The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read

We all slip up, like I still do, but if we do feeling-with rather than trying to push the feeling away enough, the child will know what they need and be able to ask for it.

Babies may not yet know words, but we can learn to understand them by observing them. If we practise this skill of observation, it will help us to understand and relate better to our children, whatever age they are.

What really helps is if they are expressed accurately, by someone on their side: you. You will not always be able to fathom out what is going on, but being kind rather than punitive towards them in their distress will encourage future cooperation and nurture your relationship with them rather than hinder it.

So much of what we have inherited sits just outside of our awareness. That makes it hard sometimes to know whether we are reacting in the here and now to our child’s behaviour or whether our responses are more rooted in our past.

If you stop to look back, to become interested in your irritation towards them, what you might find is that your own inner four-year-old is jealous or feels competitive.

Instinct is a major component in confidence, competence and intelligence, so it’s a good idea not to damage or warp your child’s.

If children are preoccupied, if they are worried about their security, their safety and how they belong, they are not free to be curious about the wider world. Not being curious impacts negatively upon how they concentrate and learn.

Even if you live apart from your child’s other parent, what matters is that you refer to them in respectful ways, that you can appreciate their good points and not always be emphasizing their faults.

How you can make their pain bearable is to be alongside them and with them when they feel it. You need to be present, for your child and the people close to you; open and accepting to what they show you and what they feel.

Speaking in I-statements, not you-statements, owning your own feelings and finding out about and acknowledging the other person’s feelings are usually the best ways to deal with the inevitable differences that arise in families.

Being kind does not mean you don’t share your feelings when you are angry. What it does mean is explaining how you feel and why but without blaming or insulting the other person.

If you take their feelings seriously in their first few years, the baby will learn that if something feels bad, it will get better, especially if they can share how they feel with someone sympathetic.

It is essential that parents are sensitive to an Orchid’s feelings, and all of us, whether Dandelion or Orchid, benefit from having our feelings seen, validated and understood – even if, in the same circumstances, we would have a different reaction.

If you came home and said to your partner, ‘I had a foul day at work,’ and they replied, ‘It can’t have been that bad,’ you probably wouldn’t feel seen, heard or met by them.

This is a truth that should be universally acknowledged: when you try to block out a ‘negative’ feeling, you remove positive feelings too.

If you repeatedly distract your child from what they feel or from their experience, you are also unwittingly discouraging them from being able to concentrate.

Believing that pregnancy, childbirth and parenting can be somehow optimized puts us in danger of bringing into the world an object to be perfected rather than a person to relate to.

The sympathetic magic I think is most helpful is to think of your experience of pregnancy as affecting the foetus, as though the environment of the womb is telling the baby a story of what they will find after they are born.

Like other animals, babies have a variety of natural reflexes facilitating our survival in the world, with one of the most obvious being able to cry to tell you they need your company or to be changed, held and fed.

To allow a baby to follow their instinct to do their own breast crawl or any other natural action, like gazing at you, crying for you, is to respect them and to trust them and from the start to help them to know that they are not an object that things are just done to but a person who has agency.

It is important to be able to talk about them, to have a place to dispel feelings in a cathartic way, so we don’t act them out at the expense of our children.

Most parents need help with their children, from relatives or paid helpers, so they can work, or even just take a shower. However, the most important people in a child’s life should be their parents.

The more we can speak about impulses and reactions we have in relation to our baby and have them understood and accepted, the more we are able to reflect and to perceive the baby as a baby and not as an object on to which we are unknowingly projecting a monster or a ghost from our past.

I believe we all need someone non-judgemental to talk to, someone we can be fully and unapologetically ourselves with – that is how your baby needs to use you, after all.

Remember: your experience and your feelings after a baby comes into your life are not right and they are not wrong. However weird and unusual they seem to you, do not keep them to yourself.

One of the most important indicators for good mental health is a strong bond between parent and child. Humans are pack animals; we have lived in tribes for millennia. We are wired to bond to each other; it is how we survive as a species.

What creates your bond and your relationship is give and take. By that, I am talking about the mutual influence we have on each other.

