Ten Years of Parenting Taught Me: When Your Kid Won't Listen, the Problem Isn't Your Kid
On the podcast's tenth anniversary, the host revisits ten parenting beliefs she once held as certain — from forcing her daughter to take medicine to treating an expert's framework as truth. Each one she first learned in a book, then had to learn again inside a real conflict.
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The argument · timestamps estimated from transcript position
Forcing the medicine won the behavior and lost the relationship
The host recalls her three-year-old daughter refusing antibiotics, and her holding the girl down and forcing the medicine in; the daughter threw most of it back up. That night her husband Alvin stayed with their daughter in the bathroom for an hour, calmly saying the whole time, ‘I'm willing to do anything, but we're not leaving until we figure this out,’ and in the end the daughter finished the whole course herself — small sips of medicine with small sips of water, then a small piece of chocolate to take the taste away. The host says the difference wasn't that her husband was more patient, but that he wasn't solving a behavior — he was understanding what would actually help the child do this thing. What the child needed was autonomy over the process, and to feel she was on the same team as her parent rather than being held down to do something.
— JenThe authoritative parenting framework rests on 146 white kids
The host says she accepted uncritically early on that ‘authoritative is the best parenting style,’ because every blog and every study said so. It was only when she made the episode on corporal punishment that she found a paper co-authored by Diana Baumrind defending parents' ability to spank their children, and started digging. She found that this framework — cited more than 26,000 times and defining sixty years of parenting research — was originally based on just 146 white, middle-class preschoolers in the town where Baumrind lived. She calls this evidence of her own insufficient critical thinking, and says she now asks at the macro level ‘does this theory make sense,’ and at the micro level ‘does it fit this specific child in front of me.’
— JenNot punishing your kid doesn't mean being ruled by your kid
The host says she once believed that without punishment and consequences children would run wild — she was in the shower when her daughter was four months old thinking ‘how do I discipline her without becoming a mean mom.’ Clinical psychologist Dr. Houri Parsi admitted in the membership community that she too had treated ‘obedience’ as the goal, and that every tooth-brushing was a battle. Once, recording for the host to see, she deliberately used no threats, no punishment and no rewards, and simply asked her two-year-old son ‘why don't you want to brush your teeth.’ He couldn't put it into words — he just said ‘Mama’ and buried his head in her chest. She realized what he wanted was time alone with her. She put the toilet lid down, sat down, held her son, and they sang a song together, and he brushed his teeth himself, the whole thing in under five minutes.
— Jen‘I need you to take out the trash’ is not a need
The host says that looking back, she didn't understand what a ‘need’ was — she thought saying ‘I need you to take out the trash’ to her husband was a perfectly logical sentence. Before their daughter was born the two of them almost never argued: mountain biking in summer, skiing in winter, because the ad agency they worked at represented resorts and paid them in vouchers. After their daughter was born everything changed: during his three weeks of paternity leave her husband would fetch her anything she wanted, and the rest of the time he was training for a hundred-mile ride and watching the Tour de France. She says it was learning that she had needs for ‘collaboration, partnership, effort being seen’ that actually pried open the problems between them; before that she was carrying a large amount of resentment inside her with no idea how to handle it.
— JenWhen you're triggered, the problem isn't the person who interrupted you
The host says her biggest trigger is being interrupted — the moment her husband interrupts her she flies into a rage, most recently over how much postage a package needed. She always assumed the cause was simply that her husband interrupted her, and that if he stopped, everything would be fine. Recording in July 2018 with intergenerational trauma expert Dr. Rebecca Babcock-Fenerci, she traced it live to her own father, a special education teacher who would treat sixteen-year-olds like ten-year-olds and who, for a stretch, lectured her every night. Later, in the car, she interrupted her daughter, and her daughter said ‘Don't interrupt me, Mama,’ and her husband looked at her and said ‘She is you.’ She says that was the moment she realized this had never been only about the two people in the room, and out of it she developed the ‘Tame Your Triggers’ course, which grew from a one-month module to ten weeks.
— JenThe handmade book she made while pregnant was full of expectations for her child
The host describes a book she made while pregnant: three covers, one in the middle and one on each side, opening in both directions, brown book cloth with a beige spine, the word ‘me’ cut out of the board on one cover and ‘you’ embossed on the other when you flipped it over — the concept being ‘you came out of me.’ On the ‘me’ side she wrote her own feelings and thoughts; on the ‘you’ side she wrote to Carys, whom she had not yet met. She reads out the earliest batch of ‘expectations for you’: I hope you're smart, or at least average; I hope you're the kind of child who shakes hands with people instead of hiding behind my legs; I hope you like both roughhousing and pretty things; I hope you don't cry all the time; I hope when you fall you get up yourself and say ‘I'm okay.’ She says looking back now, her biggest mistake was not knowing how to simply be with a person, to let them be their whole self and witness that, without carrying ideas about how they should be.
