In the 25+ years Janet Lansbury has worked with children and parents, she's learned a lot. She's here to share it with you. Each episode of Unruffled addresses a reader's parenting issue through the lens of Janet's respectful parenting approach, consistently offering a perspective shift that ultimately frees parents of the need for scripts, strategies, tricks, and tactics.
Janet is a parenting author and consultant whose website (JanetLansbury.com) is visited by millions of readers annually. Her work informs, inspires, and supports caregivers of infants and toddlers across the globe, helping to create authentic relationships of respect, trust, and love.
Janet's "No Bad Kids Master Course" is available at NoBadKidsCourse and JanetLansbury. Her best-selling books “No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline without Shame” and "Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting" are available in all formats at Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and free at Audible (https://adbl.co/2OBVztZ) with a trial subscription.
Featured in TheNew Yorker, recommended 'Best Parenting Podcast' by The Washington Post, TheNew York Times, USA Today, The Cut,Fatherly, Today's Parent, and many, many more.
Please note: This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views and advice presented on this podcast by Janet Lansbury and her guests are based on their training and experience. Opinions are offered in good faith but do not constitute professional, psychiatric, or medical advice, neither are they intended to be. You do not have to use this information, and it should not be substituted for qualified medical expertise.
We are autonomous. That means tuning into ourselves and being able to say, I don't want to do that. This is what I'm going to do. Because what can happen is that we unintentionally give a message to our child that they need us to do what they want, that that's a need instead of a want. And I think that is part of what's happening in this this note. I'm gonna get to the details in a minute. This idea that our child seems to want us always next to them, so we go along with it. And then it's it's like that idea I talk about a lot here about accommodating. So then by accommodating that, we're giving our child the message that we agree that they need our attention all the time, that they can't be okay without us, in this case, playing with them. We're only trying to do the right thing, but we're giving our child the impression that we don't trust them to be able to be separate. So that's the the kind of feedback loop that happens here that none of us want. Right? In Wry parent infant and parent toddler classes, we do this really helpful thing that comes from attachment theory. In attachment theory, Bowlby and Ainsworth talked about being a secure base, because babies need, and as they're developing children continue to need that secure base, us, that they can leave to be free explorers, coming back as needed. So a secure base isn't forcing you to be independent. The way that we play this out in the classrooms is we ask the parents to please find a spot on the floor. There's these backjacks to sit on and please stay in that spot.
They can't tell us. We wanna give them extra respect instead of less respect. And that's why she talks about welcoming a baby as an honored guest when they're born, not just a cute little thing that's maybe a little empty headed in the way that we see them. I mean, I definitely did that. Some people are naturally able to see into a baby and see the person there right away, but I was not able to in the beginning. Now that I do, I can't stop seeing that with every baby. It's like once you open this door, you never wanna leave. And maybe you can't leave if you wanted to. So that's why there's often this confusion around why this approach is focused on the 1st 2 years and what we're supposed to do later. But I do understand that just as everything looks different as our children grow, the way that we're engaging with them looks different. And that's why in this podcast, I do love to answer questions about children that are up to, like, eight or nine years old, but I don't often go beyond that because my basis of experience for those years is personal. But what I thought I would do in this podcast is share how I've continued to interpret Magda Gerber's approach and how it has served me beautifully as a parent. I mean, I'm not always beautiful as a parent, but this approach has served me that way. So let's talk about some of the major points that continue as our children get older and how they look. I mean, all of this continues as children get older, but how it looks. So first, keeping faith in our kids' competency. One of the amazing lessons in this approach is that babies are born. Yes. Very dependent on us, and that's Good. It should be that way. Right? That's how we're gonna begin our attachment.