Where we feel most frustrated and find relationships to be the most unsatisfactory is when we do not have an impact. It doesn’t matter what we say and do, the person or organization does not heed us, even if they are doing things to us, and we can begin to feel hopeless, isolated or rebellious.

Children need reciprocity from their caregivers; otherwise, they learn helplessness, that their actions have no effect. If a baby could put their experience into words they may think, ‘If I cannot affect you, then I do not exist.

If you’re physically close to your child but are missing their cues because, say, you are on your phone or computer, it will trouble them.

The more open we are to the other and the more sensitive we can be to the subtleties of glance and gesture, agitation or relaxation, the more we can ward off unhappiness and despair in our babies and therefore in ourselves.

The more positive energy you invest in your child at the start, the less of your energy you will need to invest further on.

The more relaxed your child is, probably because they get enough attuned attention, the more their default mood is likely to be relaxed rather than anxious or angry.

Being available to observe, listen and engage with your child in a way that makes them feel safe, loved and valuable is an investment in their default mood.

Sleep training is when you leave a baby or a toddler to cry either until they are asleep, or until they have cried for a certain amount of time and then you go into them after a few minutes but each night you gradually make those few minutes longer and longer.

Sleep training is conditioning, it is not relating; it is treating your baby as an ‘it’ rather than as an individual person, it is trying to manipulate your child into having a silent night rather than allowing them to separate from you at their own pace according to their own needs.

Being encouraged to do anything is fine for a relationship, but being tricked, ignored or manipulated into a behaviour is not going to enhance your lifelong bond.

While playing, an infant learns to concentrate and gets in the habit of making discoveries, one of which is the joy of feeling absorbed by what they are doing.

Play is the foundation for creativity and for work; for exploration and discovery.

A child who is concentrating on an activity must not be interrupted.

Children do not need more than a few simple toys: a couple of toy cars, a cardboard box, a square of material, a doll, a bear and a few bricks, and a child is set up.

All behaviour is communication, so behind behaviour you’ll find the feelings.

A child is most frustrated just before they master a new stage or skill. Before they can walk, talk, think, write, be sexual, be independent, they’re at their most brittle.

Children are people, not machines. We want them to be able to connect and relate rather than become robots.

When we behave well, it’s rarely because we want a reward or because we fear punishment, it’s because behaving with consideration towards other people comes naturally to us.

Children learn their behaviour from how they are treated. They really learn how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when gratitude and respect have been shown to them.

Being a parent is always going to be time consuming. It is better to put in that time positively by pre-empting trouble rather than negatively, after the trouble has arisen.

The downside of a diagnosis is that it’s like a judgement, a full stop. This means it can close a door on looking at and learning to understand the feelings behind a behaviour.

The collaborative method is when you and your child put your heads together to solve a problem so you’re more of a counsellor than a dictator.

The real work of parenting is not the tidying, it is being with your children and helping them to develop. The collaborative method helps to develop the essential skills for socialized behaviour, which are: tolerance for frustration, flexibility, problem-solving skills and empathy.

Define yourself rather than defining your child. Don’t pretend your decisions are grounded in facts when, in fact, they are grounded in your own feelings and preferences.

If you are not willing at all to be impacted upon by the opinions and feelings of your child, they will be less likely to allow your influence and your wise counsel.

Distraction is not sincere on the part of the parent and it is manipulative.

Younger children can learn more from older friends than they would by just mixing with their peers.

Before language, behavior is the only way they can communicate what is going on for them.

If we don’t look at how we were brought up and the legacy of that, it can come back to bite us.

It is not the rupture that is so important, it is the repair that matters.

When you react with anger or another overly charged emotion around your child it is because it’s a way you have learned to defend yourself from feeling what you felt at their age.

Feelings need to be heard.

When we tell our children off for feeling bad, we are giving them two things to cry about: the thing they were originally sad about and, in addition, they now feel bad because their parent is cross and they still feel sad.

We learn to self-soothe by being soothed by others.

A lack of authenticity causes a rupture and you will be able to repair it by becoming authentic.