Taming Your Triggers.

07:56  Jen recommends a related book and emphasizes the value of community support for deep inner work in changing reactions to triggers.

08:46  Rachel asks whether power is inherently bad, specifically in the context of parents having power. 

14:01  Jen warns against using parental power to control love and belonging through conditional rewards, leading to an unhealthy dynamic with children.

15:12  Rachel asks Jen about personal struggles applying podcast principles, questioning if difficulties persist despite knowing they're right.

19:32  Jen emphasizes recognizing resistance in both children and adults and discusses the trifecta of frustration, anger, and resentment as indicators of unmet needs for parents and children.

21:39  Jen discusses how she reconciles being research-based when acknowledging the biases in the research.

26:42  Rachel asks how Jen measures success.

28:18  They explore whether it's reasonable to ask parents, especially White parents, to challenge societal norms and emphasize the collective responsibility to confront and dismantle systems rooted in White supremacy.

32:28  The conversation mentions the overrepresentation of participants with one or two children, speculating on political leanings. Jen affirms her parenting approach's relevance for families with more children.

36:00  Jen talks about her hopes for readers and what she wants them to take away from the book.

39:33  Rachel acknowledges understanding the book's emphasis on building a better society through individual change. 

40:23  Wrapping up the discussion

Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? Me too. Hi, I'm not Jen. I'm Jessica. And I'm in rural East Panama. Jen has just created a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes, and I got to test it out. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it in context for you as well, so you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 Reasons your child isn't listening to you (And what to do about each one), sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe, and come over to our free Facebook group to continue the conversation about this episode. You can also thank Jen for this episode by donating to keep the podcast ad free by going to the page for this or any other episode on YourParentingMojo.com. If you'd like to start a conversation with someone about this episode, or know someone who would find it useful, please vote it to them. Over time, you're gonna get sick of hearing me read the center as well, so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script she's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com and click Read the Intro. I can't wait to hear yours.

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. And today I am here with special guest Rachel, who I haven't seen in a very long time. It's really good to see you, Rachel, you were in the Learning Membership from its inception, I think and then I do remember actually I think I confess this to you at the time feeling in what's the most precise way of describing it. Sort of bad but disappointed, I guess maybe in myself when you said that you were leaving. And then I kind of realized Rachel's graduating. Rachel's got what she needs out of working with me. And she is graduating graduating out into the world. And so it's really lovely to reconnect with you again after some some years. So welcome. And can you just share for those who are listening and who don't know you, just a little bit about you and your family where you are in the world? What kind of things are important to you?

Yeah, my name is Rachel Disney. I live in Juneau, Alaska. And I am a single mother of one daughter. She's 10 years old. And yeah, I was. I listened to Jen from almost the beginning of our podcast, I think I came in the middle of the first season or second season. And really got hooked and then joined the Parenting Membership. I didn't know you were disappointed when I left. I remember you telling me that you were glad I was graduated. But I didn't realize it was a disappointment.

Well, I think it was disappointing for me because you you were so active. And it was so much fun to support you on your journey. And so yeah, that was that was a disappointment for me. But then when I saw it from your perspective, I was like this is a good thing.

It was a good thing, and it wasn't that I no longer needed the information that you were giving. I felt I actually because it was during the whole pandemic too. Then after that I started actually focusing really on what was happening in my town when we were starting to come out of it. And so I think that was a large part of it as I stopped kind of being online, focused on what's happening here in the present, in my location. So.

Yeah, yeah. Awesome. And then you saw I was writing a book and was interested in chatting with people about questions they might have about the book, and you raised their hand and said you'd be interested in so here we are today. Then you have a bunch of questions for me that some of which I have known about and has tried to prepare for the rich and deep and juicy questions. And I think some you're going to spring on me at the last minute. So have you gotten we'll see how it goes.

Yeah, so I wanted to, well, my first question, which is maybe not quite so deep, but I think maybe it's been asked before is how is this different from the information on your podcast? This book, I read it, I loved it. It was a really nice reminder of everything, because sometimes just kind of get out of the mindset of what you're trying to be as a parent and who you're trying to be. And so coming back to this content after having been gone from it wasn't gone in in my life, but just being in community with it with other people, it was really nice to be reminded of it. And so how for people who are regularly listening to your podcast, how does this how is this different from that?

