“We Want to Do Things Differently”: A Conversation with Jen Lumanlan about PARENTING BEYOND POWER
For several years, my six-year-old daughter has said that her favorite book is The Giving Tree. This book is widely acknowledged to send a problematic message about self-sacrifice and codependence, so much so that it’s gotten its own parody rewrite (The Tree That Set Healthy Boundaries.) My daughter doesn’t know about that controversy of course—she told me that she likes the book because “it makes me think about time passing.” I don’t think she sees herself in the little boy, nor me in the tree. But like many parents who have read the book before me, I identify a little too strongly with the withered old stump that the tree becomes at the end, having been stripped of its apples, branches and trunk by the never-satisfied child. I feel like I give everything of myself to my kids; I feel like it’s never enough for them.
I read a lot of parenting books that promise to make me feel less like a withered old stump, or at least promise that if I follow their steps, my children will do something that they aren’t currently doing: they’ll sleep through the night, potty train with ease, clean up without a fuss, eat something other than lightly salted spaghetti (no butter). I often find some ideas of these books useful. Almost always, I feel lost in the fantasy they give me that my home life could look like a Montessori Instagram with just a few tweaks. But I can get frustrated with how myopic they can feel: in a world with so many pressing problems, where so many children face dire dangers, it can feel indulgent to focus so much energy on my already very well-off children. Also, parenting books tend to zoom in exclusively on what happens in the walls of our homes and ignore the larger context of the world. I’ve read many books written by and aimed at well-off White women, like myself, for instance, that admonishes us to “talk to our children about race” but that never acknowledge that sending our kids to heavily segregated schools (as most schools in this country are) might teach them a lot of messages about race that we don’t intend.
I wrote a book that grappled with some of those ideas, and met Jen Lumanlan when she interviewed me about that book for her excellent podcast, Your Parenting Mojo. At the end of the interview, we talked about her own forthcoming book, and how she was still searching for the perfect title. She explained that it was a book that was aimed at helping parents with the day-to-day challenges of their children’s behavior but that was also focused on combatting toxic systems like White supremacy and capitalism. She wanted a title that captured both those ideas. I couldn’t come up with one, and couldn’t easily see how one book could capture both ideas, but I was definitely intrigued.
But now her book is out, and titled, and it delivers on its promise. Parenting Beyond Power: How to Use Connection and Collaboration to Transform Your Family—and the World, came out in September. “It delves into the three social forces that are core components of Eurocentric culture: patriarchy, capitalism, and White supremacy, and examines how these toxic systems shape family life in our culture. The book makes the case that the way we use our power with our children teaches them how power should operate—and that often, the way we use our power inadvertently teaches lessons that we didn’t intend. She writes, “We can tell [our children]: ‘Respect BIPOC people. Respect women. Respect the earth.’ But if our daily actions with them communicate, ‘I have more power than you, and I’m going to use it to make you comply with my wishes,’ then they’re going to end up using their own power against others in harmful ways.”
But this isn’t a parenting book that tells parents that they’re doing everything wrong, nor that they should just cede all power and let children turn the home into a bacchanal of Oreos and Paw Patrol (like my eldest would if I let her). Instead, the central idea of the book is that all behavior comes from unmet needs. The aforementioned toxic social systems tell us to suppress and ignore both our needs and children’s, but we can make a different choice. It suggests that understanding our children’s underlying needs, as well as our own, can help us to reach solutions that work for our whole family. It also covers what to do in the rare situation where you can’t find a solution that meets everyone’s needs—and shows examples of how to firmly and confidently tell children that this time, the parent’s needs are going to win out (something I, like the tree in the story, need to work on.) It doesn’t ask parents to become self-sacrificial tree stumps, nor children to become angelic automatons that always do our bidding. I stayed up late, highlighting and marking up pages, feeling like this was a parenting book that saw me as both a person and a parent, and also that it gave voice to the challenge of parenting in a culture that values violence and domination more than care and collaboration. With clear writing and lots of examples, it shows how parents can meet their own needs as well as their children’s, and raise the next generation to stop perpetuating toxic social forces that are at the root of so many of our world’s problems.
Thanks to Jen for this conversation. – Sarah W. Jaffe
Sarah: If you’d asked me before reading your book whether there was a relationship between how we get our kids to brush our teeth and toxic social systems, I would have had a hard time seeing it. But your book makes a convincing case. Can you summarize how they’re connected?
Jen: Basically, the idea is that there are these big social forces that shape our world: White supremacism, patriarchy, capitalism. Our own parents were trying to ensure our success in our culture, which is dominated by those social forces I just mentioned. The process of being prepared to succeed in those systems profoundly hurt us, because it’s not possible to be a whole person and succeed under those systems—there are going to be huge parts of you that are unacceptable. And a lot of us got messages from our parents like: “you’re too big; you’re too much; you’re too difficult for me to cope with.” They trained us to stop expressing our needs. We used to resist when we were little, until we realized there was no point in fighting back and it was easier to go with the flow and do what was expected of us.
Now as we in turn have become parents, a lot of us feel caught: we want to do things differently, because we see how much it hurt us to not be able to express our full selves. When our children resist our requests, we know we don’t want to react in the same way our parents did, but we don’t have a roadmap for what to do. But how we navigate our children’s resistance shapes what our children learn about power.
And very often, liberal parents have these big ideas about how the world should work—that everybody deserves respect and care. But those bigger values often don’t show up in the way we interact with our children because when we’re stressed, we fall back on the control-based mechanisms our parents used. Ultimately, White supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism are all about power. They’re about who has more power over whom. This book gives a framework for parents to show up in your relationships with your children in a way that’s aligned with your values.
