Philosophy of Parenting

FAQs

about Linda Clement & Raising Parents' approach to caring for children

Why are you in this field, your kids are grown already?

I believe that a shift in the way children are raised is the only realistic way to create world peace.

The ages of my children remain irrelevant to that goal.

What is your core belief about children, and childrearing, as briefly as you can state it?

Children are born whole human beings, worthy of respect and kindness because they are alive.

What philosophy of parenting do you promote?

Children are people. If you wouldn’t do it to a person whose respect and kind regard you hope to retain, please don’t do it to a child. 

Some people call this 'attachment-style' others call it 'taking kids seriously,' and some think of it as 'respectful' ... it doesn't really have a name.

Which authors and experts do you refer to the most?

That depends on the context. Pretty consistently, it’s:

• Alfie Kohn
• Gabor Matè
• Gordon Neufeld
• William Glasser
• L.R. Knost
• Stefali Tsabary
• Daniel Siegel
• Michaeleen Doucleff

… with others who offer something in the line of ‘thinking well’ or perspectives on being human that parents have found valuable over the years.

Why do you talk so much about leading as a parent?

First, because it’s a far more satisfying life to live, however rarely it is adopted.

With so many influences and pressures, ask any parent: do you feel like you are a leader or that you must follow in your choices about ______ [pick any topic to fill in the blank: school, bedtime, snack foods, dress, discipline, extra-curricular activities, friends, curfews, dating]? and you will find that those who think of themselves as leaders are few and far between.

When we just follow what we think we are supposed to (or expected to) do, as if we have little choice and no autonomy, we replicate and amplify the missteps of previous generations and cave in to ‘how things are done’ at the same rate as nearly 100% of the people around us.

I like families to feel more powerful, and to be more successful than that, so I suggest taking the lead.

Shouldn’t parenting just come naturally?

Not in any real world I’ve heard of.

Many other mammals have demonstrated examples (largely in captivity, but not always) of what goes awry when parents have few or poor examples of effective parenting around them. So much of the complexity and subtlety of human (and other social animals’) behaviour is learned from being fully immersed in it, with only scraps of half-remembered conversations illuminating parts of it with language.

Some of the most common parenting practices of today did not exist anywhere 50 years ago, and yet they are seen, now, as almost inevitable, and obviously natural and correct.

When we don’t shine the light of awareness of the impact historic, mainstream, traditional or changing parenting practices actually have on children, we are working with half the information.

Without awareness of how influential the parenting seen in media, from movies, to tv, to music and even documentaries can be, we have no way of handling the insidious pressure to conform.

What is attachment-style parenting?

From the work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, attachment theory is basically that a child’s best chance at a life without chronic stress and trauma is met through a handful of relationships that are reliable, engaged, compassionate and patient. For more, please see the blog post So, What is This Attachment-Style Parenting, Then?

I’m often called a ‘helicopter parent’ and I think I’m just careful, what’s your view?

My view is that our culture, unique apart from perhaps ancient Sparta, believes that helping kids succeed and giving them what they need is cissy and pantywaist and other namby-pamby frou-frou twaddle that is dragging kids down and making them soft.

As if there aren’t enough hard people in the world.

It is obvious that ‘helicopter parents’ are helping their kids, who need help, and often it is the parents who happen to have extremely sensitive children (who are real, born that way, and are by no means created by milquetoast parenting, just as some kids come out robust and daring, or chatty and trusting, or astonishingly musical –you don’t get to order these things in advance.)

These are parents who can see just how hard the world really is for kids who can feel it all.

Imagine you have a superpower: you can hear everything between where you are now and 4km away, every sniffle and every yawn, every scream, every word, every snore, every bark, every car, every pot lid dropped… Now imagine someone telling you that you’re the wrong kind of person, it’s your fault, and you should just ignore it because it’s not overwhelming to those who can’t hear all that, so it shouldn’t be overwhelming for you.

Yeah.

Now, instead of hearing, imagine if you could feel everything that everyone around you is feeling… while you have extremely sensitive sense of smell, taste, hearing, touch, and sight. You can tell when the colour on the poster changes slightly because of a problem with the printer drum, and it’s up against a wall colour that clashes with it, and there are too many forks scraping plates and too many people talking, your left sock is slightly tighter than the right, and the music is being played slightly too fast by the CD drive that’s overpowered by 15mA. Imagine being unable to not notice any of that… and then go to Disneyland the first day of the school break.

Highly sensitive people are real. Often, they’re born to highly sensitive people who were told their whole lives they are wrong –everything about how they are is wrong, and they should just stop it, as if they’re willfully sensitive just to bother other people.

Yes, sometimes a highly sensitive parent who was not treated gently or sensitively might mis-calculate the calibration and overshoot the compensation for the sensitivity of their child –and at what cost? A child who grows up being allowed to be what he is, loved and cherished, who can blossom as acceptable and whole…

The world beats up too many people as it is. Let the helicopters nurture their children.

I read that Linda was a La Leche League Leader for a long time, does that mean she’ll tell me not to wean, or that weaning is bad? Is she opposed to formula, like they usually are?

Linda grew up in the real world, where kids in Romania lived in orphanages for years eating little or nothing other than coffee, oreo cookies, and white sugar, so she holds no illusions about the range of ‘it won’t kill you’ diets that children can survive.

