Parenting Beyond Power: How to Use Connection and Collaboration to Transform Your Family—and the World

Your Parenting Mojo podcaster Lumanlan debuts with a mostly successful program on how to “move beyond traditional command-and-control parenting approaches like time-outs, punishments, and rewards.” She suggests that rewards reduce children’s intrinsic motivation to complete tasks and make it less likely they’ll continue to do so once parents stop doling them out. Instead, she urges parents to identify and address the roots of children’s undesirable behavior by talking with them about how they’re feeling. Examples from families Lumanlan has corresponded with show the advice at work, as when she illustrates the importance of making children feel heard by describing how a mother curbed her four-year-old son’s tantrums by telling him “she understood how hard it was” for him to have to share his mother’s attention with his older sibling. Passages proposing connections between control-based parenting and white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism are a bit garbled (it’s unclear, for example, why Lumanlan categorizes saying “I’m the parent; I know better than you” as white supremacist and “I’m in charge here” as patriarchal instead of vice versa), but the compassionate guidance will be a boon to parents eager to move away from punitive child-rearing strategies. This gives parents much to ponder. (Sept.)