Yeah, I mean, even though I talk for an hour, every two weeks, it's still really difficult, I think to sort of convey the overall vision in a podcast episode. And I think I've tried to draw it together. You know, to some extent, it's sort of the schedule is dictated by things that are happening in the outside world and my interests and the interests of parents who write to me asking questions. And these get all interspersed with the topics that I'm really deeply exploring. And so imagine from an outside perspective that maybe it looks a bit scattered. and also, not everybody wants, you know, three episodes in a row on White Supremacy in parenting. I get plenty of messages a people saying that one episode on that topic is too much. And so I don't want to sort of spend a lot of time digging into these issues on the show.

But I think what the book does is it gives me an opportunity to really sort of connect the broad social issues that I've done episodes on, right, I've done episodes on white supremacy, and patriarchy, and various aspects of capitalism, consumerism, that kind of thing. And then I've done episodes on sort of the Problem Solving method, which is heavily grounded in Nonviolent Communication, and on different aspects of that, right how to see our child's resistance, and why giving choices doesn't work, and all those kinds of things. And the book is really the place where it all just kind of came together for that the vast majority of the things I talked about, came together in the book.

And I would say the one area that is probably missing is the the Taming of Triggers aspect. And the reason for that is that could be its own book. And I really wanted to include it all and there just wasn't space to do it in within the same book. And so we sort of made the conscious decision to acknowledge that feeling triggered is there and that that may impact your ability to use these ideas, and just sort of sidebar to it and said, "Yes, it is there. It's an issue." And for this book, we're going to focus most totally on your child's experience.

So yeah, so I've had a lot of parents reach out and say, ah, now I finally get it. See how it all fits together, right; how the social forces show up in my life, in my family of origin that I didn't see before. And now I can see, okay, this other path is a set of tools that I can not just say, Okay, I know, I don't want to parent like that, like I was raised, but I don't really know what else to do. This is like actually what to do, how to parent in alignment with your values. So I would say that that's the biggest difference.

I do like how it is all encompassing. And I appreciate that you mentioned the Taming Your Triggers. Does that mean that there might be another book coming around that topic?

Yeah, I mean, the best book that I know of on that topic is How To Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids by Carla Naumberg. And I was so impressed with it, I have to say, when I read it, I mean, it's basically what I teach in Taming Your Triggers in book form. And there are some parents who can read a book and can enact the ideas in the book. And so I think that How To Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids is a great place to start.

But I also work with many parents who are like, I've read all the books, and I still explode at my kids and I can't figure out what's going on. And that sometimes it's the processing of that information in community with others that is the thing that allows you to see oh, yeah, it wasn't until you said it that I realized I have that trigger too, or that yes, this shows up in my family. And I had absolutely no idea that it was there. I just couldn't see it before you said it. And so it's there's something about doing that really deep inner work with other people in a way which feels safe, because you know, you're never going to run into them in the grocery store because they're from all over the world that allows people to make process on understanding and sort of changing the way that they show up when they are feeling triggered in their relationship with their kids that is that seems to be a bit different from reading the book. But yeah, I would say that that book is a great place to start.

Parenitng isn't in a vacuum, which I really love because this definitely does break down how we parent in society and how society shapes our parenting. It's called Parenting Beyond Power and so the whole hierarchy of power in our society, we grew up with it. It's like the air that we breathe. Sometimes we don't even know that we're what we're doing, what we believe, until we talk it out and have those conversations. So since it's all about power, and hierarchy, is power, inherently a bad thing? Like is it bad that parents have the power?

Is power inherently a bad thing? I knew I knew you were gonna laugh that I would have to think that.

I struggle with this question too. Because I mean, when they're younger, we need to hold their hands to cross the street. Sometimes we need to make an executive decision. But at the same time, we can never know what's going on inside that little mind. Sometimes my daughter thinks now that she remembers from when she was four and I'm like lightbulb moment. If I had known that then I would have likely differently.

Yeah, yeah. And so maybe that is sort of the answer to the question is that we have been in the world longer, right. We have fully developed prefrontal cortex cortex is, by and large, we have the ability to understand information that our children don't necessarily fully understand. We know the risk of running out into the street better than a two year old does. And we do, I think, have a responsibility to keep our children safe. That said, our children are the experts on their experience. And very often, we use our power to override what they know about their experience. And I think that there are times when our child's safety is genuinely in danger. And it's sort of a justified use of power, right, kind of think of it as a benevolent use of power. Yes, I can see that I'm using my power over you. And also, I can see that you don't really appreciate that that car is coming towards us at 40 miles an hour. And if you step out, now, something bad is going to happen. So that I would say, consider sort of a benevolent use of power.