But I kept thinking about it, and, you know, it's just not an interesting enough topic to me. I mean, it's not interesting at all to me, to be honest. It's this mundane part of my day. And I imagine also for kids too. And probably, I mean, I could be wrong, but even dentists probably don't find it a super intriguing topic. But then I received a question in a comment on Facebook on my post, this may be why you're yelling. The comment was not about toothbrushing, but it reminded me how all of these cooperative activities, these tasks that we need our kids to do, we want our kids to do, how they're all related. And that there is a magical approach for helping our kids to do them. This magic isn't, unfortunately, a magic wand that we can just wave. And unfortunately, it also isn't saying some magic words or playing magical games, like what is sometimes offered on Instagram and TikTok for, quote, getting kids to do these things. This magic also isn't about giving a child a certain period of attention, playing with a child, filling their cup. Even that, unfortunately, isn't a formula for a child to be reliably willing to brush their teeth, help around the house, try new foods, clean up their toys. Yes. Those do help to build intimacy and connection. But the magic that works is when our relationship or connection is through and through. It's through the happy times. It's through the special times. It's through the tough and disappointing times. It's through when we're setting limits. It's
Her healing journey with others as a life coach for survivors of trauma and abuse. And all of this is on her website, beatingtrauma.com. Elizabeth is also the mother of twins, and she's acutely aware of the challenges that parents with less than ideal childhood experiences face. One doesn't need to have experienced abuse to benefit from Elizabeth's insights. They resonate deeply with me. They can help any parent recognize their triggers and break negative cycles and patterns of behavior that may have been passed down to them. And that is why I immediately thought of Elizabeth when I received a note from a parent who's struggling to be the confident leader she aims to be. She knows what to do, but time and again, in the moment with her toddler, when her toddler is behaving in challenging ways, she snaps, and she behaves in a manner that she regrets. She can't seem to break the cycle of reactivity and regret. Hi, Elizabeth. Hi, Janet. Thank you so much for having me on. Elizabeth has written some wonderful guest posts for my website that have always, always been some of the most popular, and she's just a gift to the universe. So, I can't say enough good things about you. Thank you so much. So here's the note I wanted to share with Elizabeth and try to get her thoughts. Dear Janet, greetings from Prague, Czech Republic. I discovered your podcast half a year ago and have your books too. They're a great help. Thank you very much. I have a question about myself. I was raised in a way that was in no way respectful. Now I very often feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of raising my daughter, 2 and a half years old. The fact that children model our behavior is really scary for me. I'm listening to your podcast, and it all makes sense. And I totally know how to behave at the moment of
To attach, hopefully, not as their primary attachment. Hopefully, that still remains the parent. Right? That's what we want. But they need to form a secondary attachment with those adults caring for them so that they have somebody that's an adult to be attached to instead of prioritizing the other children to be attached to. Yeah. We're not saying kids shouldn't be in daycare. That would not be realistic. A lot of parents, for economic and other reasons, simply have to send their kids to daycare. The question is to recognize what we've lost and how to supplant it. Okay? So if the kid goes to daycare, the first point is what the child's brain cannot handle is competing primary attachments. The child can handle many attachments, but not competing primary attachments. By the way, that's true of the human brain in general. It's very difficult for even for adults, for example, to be in love with 2 people at the same time. Eventually, the brain goes this way or that way, but it can't hold on to both. Now the child's brain, being very immature, is absolutely incapable of handling, competing primary attachments. So when the child goes to daycare, the parent needs to encourage the child's attachment to the daycare provider because that doesn't compete with the parent, but the peer attachment does. So we have to have healthy adult attachments. If the child is not gonna be with the parent, it's like Gordon says, in the morning, the parent hands the a passion baton to the teacher or the day care worker, and in the evening, we take it back. So that's the first point. So that when kids go to day care, parents should hang on that day care for a few weeks and make sure that their child sees them, the parent, forming relationships with the daycare provider so that the child then sees, oh, okay, I can be attached to both of these people. That's the first thing. The second thing is we have to understand how children attach. And the more immature we are, the more primitive. And I don't mean that in a negative sense, but the
