My Favorite Parenting Books

I did it! I finished my first month of books. Two books this month, because they were started six-ish months ago and I make the rules here anyway.
These are my favorite parenting books. To be honest, they're the only ones I've read all the way through, but I tried others and that's why I didn't finish them. Anyway, I think they go together real nice (read in Cousin Eddie's voice, please). They just really jive with how I feel about parenting naturally too. That's not to say that all of their takeaways were second-nature for me though. I have to think about the applications frequently and remind myself why I think all of this is important when we're in the middle of an ugly tantrum. Most importantly for me, the premises of these books work well in a lot of ways with my spiritual beliefs too. We'll get to that.

The books were The Danish Way of Parenting by Jessica Joelle Alexander and Iben Dissing Sandahl and No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame by Janet Lansbury. I'm mostly going to tell you about The Danish Way, but I'm fitting some No Bad Kids in with it too.

My family is Danish, part of it at least. My mom's grandpa was born in Denmark. I'm not sure if that has actually had an influence on us, but I look back on being with that side of my family and all of my memories are very "hygge." I like that. Even though it's probably not the overused, overhyped, hot buzzword anymore like it was a few years ago, I think it's pretty key for increasing happiness and satisfaction in life. (Hygge is a Danish word, borrowed from Norwegian, that basically means a coziness together.) So I was interested in The Danish Way of Parenting from hygge alone. To very crudely summarize, it's a parenting philosophy that believes in a couple different things:

Play. Letting kids have independent, unstructured playtime (especially with other kids and outside) is so influential in the development of self-esteem. They try things on their own, they succeed and they fail and it's all so healthy. Putting themselves in "risky" situations (while I sit close by and stress over all the ways she could hurt herself, my daughter, that is) helps with decision making and resiliency. Danes are so serious about play that they do not have any formal education till six years old.

Honesty. I really like how this concept blends with the other book, No Bad Kids, and its idea of respectful parenting. To start here, I believe we existed before this mortal life. Without getting into the details of it, I think that we're all relatively the same "age" in the eternal sense of things. For some reason, Harper ended up being my daughter instead of the other way around, so it's really important to me to parent her in a respectful way. In The Danish Way of Parenting, this looks like honesty and being straightforward with her. She drew a picture and it's really not great? I'm not going to overpraise her and tell her it's incredible and belongs in a museum. It's hard not to clap and cheer for every new thing she does, and really, I do. But I'm trying really hard not to overdo it. (Other than the freaking party I'm going to throw her when she decides to talk.) I think that just sets kids up for disappointment when the real world gets a hold of them. That might sound terrible, and I'm not going to tell her it's bad in any way, but this book talks about how it's more important to talk to her about her experience drawing it (that not-so-great picture from before), the work that went into it. Does she like it? Why did she choose to draw that, use the colors she did, etc. Stuff like that. This also means not telling her that she's smart all the time, but rather that she's really good at learning and doing things well when she works hard. It's Dweck's fixed vs growth mindset basically, and I have no doubt the latter is healthier.

In No Bad Kids, the way this comes through (to me, at least) is in the message of treating our kids as equals, and never treating them as "bad." This has been a really hard one for me, especially with the way I talk about Harper. It's so easy to fall into a trap of retelling the "bad" things our kids did (especially when they're kind of funny) or recounting a tantrum to someone, but they just hear you constantly saying how bad they are when you do this. "The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice." (Peggy O'Mara) They're not bad, they're just trying to figure things out. This changed how I view everything with Harper. Tantrums used to look dramatic and terrifying to me, like she was trying to punish me with her bad behavior. This helped me see that misbehavior just means she has a need she's not able to communicate yet, she's testing her boundaries, and most importantly, she's testing how secure she is with us as her parents. Game changer. The Danish Way talks about the term "terrible twos" and how it doesn't exist in their language. They call it "the boundary stage." See how much better that sounds? I can handle the boundary stage. It's just their way of learning the world around them.

Being together. This is Hygge. Being cozy together. Spending time together without distractions (both books agree on less screens, so does this awesome article from Psychology Today). 