But I think it's really easy to fall into a pattern of well, toothbrushing also a benevolent use of power, right. My child eating their vegetables, also a benevolent use of power, because if you don't brush your teeth, they might fall out. If you don't eat your vegetables, you might not be healthy. And it's very easy for us to go down that road of one thing after another. Yeah, it's really about protecting them. It's really about their safety, when most of the time it's not. Most of the time, it's about our fear. It's about our, you know, I always think of control as sort of a fake need. It's not really a need. It's something that masks a fear that's underneath the fear of something bad, that's going to happen, that we want the best for our children. We want to keep them safe. And sometimes it seems as though using our power is the best path to making that happen.

But it also gets us into these power struggles with our children, and sets up a dynamic where it's hard to see things from their point of view. I've been doing a lot of workshops with parents over the last few weeks at preschools, and I did one recently, and we kind of help the parent to actually take on the perspective of the child. And just seeing her understand for the first time, my child has feelings. My child has needs too. And I hadn't even thought to consider it. I've only ever seen it from my perspective before. It's such a powerful shift and powerful shift. And when we can, right when when we're able to do what you did with this information, right? Could we now say, Okay, now that I can see that there is a way to understand what my child's needs are, instead of waiting the four year or, you know, six years, that you've waited to have this understanding, can I say, okay, yes, that happened. There is nothing I can do about it. I can treat myself with compassion, that I would like my child to treat herself, I'm not going to beat myself up for doing that thing. But I am going to take what I learned about that and apply it to our relationship now. When when I see that resistance from her that I saw in that four year old child who wasn't able to articulate it in a way that I could hear, can I now be willing to hear what really is her need underneath that resistance and move forward in a power with relationship rather than a power over relationship?

I really love that. And there was actually one part in the book I'm gonna read, it's on page 45, for anybody who has the book. And this really stood out to me about this power dynamic: "So if your child doesn't have anyone else, very often, the person who caused their upset in their mind is also the only person from whom they can find comfort." And that was a really poignant moment when reading this book of like, Oh, crap, yes, you're absolutely right. That it's this dynamic, it's all entangled. And they don't have anybody else to go to for comfort. Even if they're mad at you. They still want that comfort. And it's yeah, yeah, it's very interesting.

Yeah. And it's really easy for us to sort of use that power And not benevolent way And steamroll them into, well, I'll reward you with comfort with love and belonging, when you do that thing--if you do that thing. And if you don't do that thing, then I'm not going to, you know, love you in the way that you want to be loved. And yeah, that's how we get into using our power over.

And if we can see that we have other resources available to us, right? We have friends. We have partners, often not always. We have therapists. We have all kinds of other people that we can turn to. We have we know we can go out for a run. We can move in a way that feels good to our bodies. We can dance, right? We can see all these other resources that we have to support ourselves. And our children very often can't see that and the thing that they need more than anything is to to go over hit, a tennis ball over to us a they're saying, "Am I okay? Am I lovable?" And what they need is to get that tennis ball back saying, "Yes, I see. You, you are okay, you are lovable as you are." And that's what they really need from us. And that's what we needed from our parents and many very often didn't get when we were children, which is another reason why this feels really struggling.

So, I want to ask you, this is going to get a little bit personal. But what do, like, when you go through these, I've read, I've listened to all the podcast episodes. I agree with all of these relationships first, not giving rewards, not punishments, things like that. But sometimes we still struggle with them, even if logically we know that it's right. So what do you, what is your thing that you struggle with even though you know, logically, it's the right thing to do, but you just have a difficult time with it. Do you still have that?

Yeah, yeah. There are a couple of things that sort of head in that direction, right? One, one is screen time. And I really wish that Carys could moderate her own screen time. And we have tried to do unlimited screen time experiments to see you know, and we're gonna make it an extent, reasonably extended period, right a couple of weeks. And if we get to the end of the couple of weeks, and we can see that you are doing some time on screens, and you're really enjoying it, and you're doing some time off screens, and you're really enjoying it, then I don't want to be the person who moderates your screen time anymore and who manages how much you get. And each time we've tried it, we'd get to the end of the two weeks, and she's still, you know, still still on screens as much as you possibly can be. And it's so clear that this point, she isn't capable of being able to regulate that for herself. And so that sort of puts me in a position of, well, if she can't do this for herself, if there are industries that have spent billions of dollars making Minecraft more appetizing to children, not one that they want to keep playing, it is my job to step in, even though I would prefer it if I didn't have to. And so that that I think is one piece.

