When I first started working with parents, Gina Ford was all the rage. The new parents I worked with were aiming for the Contented Little Baby straight out of her book. As those little babies grew, parents followed the advice of Supernanny Jo Frost.
Popular parenting trends at that time were based on behavioural strategies — using ignoring to discourage unwanted behaviour (in the form of controlled crying and time outs) or rewards to encourage wanted behaviour (such as reward charts and praise).
Over the last 20 years, together with our growing knowledge of infant and child development, parenting trends have dramatically changed.
Following a surge in attachment parenting practices, promoted by William and Martha Sears in the USA, the current popular parenting movement is gentle parenting, with millions of views of #gentleparenting videos on TikTok.
This philosophy is based on respect for children. Gentle parenting is less about a series of practices and more about tuning in to your child, understanding their developmental capacities and supporting them in managing their emotions and behaviour — particularly through the regulation of your own.
However, judging from the number of #gentleparentingfail videos on TikTok, it can raise anxiety and leave us feeling… ungentle.
What all parenting trends and philosophies have in common is this — they give us weary parents a rule book, a set of guidelines to follow, which cover all the various complicated aspects of parenting we have to deal with every day, from feeding to sleep challenges, to toileting, dealing with emotions, discipline and so on.
When we are dealing with little people, who are generally quite complicated beings, in a stressful world (which is complicated too), it can feel reassuring to be handed a series of tasks to complete.
And the reward at the end, we hope, is a happy, well-rounded and calm child who feels loved, worthwhile and successful.
There are now tens of thousands of parenting manuals and books. Many are extremely useful, but alongside the information we receive online and advice we get from those around us, it can be hugely overwhelming.
The parents and parents-to-be I speak to are often full of anxiety, feeling they are getting it all wrong and have messed up their children permanently.
I hear stories from parents trying so hard to do their best for their children, then losing their temper spectacularly, or struggling to manage a day with their children, or just feeling generally spent and broken.
Often, parents tell me not just what they’ve tried, but whose advice they have followed — those parenting experts who have professional or personal experience — on social media, blogs, podcasts, books. And often, the first thing I tell them to do is to stop reading parenting advice, stop looking at parenting information on social media and listen instead to themselves and to their child.
One of the biggest problems we face as modern parents is we have forgotten that being a parent is hard. It is supposed to be hard. We look for rules and guidelines and manuals because they can help us feel more in control, more confident that what we are doing is ‘right’. Because we hope that will make it easier. But then, when our days are hard, we can so easily feel we are getting it wrong.
This is something I often discuss with the clients I work with and the parents I connect with online.
One parent, Sheila, described this sense of failure: “I remember very clearly the first time I had this feeling. A feeling of failing, letting my kid down hugely. Of doing something irreparable. Regret and fear and sadness and guilt mixes into the worst cocktail ever.”
‘I hear stories from parents trying so hard to do their best, then losing their temper spectacularly or feeling spent and broken’
When we think if we just had the right technique, then parenting would be easier. Moments of conflict or exhaustion leave us feeling we are failing.
When we know parenting is tough, that it’s OK to find it tough, and that we will make countless mistakes along the way, we can look at those tough days with compassion for ourselves and our children.
As Sheila says: “Now I look back on that moment as the first time I came up against my daughter as an individual, rather than her being an extension of myself; the first time I couldn’t centre her absolutely (there was a new baby in the mix).
“It definitely marked a time of change and a period of huge learning, entering the next phase of being a parent. I think I’ve forgiven myself for being less than perfect, but that’s always a work in progress.”
Another difficulty we face is we are often parenting in isolation. And many of the parenting manuals we read or advice we hear is directed at us changing our individual behaviour.
What about the people around us? We do not exist in a vacuum. Our parenting is supported and impacted by the people around us, the communities we live in, the experiences we have had within our own families and communities, and by the services and systems around us.
So, for example, common advice around helping babies sleep might make a lot of sense if all we’re doing is looking after a baby.
But if our baby is struggling to sleep because we live in noisy, overcrowded housing or because we are at the end of our tether because we haven’t slept ourselves for days, or because we don’t have a routine as our working hours are unpredictable, mainstream advice can leave us feeling worse when it doesn’t apply to us and our circumstances.
