Claire Lerner and "Why Is My Child In Charge?"
An interview with child development specialist Claire Lerner about the faulty mindsets that make parenting feel impossible, and why it's OK when our child doesn't want to hand over the iPad.
I’m so excited this week to bring you an interview with Claire Lerner, a child development specialist who works with families of young children and author of the new book “Why is My Child In Charge? A Roadmap to End Power Struggles, Increase Cooperation, and Find Joy in Parenting Young Children.” I am not exaggerating when I say this book would have changed my life if I had read it when my child was small! You can hear my full conversation with Claire here, and highlights are below.
Tell me about how your book came to be:
Families come to me because they’re struggling with some kind of challenge. Meal time, potty learning, tantrums, physical aggression — the bread-and butter stuff that almost any parent confronts in the early years. Many came in describing things like, My child’s a fascist dictator. My 3-year-old is extorting us — he will only come to the dining table if he can watch Paw Patrol. Or the two moms that said they have this amazing feisty 4-year-old girl who thinks she’s an equity partner. You can see many parents had a situation where things have gotten completely upside-down and their children were driving the proverbial family car. But the strategies we talked about in the comfort of my office — tolerating the upset, boundaries with love — completely fell apart in the heat of the moment. Parents got so triggered that they couldn't sustain it.
Through home visits and watching the triggers, I started to reflect with parents on what, at a cellular level, was getting triggered. Once I made them aware of these faulty mindsets and helped them make mind shifts, that really is what unlocked their ability to be the parents they wanted to be.
When you talk about the mindsets that make it challenging for parents to stick to their plans for positive parenting, I’d love to hear where you think some of these mindsets come from.
I think it’s sort of a confluence. Certainly for some parents, the mindsets come from the old records playing in their heads. So for example the first mindset I start out with is, My child’s misbehaving on purpose. He should have greater self control and be able to manage when he can’t get what he wants. That mindset certainly for many of us comes from what we’ve known and what we’ve heard: that’s a spoiled child, that’s misbehavior.
Some of it comes from the zeitgeist of the world we live in, some of it from our upbringings; for many of us, it’s our own temperament. I’m a sensitive person who had a very hard time tolerating my children's upset, so I did way too much rescuing, giving in on limits I knew were important, because I felt I was being mean or depriving my child of something. When they pulled on my heartstrings and said I really need you to lie with me for 20 extra minutes, that really plugged into my guilt, so that led me to do things that ultimately felt more loving and were not more loving. That’s one of these really important mindshifts — that often, what feels loving is not what our children need. And what feels ‘mean” is actually what our children need. What they need is, I know sweetie, it’s never going to feel like enough books. It is such a special time. I don’t expect you to like the rule, but our rule is 3 books and 10 minutes of cuddle time, so that your brain and your body get the rest they need.
Do you think these mindsets have changed over time at all? If we were to go back a couple decades, do you think there would be any difference in what parents are dealing with?
I do think some of these mindsets are more prevalent now than they might have been before — again, for several reasons. One biggie is just the explosion in research in early childhood development and especially brain development, just in my lifetime. I started in this field in 1985, so I’ve seen incredible change in the way we understand young children and how they process the world and how much is going on in their brains from early on, and I think that’s been awesome.
By and large, that development made us much better equipped to support children’s healthiest development. At the same time, it gets misinterpreted. The big faulty mindset I talk about a lot is the lack of limits. I think that one is especially hard for this generation of parents. Somehow ‘limits’ get misconstrued as ‘limiting your child.’ Like they're not going to be their full self and you’re not respecting their individuality. And that is a completely false interpretation of what limits really mean. if you’re equating limits with somehow thwarting your child or abandoning your child, then it’s going to be very hard to set limits. So that’s one thing.
It's when you don't set the important limit that things go off the rails. The limits are what's loving.
The second biggie, and this is true especially for parents who have highly sensitive reactive kids, when they are in distress mode, it can look and feel scary. But the fact is that that distress is not harmful to a child in an otherwise loving family where this child is getting lots of love and attention and cuddling and playing. Setting a limit on screen time or food or bedtime or washing hands — the distress the child may experience when they’re disappointed that they can’t get the extra episode of Peppa Pig, that state of distress is not toxic stress. It’s just so uncomfortable for them, but what they need to survive is a parent who can say I know. I’m going to be your rock. I’m going to help you through this.
I think your generation of parents has been exposed to so many of these messages. So many parents have adopted this gentle parenting approach, but it is incredibly hard work. Because it’s not what they experienced, so it doesn’t come naturally. So I still get many parents who are like, When push comes to shove, I need to teach him a lesson.
Parents almost cringe when I say You need to be in charge. They feel like being in charge is like being an authoritarian fascist dictator. But getting directions is loving and helpful to kids. It’s why they love school. Children know exactly what their marching orders are. Happy children are not always happy. Why would they be happy about limits on bedtime or snack food or screens or playground time? So you have to get comfortable with their discomfort and know that’s part of it. You can't open up any kind of publication that doesn't talk about the importance of resilience and grit, and that’s where it’s built, is in learning and managing that you can’t always have what you want when you want it.
Claire taught me a really important strategy that I wanted to share with you when you're in conflict with your young child:
1) Name the child's behavior using neutral language (i.e., "OK, I've asked Emily to give me her iPad, and she's saying no")
2) Give the child a choice and let them know they can either comply with the boundary, or you will enforce the boundary ("Emily has two great choices right now. One, she chooses to give me the iPad back, or if she chooses not to give it back, no problem, I'll be a helper and I'll take it. That might be kind of uncomfortable for both of us, but putting up the iPad is something we have to do")
3) Follow through on the child's choice without anger.
You can read more of Claire's wisdom by checking out her book! I really recommend it if you have young kids at home and you've ever, maybe, possibly, thought of them as fascist dictators. And don't forget, you can listen to our full conversation here: Episode 4: Claire Lerner. I hope you and everyone you love is safe and well as we close out the year, and I appreciate your readership and your support!