And linked to that is related to food, right, which I've talked about my struggles with that in the past on the show, I think we could try an unlimited sugar experiment, my hypothesis would be that it would go just the same as the unlimited screentime would be and maybe we'd be in the same place. I really do wish that I was less cognizant of that. And I think the path that I found to be sort of most middle groundish is to try not to demonize any food. And to support her in eating a serving of a food that she enjoys, like every day. So if she's already had chips, today, I'm going to ask her to eat something else. If she's already had an apple today, I'm going to ask her to eat something else. And so I'm not attaching this moral value to food. And whatever it is that she's already had, I'm going to suggest that she has something else.

And that's the best way that I have found to manage my cognitive dissonance between where I wish I was with food, and where I actually am with food. So I would say those are the two main sort of solid topics that I struggle with. And then the broader issue, of course, is always, you know, I write in the book about how we see we can see learn to see children's resistance as a signal of their unmet needs. And also I grew up in a power over family, right, and I exist in a power over culture. And there's still that really deep, embedded idea in me that resistance is not okay. And so I think that that's a tension that a lot of parents who follow respectful parenting hold, which is, I really believe in this way of interacting with children, I want to treat my child with respect. And I want them to have a whole full experience and to be seen and known and understood for who they really are. And I would have been punished for speaking to my parent in the way you just spoke to me. And so I'm constantly when there is that resistance constantly having to remind myself that that resistance is a good thing. It's a key, it's an indicator that I can use to understand her need, rather than it's something that I need to automatically push back against with the power that I hold as a bigger older person.

Do you ever get the feeling and I'm saying this because sometimes I get the feeling that I talked too much about our emotions, actually. And that there are some kids who, while they could need the help with that. It just is overkill maybe sometimes. And they just was like, yes, I get it. Now you can stop talking.

Think maybe that's true for some kids. We haven't experienced that. I mean, we talk about this stuff all the time. And I'm thinking of an example in the book that we're reading right now where oh, yeah, it was one character was saying and it's sort of related to feelings, n exactly feelings, but this character, their dad wanted them to be pretty and and not, like their older sister. But that wasn't what this character was was you know, really felt like and it and Carys likes to make the cat hissing noise when she doesn't like an idea. And that's her, you know, of course, she responded immediately with that. And so again, I sort of look for resistance. And if I wasn't seeing that resistance from her to like, just tell the flippin story, right, I wouldn't potentially go into it as much as I do. And there are some kids who don't want to hear it as much. And I think the balance is sort of respecting their desire to just hear the story to just have the conversation with and acknowledgement that we do have feelings. And that can be really helpful to us to understand more about them than maybe you and I understood when we were growing up.

It's all about looking for that resistance.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and in ourselves as well, right? We used to resist our parents by saying, whoa, by having a tantrum slash meltdown, what we're whatever way we choose, by hanging out with the wrong crowd in high school, because they actually saw us for who we really were, unlike our parents, you know. Whatever our way of resistance was, we tried to resist as well. And we were told that that's not okay. And you, you do not fully belong in this family until you stop doing that. And so we can now use our resistance, right, our feelings of the trifecta, I think, for us are frustration and anger and resentment. If we're noticing resistance in those forms, and us we know that we have unmet needs to. And so we can use that, just as we're looking at our child's resistance, you know, their meltdowns, they're saying 'no', they're stalling their resistance, whatever form it takes, we can use our own resistance to, to the situations to know oh, yeah, this isn't meeting my needs either.

So I've noticed a trend of so you start, it's not that you're not research-based, you are very much research-based and you still claim that as a core of your podcast and your information. But you started out heavily relying on a lot of the research and as you went through your podcast, you started breaking down that research and how it was actually done. And the biases, and finding the discrepancies and how do you reconcile being research-based with the research that's coming out of it, which we can agree with, but there's biases behind it?

Yeah, that's been a real learning journey for me, for sure, over the last few years, and I definitely came into this with a perspective of science is going to tell me how to raise my child because obviously, I have no idea how to do it myself. And I can't look to my parents for an example on this. So science is going to provide the answer. And, you know, I have said, from the early days that I've been critical of things like small sample sizes, and you know, if you're looking at five white kids, can you really say that this is what everybody is like? Probably not. And then it really is just the process of reading. I mean, it's over 10,000 studies at this point that I've read for the 190 plus episodes that we have, plus all of the membership content, of course, which which takes as much each each module is as much research as an episode.