Human milk is, obviously, naturally the best food for human infants (and people with GI cancer, because it’s often the only thing they can tolerate at all, but that’s just a sideline piece of information everyone should have) and when that’s not possible, there are a great many ‘much better than coffee, oreo cookies and white sugar’ options available, commercial formula among them.

The only opposition Linda has to formula itself are the sleazy marketing tactics (which she would oppose in any product’s sales) and the profit-margin driving the ingredient list, as the whole thing seems to be the cheapest possible ingredients at the highest price the market will bear –but, again, formula is far from being the only product in which either are true.

Breastfeeding, chestfeeding, and human milk feeding (expressing and feeding, or feeding donated milk) is hard enough without having people tell you when to stop, or why stopping will make your whole life easier.

Linda likes people to make decisions based on their own values, rather than other people’s rules, disgust, schedules, opinions or demands. If that means weaning by choice, there are sensitive and gentle means to do that, and Linda is happy to share that information.

All humans will wean to a full, adult diet, at exactly the right pace for their own bodies, if they’re left to it. Guaranteed.

The rules for attachment parenting are all about breastfeeding and babywearing and night waking, what’s that got to do with elementary schoolers, or tweens or teens?

There are no real rules for attachment parenting.

Dr. Sears, who kind of coined the term a few decades ago, was talking about getting the parent-child bond off to the most natural (easy) start, with the fewest barriers to the responsiveness necessary to create that bond –both in the child and the parent. He didn’t really talk about anything after the babies were toddlers because he’s a pediatrician, and his clients are the under-5 set. This has led to a pretty big gap in resources on the market –at least in the works labelled as ‘attachment parenting.’

The philosophy has been available for a lot longer than even John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s work, under a different set of words.

The ideas of watching a child for their developmental phases, and discovering how they see the world from a compassionate, attentive perspective predates language… and there are many voices over the past century who spoke of it:

• Jean Liedloff, in The Continuum Concept;
• Tine Thevenin in The Heart Has Its Own Reasons;
• Kangaroo Care by Susan Ludington-Hoe;
• Touching by Ashley Montagu; Haim Ginott’s work;
• Choice Theory by William Glasser;
• Hold Onto Your Kids, by Gabor Matè and Gordon Neufeld;
• And the Children Played, by Patricia Joudry;
• Grantly Dick-Reid’s work;
• Piaget’s stages of development;
• The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller;
• Michele Odent’s Birth Reborn;
• The Mother’s Almanac by Marguerite Kelly;
• Only Connect, edited by Sheila Egoff et al,
• Unconditional Parenting and The Myth of the Spoiled Child by Alfie Kohn;
• James McKenna’s research about sleep;
• Dr. Louise Hart's The Winning Family
• Parent Effectiveness Training by Dr. Thomas Gordon

… is just a very short list with an explosion in works following the 1990s… and now the lovely Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaleen Doucleff...

Essentially, human beings have a deep need for connected, trusted relationships which was dismissed as irrelevant for a very long time by a lot of people who preferred their people to be less attached to people and more to ideas (like patriotism) or less securely attached and more likely to buy things (like consumerism.)

Our real needs are neither new, nor changeable.

This is who we are.

I have my last baby, and I don’t want to wean (or parent) the way I did my older kids, because I see now how it didn’t work –is it fair to parent this one differently?

There are so many pressures in our world: to keep being predictable for the comfort of others; to be ‘fair’ to everyone; to be liked by everyone in our social networks; to make the same decisions others made to stop them feeling guilty over things about which they were never really convinced…

The question of weaning is deeply personal, and while it may seem like it would be ‘fair’ to parent all the children identically, that is like it being ‘fair’ that everyone be blinded because some people have no eyesight.

Ethically, not doing better when we know better is hard to argue in any way that isn’t vicious to ourselves and our children: ‘No, honey, now that I know people need a strong sense of security and safety, you can’t have that because that would mean helping your older siblings have the same things, and that wouldn’t be fair.’ (???)

One of the greatest sources of stress is living in opposition to what we know to be best for our families.

It is even more stressful when we are actively choosing it.

Child rearing is too hard to figure out, there are too many experts in the field and they all disagree with each other –how can I quickly figure out who fits my style, or what my kids need?

Hard choices, easy life; easy choices, hard life.

Parenting is a long-term and complex experience that may be reduced to brief Mission Statements, if parents decide to do that, but there isn’t any quick way to figure out what fits your style.

There is an ocean of material by a great many people (who make claims about kids and parenting that are completely disconnected from reality) along with advice, hierarchy roles, and rules that are antagonistic to connected, peaceful relationships.

You can weed out the dross and find the quality material. Here are a few methods that expose the problems in some resources:

• Does this material sound like it has a deep respect for the humanity of children, taking their feelings and experiences seriously?
• Is there a sense that it’s a parent’s job to mold or control their child? Are the suggested tactics things you would intentionally do to your boss, your clergy, your parents, or the new friends you hope to get to know better?
• Are there rigid ideas about when a child should be able to take on adult responsibilities, control their emotions (or the expression of their emotions), or understand others based on ages rather than experience, learning or developmental stages?
• Does the material suggest many rules, constraints, rewards or bribes, threats or punishments, with or without the idea that children ‘choose’ which they get?
• Is the focus on the child’s results rather than the child’s goals or learning process?
• Is there any suggestion that the environment is what the child is responding to, rather than it being a child-caused problem?