One of the unspoken problems of parenting advice and manuals is they can give us the impression that, if we do get it right, we and our children will be happy all the time.
So when our child wakes up grumpy or we are tired ourselves and having a bad day, we can add another layer to this. A layer of shame or worry that it isn’t supposed to be like this. That if we just followed the parenting rules, then we would live a life of harmony.
But as well as love and joy and happiness, family life is full of friction and conflict. Not only should we tolerate that, but actually those messy emotions and situations are an essential part of family life.
Our children need to be in conflict with us in order to figure out who they are, separate from us. They need to protest our decisions in order to remind us of their unique needs.
Sometimes they need to rail against the pressure that is placed on them by our child-unfriendly society.
And they need to experience disconnect and the reconnection that follows, to know relationships are robust and we can love one another even when we’re frustrated and annoyed with each other.
That we don’t need to be perfect to be deserving of love. Letting go of our ideas of what we ‘should’ be doing as parents can be hugely liberating and help us tune into the actual child in front of us, not the one we read about in parenting manuals.
As Sheila found: “I’m more confident now in listening to the guiding voice inside, and less desperate to seek outward validation of my interactions with my kids. I try to remember that a moment ‘gone wrong’ is the tiniest drop in the ocean of relationships and events that will shape the person my kids become.”
When we accept that family life is messy, we can begin to write our own rule book, creating a story that suits us, our family and our circumstances. Not a fairytale and one where there are no heroes, just parents trying their best and children who can teach us more than any manual.
Dr Emma Svanberg is an award-winning clinical psychologist, author of Parenting For Humans (Vermilion, March 2, 2023) founder of The Psychology Co-operative and co-founder of Make Birth Better CIC. Emma also facilitates a parenting community on Facebook called ‘The Village – A Parenting Community For Humans’.
Involve your child in how you want the family to function. Photo: Getty/picture posed
Five tips to help you throw out the rule book
One of the things we often do as new parents or when we enter a new phase as parents — just as we do when we start a new job or move to a new place — is look for solutions to make it feel easier.
This is why parenting books are so popular. Then, when the solutions don’t fit for us, we tend to look for a new solution.
Sometimes we need to stop looking outside of ourselves for the solutions. Instead, we can think about what solutions might fit for us by listening to ourselves and listening to our children.
Here are five ways to help you do that.
1. Understand your own story
One of the reasons we look outside of ourselves for solutions and rules is because we don’t trust our own instincts. Often that’s because we had experiences ourselves that we don’t wish to replicate for our own children.
We need to understand those experiences and what they left us with before choosing what we want for our own children. This is the basis of Parenting For Humans — guiding you through understanding how your own experiences shape your parenting so that you can better understand your child.
2. Write your family story
Once we understand what we are bringing to our parenting from our own journey, we have the exciting task of writing our own family story.
One based on what we choose, not based on ‘shoulds’. This can be an active process, involving discussion with all the family members and with flexibility to respond to what is working and what is not.
3. Your child is a hero in that story
These decisions and discussions should involve your child too, especially as they grow.
Parenting advice often gives the impression that parenting is something that we ‘do’ to our child, who is apparently a willing participant in our parenting experiment!
But of course our children are whole human beings in their own right and have opinions (often strong ones!) on what they need in their family and the world around them.
Our role as parents isn’t to mould them to suit our expectations and those of wider society. Rather to hold them while they discover who they are for themselves.
4. Own your errors
One of the biggest generational shifts we have seen in modern parenting is our capacity as parents to own up to our many mistakes, to apologise to our children and find ways to repair disconnections.
As parents, we often take one of two pathways here. We don’t acknowledge our errors because we worry this will leave us feeling (or looking to our children) to be out of control. Or we over-apologise to our children and berate ourselves for missteps.
When we accept that mistakes are part of life, and an essential part, it becomes not only easy to own up to them, but something to relish because this lets our children know it’s OK to make mistakes and pivot too.
5. Remember this is a lifelong process
We often talk about parenting as something to ‘crack’. Once we’ve figured out this problem in front of us, then we’ll be sorted.
This leaves us in a state of urgency. But parenting is a marathon, not a sprint.
Once we realise it is not something we ‘do’, but someone we are — forever! — we can relax into it a little more and notice the things we cherish.