And through just being immersed in it for so long starting to see that the researchers are swimming in the same toxic cultural soup that we all are. And they're all using the same sort of metrics for success, right? It's all I'm I'm doing an episode on or actually recorded today with another listener, remember, an episode on rewards and punishments in schools. And so all of the success metrics are things like you know, decrease in the number of referrals to the office, decrease in suspensions, decrease in expulsions, and you know, it brought more broadly in other studies is things like number of years of school, number of years of college, how much money is the person earning? How likely are they to be incarcerated or not incarcerated. And all of these metrics are guiding us towards seeing success as success in a White Supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist culture.

And so not being incarcerated is if the alternative to not be incarcerated as being incarcerated because you're almost like the canary in the coal mine saying, this system sucks. This system doesn't work for anybody, right? There's a beautiful book called Troublemakers by Dr. Carla Shalaby and she talks about how the, you know, the problematic kids in school are like that canary in the coal mine, who we're sending them down first, and we're saying is the air safe to breathe? And they're like, n, it isn't. And we're like, well, we're sending everybody down anyway. So suck it up. And if you can't suck it up, then we're gonna kick you out, right? You don't belong in school anymore. And so you can't get a job and so you're probably going to end up in jail because you don't have another way of making money.

So I think when we can see that their research is guiding us towards seeing success as success in our White Supremacist patriarchal culture, and if we think about that culture and we think you know what, that culture really hurt me? Do I want my child to be successful in that culture? Or do I want us to work toward changing a culture so that it actually sees every person's intrinsic value, and nurtures every person, rather than saying, you can only be "successful" if you fit within this box? And so that the research, I'm always going to look at it, I'm always going to try and understand it, I still think it's important to know what it says, always in the back of my mind, there's that idea of, and it measures success in this very precise way that isn't very well aligned with what I believe. And so I always have to sort of take it with a grain of salt, and make sure that I'm not blindly following the research. Because if I am, I'm blindly heading in the direction that I know doesn't fit with my values. And I get a lot of slack on that, right, I get bad podcast reviews on iTunes, from people saying, you know, this used to be research-based, and now it's full of all this feminist crap. And there's so much bias in it, I just want the research. I can make the decisions myself based on the research. And to me, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is, because science really is a researcher's values baked into the ways that we are looking at the subject. That bias is already there in the study, a I'm just trying to call attention to the fact that it's there. And to interpret that through a lens that I fully admit is biased. But at least I tell you what the bias is, rather than having this veneer of actually, this is the objective truth. And it's true for everybody, which the research, you know, tries to purport to do.

So how would you measure success? What are your markers?

Yes, I mean, I, my friend Brian Stout with whom we interviewed Dr. Carol Gilligan, for the episode on patriarchy, runs an organization called Building Belonging. And their idea which I mean, it's so resonates so much with me is we're building a world where everyone belongs. And if everyone belonged, everyone would be fulfilled, right? It's that simple. It's, you know, some, some people would maybe pursue careers that generate a lot of money if capitalism was still part of that system, which I argue it doesn't create a society where everyone belongs. But if we can't figure out how to, you know, fix capitalism, or move beyond capitalism, then yeah, some people may be in careers where they get paid a lot, and other people may be in careers where they don't. And that that's okay. And they're not shamed for being in a career where they're not getting paid a lot, because they feel fulfilled. They're doing work that feels really meaningful to them. And that everybody knows that I get to show up exactly as I am. And that that will be lovable and acceptable to the people around me. So I will know that my child will know that you will know that your child will know that. And instead of constantly judging people and putting them in boxes and saying, "You need to act like this, because you look in this way. You present in this way. You're part of this group." That we can actually see people for who they really are and you know, the constantly sending out the message, am I okay? And getting that message back, yes, you are. Okay, you are lovable, just as you are. That, to me is where I want to go? Are we going to get there in my lifetime? Carys's lifetime? Maybe not. But that's where I want to go?

Do you think that it's reasonable to ask parents who really want to do this to clap? Do you think it is reasonable to ask parents to do this when they're living in a society that could potentially harm them for going against the grain? For swimming against (unitelligible)?

