10 Years, 10 Lessons: Everything I Got W...

Before my daughter was born, I made a book split into two halves. One cover said 'me.' The other said 'you.' I filled the 'you' side with a list of hopes for who she'd become. I had a lot of ideas about the person she should be before I'd ever met her.    This episode marks ten years of the podcast, and I'm using it to walk through ten things I got wrong along the way. Because if you're in the middle of any of these yourself, I want you to know exactly where I started.   I'll cover what I misunderstood about the RIE approach and Magda Gerber's work, how I mixed up authoritative and authoritarian parenting in an early episode and had to go back and correct it on air, and a fight over a dose of antibiotics that taught me the difference between managing my daughter's behavior and understanding what was underneath it. Then I get into what I got wrong about myself: a resentment that built for months in my marriage before I understood what a need even was, a moment mid-interview when I realized one of my biggest triggers had nothing to do with my daughter, and the Alfie Kohn book that planted the seed for how I parent now. I close with what I got wrong about parenting itself, and why, ten years in, I still think most of us are trying to do this without the people around us it takes.  

Questions this episode will answer

What is the RIE approach to parenting? RIE, developed by Magda Gerber, treats infants as capable people who deserve respect from birth. I only found out about it because friends who practiced RIE came to meet my daughter right after she was born, right before they moved away. This episode gets into what happened after that one visit.    What's the difference between authoritative and authoritarian parenting? Authoritative parenting is warm and sets limits through relationship, while authoritarian parenting sets limits through control and obedience. I got these two labels mixed up on the podcast in 2017. This episode looks at what happened when I dug into the research behind that framework and found out how narrow it is.   How do you discipline a child without using punishment? Instead of punishment, this approach looks at what a child is struggling with and works with them to solve the problem. I share the story of a medicine fight with my daughter where forcing the issue failed completely, and a different approach, built on her having some say in what happened, worked on the first try.   Why do couples fight more after having a baby? New parents often take on different loads of housework, childcare, and mental tracking, and that imbalance builds resentment fast when it isn't named. I talk through the specific fight with my husband that forced me to see I was missing collaboration and acknowledgement, and that he was missing something too.    What is the Gottman method, and does it work for parenting partners? The Gottman method is a well-known approach to couples communication, built on decades of relationship research. I talk about where I think it falls short for parents specifically, and what I changed to fill the gap with couples in the Parenting Membership.   What are the biggest mistakes parents make? This episode names ten, from misunderstanding what respect looks like with an infant to assuming a nuclear family is supposed to do this work alone. I walk through each one, including the specific moment that showed me I had it wrong.  

What you'll learn in this episode

• How Magda Gerber's RIE approach and Alfie Kohn's bookUnconditional Parentingreshaped how I saw my daughter, and which of Kohn's 13 principles I still use with parents today
• Why the authoritative parenting research that's been cited over 26,000 times was built on 146 white, middle-class preschoolers in one town, and what that means for how much weight it should carry
• The medicine fight that showed me the difference between forcing a behavior to stop and understanding what my daughter needed to do it differently
• How a recurring fight with my husband over the four-month sleep regression led me to understand what a need is, in my marriage and in my parenting
• What happened during a live interview when I realized one of my biggest triggers wasn't about my daughter at all, and how that became Taming Your Triggers
• Why I now think parenting was never supposed to happen inside one house with one set of parents, and what building a village looked like for my family

  Other episodes mentioned:

• 020: How do I get my child to do what I want them to do?

• 148: Is spanking a child really so bad?

• 183: What I wish I’d known about parenting

• 069: Reducing the impact of intergenerational trauma

• 209: How to get on the same page as your parenting partner

 

Ten years of learning it twice

Every one of these ten lessons, I had to learn twice. Once in my head, from a book or a study or a guest on the show. Then again, slower and harder, in the actual moment with Carys or Alvin, often while everyone around me was doing it a different way. Knowing what's underneath a behavior doesn't mean you'll catch it at 6pm when dinner's burning and your kid is on the floor. That takes practice, and people around you who are practicing the same thing.   That's what the Parenting Membership is for. A place to keep practicing the information you learned, in your specific moments with your specific kid, alongside other parents doing the same work.     Jump to highlights 00:00 Opening: the original episode zero script, re-recorded and re-read on this 10th anniversary 01:57 Milestone reflection: 10 years, over 300 episodes, and thanking Dr. Roberta Golinkoff and Katie Stankie 06:00 What I got wrong #1: thinking my job was to make Carys stop doing things, illustrated by a medicine-refusal standoff 09:19 What I got wrong #2: uncritically accepting authoritative parenting as "the best" style before questioning Baumrind's framework 13:40 Listener Laura shares what she wishes she'd known about potty training too early 17:41 What I got wrong #3: believing kids would "walk all over me" without punishments and consequences 18:34 Dr. Houri Parsi's story of a four-minute toothbrushing turnaround once she stopped trying to control the outcome 21:31 What I got wrong #4: not understanding that people (including myself) have needs, illustrated by early parenting friction with my husband 24:01 What I got wrong #5: realizing my triggers were about my own history, not just my husband's behavior, in conversation with Dr. Rebecca Babcock-Fenerci 27:55 What I got wrong #6: assuming parenting wouldn't change me much, illustrated by hiking the Tour de Mont Blanc with an 8-week-old 30:27 What I got wrong #7: trying to shape my daughter into a preconceived idea, based on a list of "hopes" written during pregnancy 33:14 What I got wrong #8: assuming I’d be "the enforcer," and how Alfie Kohn's Unconditional Parenting principles shifted that 39:07 What I got wrong #9: treating couples' relationships as separate from parent-child ones, and lessons from Gottman-based coaching 42:34 What I got wrong #10: assuming parenting happens within one nuclear household rather than needing a village 47:58 Closing thanks to Denise Suarez and an invitation to join the Parenting Membership