Personally, I think we're living in a weird transition time, technologically speaking. We don't really know what the effects of parenting with screens will be once this generation is in adulthood. The iPhone came out in 2007, so the oldest a kid raised with an iPhone-toting parent could be is 11. We do know some immediate effects though. Maybe I'm being too traditional here, but I'm glad I don't have memories of my mom looking at a screen. Another great article from Psychology Today talks about the Still Face Paradigm, giving us a clue into how our tech habits are impacting our kids. Basically, they had parents play and interact with their baby or toddler, and then for one minute, hold their face completely still and unresponsive (imagine how you look when you're staring at a screen). They found that children find it confusing, distressing, they try to get the parent's attention again and again (see: tantrums), and then "show upset, despondency, or anxiety." Sounds cozy, right?

We watch TV in our house. Harper probably has every episode of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood memorized, and somehow she still wants to watch it all the time. I'm not perfect here, she watches an hour to two hours of tv at home most days, split up into a few different windows. When she was coming up on 18 months and was actually showing interest in watching a tv show, I realized how easy shopping was if I just handed her my phone to watch Daniel. But then I started noticing that her tantrums were getting more intense, and it was pretty correlated with the amount of time she had watching a screen that day. I'm soooo far from perfect with this, but while reading these books, we decided to pull the phone and try to spend more time together. Which was absolutely terrifying at first. Like I actually braced myself for the wall of screams I was sure was going to hit me when we first took it from her hands while we were driving home from a friends' house last month. She was not happy, but we replaced it with a playlist of her favorite songs, and it worked! She actually asks for these songs now when we get in the car (if you know us well, you know she isn't talking yet, so this is done through a series of her own signs and sounds, but I get it). Sometimes I still wish I could have some uninterrupted Target/Costco time, but this really was so much less scary than I thought it was going to be. And our day goes so much smoother when she doesn't watch anything on my phone. AND more importantly, she seems so much more content with singing with mom and dad, or playing with us without a pesky little screen in the way.

Reframing. The Danish Way talks about Danes being a little more comfortable with what we might view as "negative situations." If you look at Hans Christian Andersen's stories or other Danish tales, they don't always have a happy ending. That is not satisfying to most Americans, which is why we've rewritten his most famous story (to us at least), The Little Mermaid. Danes are taught growing up to reframe the negative situations. If a child has a soccer game and their team loses, you'll likely hear an American parent wallowing with them and saying something like "I'm so sorry you lost your game," whereas you might hear a Danish parent saying something along the lines of "Yeah, you lost, but at least you didn't break your leg." I love how this takes the American notion of trying to make everything happy and lets you be more comfortable with a range of emotions. No Bad Kids can go along with this principle too. It stresses how important it is that we don't tell our kids to stop crying or to feel any emotion other than what they're currently feeling. Emotions are healthy, all of them. Stifling them isn't. Instead, No Bad Kids suggests sitting with your child while their tantrum or cry fest runs its course, and being available if they need/want comfort during it. Then, talk to them about what they're feeling, helping them put a name to their emotions, and suggest a good way to move past that feeling once it's run its course. 

No ultimatums. Both books agree on this idea. Children need discipline, not punishment. No Bad Kids talks about non-punitive discipline not including time-out or spanking. The book often quotes the leader of respectful parenting, Magda Gerber, asking "Time out from what?" Time-out is a disconnected, theoretical concept that most children don't really understand so it can't really be expected to correct a child's behavior. There's a growing body of research showing how damaging physical punishment can be for a child. Spanking results in fear, which can only stifle a respectful, loving relationship on both sides. The Danish Way addresses ultimatums by explaining that they place conditions on the parent's love and acceptance. Saying "you better do this or that right now" or "or else" type of statements is heard as "there are things you can do that will lower you in my esteem." Not that a kid would understand that exact statement, but they feel the gist of it. When they don't do something you want them to, or they do do something you don't want them to, help them to see that you still love them, but their choices have consequences.

Practicing empathy. I'm running out of steam here (and Harper is waking up from her nap), so I'll be quick about this. We want our kids to be compassionate towards themselves, so it's important to show them the way to be compassionate towards others. Teach them to respect and strive to understand others. Help them notice other people's emotions, talk about what could cause those emotions.

Letting them work it out. Sit back more often, instead of intervening. We hear enough about helicopter parents (and now lawnmower parents). Don't hover over them, don't mow down their problems before they get to them. Let them have the opportunity to learn and overcome.

Anyway, these books were really, really good. When it comes down to it, I think most parenting philosophies are good. These ones are just the ones I personally like. Here's some more info on the Dos and Don'ts of No Bad Kids, since I didn't really get to all of them. On to October's book! Any suggestions for me? I'm looking at trying A Man Called Ove again, or Less. Have you read them?