Yeah, I think it's a fair question. And I think as a White person, I have more responsibility than a BIPOC person, right, because it is White supremacy that has created many of these systems. And I have benefited from them, even though until relatively recently, I didn't know that I had benefited from them, because that's part of White Supremacy is it hides the fact that White people benefit from it. And so I think that I do have a responsibility to take on some of that labor, so that BIPOC folks don't have to exist in a society that suppresses them, that tries to suppress them. Because it's Black women who hold the whole system together right now, you know, all of this stuff flows downhill. And, you know, we think about sort of professional women who are fun, but not always White, or in proximity to Whiteness, and the chains of care that they rely on, to have a place in the working world alongside the men, right, and the daycare, and the nannies and all the stuff that it takes to make that happen, and how we underpay undervalue and underpay those employees. And you know, nannies that come over and leave their own child in their country of origin, being cared for by a relative don't see them for years at a time so that they can take care of our child and send money home because of this capitalist system. And so I see it as Yes, it's additional work. It's additional responsibility. And yes, it sucks that this work is needed, right.

And also, I don't think we White women perceive the whole, you know, the the enormity of what other people carry. And I'm reminded of a conversation that I had with a BIPOC woman and she said, "I don't know that I can fully understand what it's like to be White. But I think I can understand it better than you can understand what it's like to be a person of color." And I said, "Yes, I think you're right." And she said, you know, the next thing is, "So I've been thinking, if I didn't have to worry about whether the car that's coming towards us, as we're in this, crossing the street is going to accelerate, because they see that I and my son are a person of color, what would I spend my time on?" That really sent me down a rabbit hole, right? I was thinking, what do we White women spend our time on? We find other things to worry about. And what if we could not worry about some of those things? Right, it was in conversation with with another White woman who said, "You know, this thing that I was terrified was going to happen didn't happen. And so my sister said to me, what am I going to do now? And I said, probably find something else to worry about." So what if we just try not to do that? How much energy and capacity with that free up to do some of this dismantling work? That's where I think we need to be playing.

Oh, interesting. Well I really you even mentioned in the beginning of the book, I think it's in the Introduction, you flat out say that this is not for people of color. This is a book for White people, I think I don't know the exact word.

Basically, the more privilege you have, the more this book is for you, right. And people of color may find ideas that are helpful in it, in understanding your needs and your child's needs. And also these systems mean that you may not fully be able to move towards your child's needs in the way that White people can, right. You may not be able to drop off your kid at preschool in pajamas and without child protective services being called because of the failure of White parents and White teachers to understand what you're doing that you're meeting your child's needs, that you're not being neglectful. And so yeah, so the more privilege you have, the more the ideas in the book are relevant to you. But also some of the early readers who identify as BIPOC say, you know, this is relevant to all of us, we all need these skills, we all find them helpful.

Okay so going in a little bit of a different direction of who this is relevant for, I have an only child. You have an only child, I noticed that a lot of people who have written the blurbs in the front of the book, they have one in two children, that I ended up now that I'm thinking about it back in the the workshop that I was a part of, as far as I know, most of those people only had one or two kids, there might have been some people with three or more. But have you observed that that most of the people that you have reading your contents, are a part of your content have only one or two children? And is this relevant for people with large families? How does that, how does that work?

Yeah. So I have noticed that there's an over representation of people with one child, and I'm not sure as to the reason why. I do wonder if it's partly a sort of tied to political ideas that in general, folks who lean Liberal tend to have smaller families. Folks who lean more right wing Republican tend to have larger families. Obviously, that's a massive generalization. And there are people in both camps who have different kinds of families. But my hypothesis is that that sort of generalizations/their stereotype is somewhat accurate. To some extent, those examples were selected because I wanted to demonstrate sort of a gender balance and a racial balance and a location balance. And it was hard to do all of those things, and also balanced the number of children, for families, so I did have more from folks who had more children that didn't make it in because because of the examples that were selected.

I do think that this is relevant to people who have more children. And frankly, I think it makes parenting more children easier. I'm thinking back to the conversation that I had on the podcast with Adriana and Tim a while ago. And where that, you know, Adriana couldn't go to the bathroom without kids tearing each other's hair out. And it was through learning and applying this method of Problem Solving, which I talked about in Parenting Beyond Power. It's sort of the crux of the book, in applying this with her five year old that just a few weeks afterwards, the five year old is coloring and the three year old comes running in and starts coloring on the paper. And the five year old says, "Oh, are you feeling sad? Because we haven't played time yet? Do you want to go play for five minutes and then we'll come back and we'll color next to each other?" And three year old was like, "Sure." And so when when our children can do this with each other then And we're not the referee waving the flag in the middle all the time saying, you know, you had this first and stop doing that. And why can't you sort this out for yourselves when we haven't given them any skills to do that, and being the person who's constantly telling them how to interact with each other.

