10 Years, 10 Lessons: Everything I Got Wrong About Parenting
Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveShow Notes
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 th
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