— JenKohn's principle two: reconsider your demands first
The host says she once thought she would play the role of ‘enforcer,’ and even wrote ‘I hope you can love me the way I love him’ on her pregnancy expectations list. She says RIE loosened the soil for her, but what actually planted the seed was Alfie Kohn's Unconditional Parenting. She shares a few of its principles: principle two is to reconsider your demands — ‘maybe when a child won't do what you ask, the problem isn't the child, it's what you're asking’; principle five is to change the way you look, not just the way you act — when you see your child do the thing you asked them not to do, your first reaction is curiosity about what they're struggling with, not how to make them stop; principle ten is ‘attribute to your child the best motive consistent with the observed facts,’ and she says when she quotes it she changes the ending to ‘consistent with the observed behavior,’ because ‘there are no facts, only what we observe.’
— JenThe couple relationship isn't a different subject, it's the same one
The host says she long believed the couple relationship and the parent-child relationship were completely different things — when she started the parenting membership eight years ago she asked Dr. Laura Froyen to write the co-parenting module, because she had no idea how to handle a partner relationship. She says her parenting shift toward collaboration was relatively easy, because she had no ten-year-old habits with her daughter; but with Alvin she had been together ten years and had never learned how to disagree, because most of that time was spent doing hobbies they loved, and she didn't mind doing most of the housework. It was only when she took Gottman training that she realized this was almost the same work she had been doing with her child all these years — while also believing the Gottman method itself has a few key flaws. She recruited couples from the membership to record real arguments, using modified tools, and one couple — where the husband had refused to discuss a toxic issue — found that after his wife listened for ten minutes with a genuine intent to understand him, he was willing to talk, and in that same session they reached an agreement to move forward.
— JenParenting was never a one-household affair
The host says that before she had a child she barely interacted with children and didn't much like them, and assumed that after having one she would still be the same person who needed no support. Her family was three thousand to six thousand miles away. She says we are never told we will need support, that family may be unwilling or unable to provide it, and so we never think to want it. She mentions a facilitator in her daughter's ‘non-school’ program, in her twenties, with no children, with a job, who didn't need the money, who set aside just one afternoon a week simply because she liked being with children — and this created stability for the whole schedule: if one parent facilitator got sick, there were others in the week who could cover. She says if she had done something like this when she was younger, she could have created that kind of space for a family while she still had the capacity, and would have learned a little about how to be with children.
— JenIn their own words · checked verbatim
It was a massive learning experience for me to see that this framework that has been cited over twenty-six thousand times and that for six decades has basically defined the entire body of research on parenting as a verb, as a thing you do, is based on 146 White middle-class preschoolers in the town where I happen to live.
Jen9:19
even though it seems like we have to control things for them to happen the way we want, when we stop trying to control them, our kids stop resisting us.
Jen21:07
here's a very unsettling possibility. Perhaps when your child doesn't do what you're demanding, the problem isn't with the child but with what it is you're demanding.
Jen33:14
We were built to raise kids in groups. And somewhere along the way, some of us lost that. And we don't find out until the precise moment that we need it, and that we don't have a map to build it.
Jen45:51
Every single one of them, I had to learn twice. Once in my head from a book or a study or a conversation with a guest. And then again, much more slowly, much harder in the actual moment with Carys or Alvin or other people around me.
Jen46:13
Ten years ago I didn't have a village so I built one and we're still building it one parent at a time.
Jen48:02
Figures
| Years since the podcast launched | 10 years | 1:57 |
| Episodes published | 300+ | 1:57 |
| Books and academic articles read for the show | More than 10,000 | 1:57 |
| Times the Baumrind parenting framework has been cited | More than 26,000 | 9:19 |
| Original sample size of that framework | 146 white, middle-class preschoolers | 9:19 |
| Distance the host hiked the Tour du Mont Blanc with her eight-week-old daughter | 75 miles, 28,000 feet of elevation gain, 10 days | 27:55 |
| Evolution of the ‘Tame Your Triggers’ course length | From a one-month module to 10 days, two weeks, then 10 weeks | 27:09 |
| Listening time needed for the husband's shift in the couple coaching | 10 minutes | 39:07 |
Glossary
- RIE / Resources for Infant Educarers
- A parenting approach founded by Magda Gerber, whose core is treating infants as whole people worthy of respect.
- authoritative parenting
- High responsiveness plus high control, treated in Western research as the ‘good’ parenting style.
- authoritarian parenting
- High control without responsiveness to the child's needs, associated with negative outcomes in Western research.
- Special Time
- A daily practice of a set period of parent-child time led entirely by the child, used to meet the need for connection.
- Gottman method
- A couple-relationship research and coaching system built on observing patterns of interaction between partners.
How to listen
Parents who are stuck in their child's behavior problems and starting to doubt the ‘punishment and consequences’ toolkit, especially families with a diagnosed or neurodivergent child.
The roughly two-minute listener-submission intro at the top and the membership pitch at the end can be skipped.