Do your children resist doing every single thing you ask them to do? Is getting in the car seat (or toothbrushing or sugar or screen time) a constant challenge? Discover how to make parenting easier, and raise liberated children who will grow up to change the world.
Our children don't really learn about White supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism from what we tell them; they learn it from how we interact with them every day. Research-based parenting educator Jen Lumanlan offers The Problem-Solving Approach, a simple yet revolutionary framework for rethinking our relationships with children. Even conventional discipline methods like time-outs, countdowns, and "consequences" teach children that more powerful people can control others, a lesson they take out into the world.
This new approach helps us to look beneath challenging behaviors to find and meet children's needs, and our needs too, perhaps for the first time in our lives. It involves empathetic listening, understanding feelings and underlying needs, and problem-solving with our children to find solutions to conflicts that meet both of our needs.
It makes things radically easier in the short term because problems like tantrums, stalling, resistance, mean words, and hitting melt away. In the long term, it helps us to raise children who confidently advocate for themselves, and treat others with profound respect. Lumanlan shows how replacing conventional parent-child power dynamics with connection and collaboration can create a more peaceful home now and a better world for all of us in the future.