But instead, when we can help them to understand each other's needs, they can apply that in every interaction that they have, and find strategies that meet both of our needs. And so I think it's 100% relevant to families who have more children, you can start by doing it with the oldest, right. It's probably going to stick a little bit fastest, and then start cascading down and working with the younger children. And then they start to see and meet each other's needs. And then parenting gets so much easier.

Well thank you. It was funny, because I was looking through the book, and I had only just recently realized the bad. And so it did make me wonder how this dynamic plays out when you have a large family. So so all of I'm, I'm almost done. So all of this being said, what do you hope that the readers will take away from this book all in all?

I think, I guess two main ideas that are in the book, and that I hope people will take out is that, you know, even if we had a happy childhood, we didn't have a traumatic childhood, if we think we turned out, okay, we were still impacted by these big social forces. And I hope that parents can see that, and not, you know, what I'm not trying to do is to say, you know, our parents you suck. But to say, you know, I can also see that you are parenting with a whole bunch of unresolved trauma, and that you are doing the best that you could and that you did this because you really wanted the best for me. I know you didn't do it, because you wanted to hurt me. You did it because you wanted the best for me. You tried to shape how I would turn out because you wanted me to be successful in this world. And so I hope that parents can read the book and understand this and have some compassion for themselves.

In terms of power, they've probably been in a power dynamic before, right with their child, like, even unless we make a conscious decision to say, "I don't want that. And I'm going to do this instead." Because we learn the power dynamic power over dynamic from our parents, that's the thing we're going to fall back into, if we don't know anything else. So I hope that we can have a sense of compassion for ourselves and where we've been, and also for our parents and for what they experienced, and that they were doing the best they could. So that sort of the the one big piece of it is understanding that and acknowledging the impact has had on us than having compassion for ourselves and our parents.

And then the other piece of it is, if we agree that we don't want that world, that world is hurting us, has hurt us, will continue to hurt our children, then we're not going to create a world where everyone belongs, if we keep doing the same things that our parents did with us. It can't happen. It's not going to happen. We have to do something differently. And I don't claim to know all the answers, right. I don't think this is gonna get us all the way there. We have a lot of you know, political systems, capitalism. It's not going to be impacted directly by this, but I 159% believe that if we raise children who understand their needs, can articulate for those needs, can advocate for those needs and also understand that we have needs, and that most of the time, we can be in relationships where most people, were everybody's need is met, then they will take that into the world, and do that in relationships with other people. And that, to me, is where we start to heal these other systems. Because all of these other systems are based on the idea that my needs are more important than yours, that I matter more than you do. Because I have more money than you do. Because I'm Whiter than you are. Because I'm a man, right? If I'm a man, or if I'm a woman, I'm getting my authority from the patriarchal system, and I'm using that authority over people who are smaller than I am, right, my kids, and that, that if we truly see and respect other people's needs as as important as our own, then we will start to heal those systems. We will start to say, "You know what, that doesn't fit with my values." So how can we create a system that actually does fit with our values, and I don't know how we're going to get there yet. But I really believe that we're going to raise children who have the skills to be able to figure that out if we use these methods. So that's what I hope people take out of it. But you have read the book, and now I want to know what you're taking out of it.

I really think that I did take that from it. One of my questions would be do you really see us healing society, all of society's issues with this book, because I think that's what you're trying to say a little bit is not that your finger we're not going to snap our fingers and make everything perfect, but that we can't build a better society of the individuals in that society are still working within these broken pieces. And so I definitely did get that from the books. So, yes.

Thank you for talking to me today and letting me ask you questions. And I loved the book, and it's gonna stay on my shelf, and I'm going to give it out to people and people who I think are ready for it. They know that they're gonna love the book too. And they're gonna get a lot from it.

Awesome. Thanks so much for thinking about it so deeply for reading, play, and, and for doing all the background research. And you know, I know you've listened to a bunch of episodes over the years. And it's really good to see you again, and to reconnect with you and to know that you're doing well out in the world. So thanks for being here. Thanks for raising your hand for this. I really, really appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thanks, Jen.

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