Sarah: Did this connection, between how we navigate conflicts with our children and these larger power structures, become obvious to you all at once, or was it a more gradual process?
Jen: It was a gradual process. I started exploring White supremacy on my podcast (you can find those episodes at yourparentingmojo.com/race). I also was interviewing experts in episodes that touched how patriarchy and capitalism shape our world.
But at the same time the parents in my Parenting Membership were asking me things like: how do I get my kid to brush their teeth? How do I get my kids out the door in the morning? How do I get my kid to get in the bath? And it was just so bizarre for the longest time because it felt like I was on these two parallel tracks of the big social issues and the daily challenges.
I started seeing the connection in a workshop I run called Taming Your Triggers. The parents I see there often say “I was fine until my kid got to the age where I really struggled with my own parents.” Then the parent finds themselves triggered.
Looking at the behavior through an expression of unmet needs helped me connect the dots. The parents I worked with often didn’t understand that they even had needs. Why don’t the parents understand needs? Oh, it’s because their needs were suppressed for so long that they’ve forgotten how to see them. Why were their needs suppressed for so long? Because their own parents couldn’t cope with their needs and were trying to get them to suppress those needs to raise them to do well in our society. Well, what kind of society is that—what kind of social forces that are impacting that?
Sarah: In your Appendix that you list out eight categories of needs. You didn’t break them up into kid categories and adult categories—i.e., adults can also have a need for play, and kids have a need for self-care.
What needs do you see that most commonly go unmet for children? What about for adults?
Jen: Well that’s the thing about needs—they’re universal. And I should say that this isn’t my invention; this is heavily grounded in Marshall Rosenberg’s work on Nonviolent Communication.
In respectful parenting circles there’s a popular idea that all behavior is communication, but communication of what? What is my child trying to tell me when they launch themselves across the room to hit me?
I have a quiz, which helps to guide parents to what are likely to be some of their child’s biggest unmet needs. For young children, autonomy tends to be big; the idea that I want to decide what happens to my body. But that’s a big one for all of us, right? It’s just that when children want autonomy, we often call it “difficult behavior.” When our need for autonomy isn’t met by someone, we say that other person is an asshole.
For children, connection tends to be a big one as well. There was a parent in my Taming Your Triggers workshop: every morning she was having a fight with her kid about getting dressed on her own. Finally, after we started the workshop, she asked her kid: “why don’t you want to get dressed?” And her kid said: “I like knowing that you were the last person to touch my clothes in the morning before I put them on.” Now we know the child has a need for connection, and of course her mother is happy to help her to meet those needs. The parent hugged the child’s clothes before the child put them on, and that ended the fighting. Having a better understanding of needs gets us out of this fighting over strategies we’re using to meet our needs that don’t work for one of us. Needs don’t conflict; the conflict arises in the strategies we use to meet our needs.
For adults, the most common unmet needs in our relationship with our children are things like collaboration, harmony, and ease. So often, when we can understand what our child’s need is and help them to meet their need, then our need for collaboration, for rest, for harmony, for ease gets met just by extension. We don’t even have to do anything extra.
Sarah: “Gentle parenting” has gotten hyped in the past few years. How is your approach different or similar to that approach?
Jen: Even in the gentle parenting guidance, there’s often an undercurrent that it’s parents’ job to get your child to do what you want them to do (I hear parents say things like “I need you to put your shoes on”). We call our wants “needs” and our children’s wants “wants.” Coercion can still happen under the guise of gentle parenting. An example of that would be the advice to offer a child two choices, both of which are acceptable to you (“Do you want to put your shoes on now or in two minutes?”). Where that falls apart is when we haven’t taken the time to consider: are either of the choices acceptable to the child? Do either of the choices meet the child’s need? Maybe magically, one of the choices you present does happen to meet a child’s need, or maybe if your child is young enough, then they might go along with the idea and feel like they really are getting to choose. But then they get old enough, they realize, yeah, actually, neither of these choices meets my needs, and they’re going to resist.
The main idea in the book is that our real job as parents is to understand both what our real needs are, and what our child’s real needs are. (That’s another key difference: in gentle parenting, it’s the parent’s role—usually the mother’s role because the mother is usually the one learning about parenting in a patriarchal society—to provide an optimal experience for the child. I say: No! Your needs are just as important as your child’s needs, and we’re going to get them met more of the time.) Once we understand both people’s needs, we can try to find the cognitive flexibility to find ways to meet both needs.
So in the examples of the shoes: the parents’ needs here are for collaboration, for ease in the morning, for competence in their work, i.e. to get to work at a certain time and meet commitments to co-workers. The child’s need might be for autonomy in where and how they put on the shoes; it might be for connection with us; or it might be for comfort, where the shoes are causing a sensory challenge. But when you understand the need, you can come up with a strategy: If their need is for autonomy, you could let them choose which shoes to wear, or just bring the shoes with you so they can choose to put them on instead of having their feet hurt/cold. If their need is for connection, you could help them put their shoes on. The child’s need determines whether and how the shoes go on the feet.
How can we get both our needs met is that’s a very different question than: “how do I get my child to do what I want them to do?” We can probably imagine 10 different options for how we could get a child’s shoes on without a struggle, but whether that option will ‘work’ will depend on us accurately understanding our child’s need—which we can ask them about! We don’t have to guess. Our White supremacy, patriarchy, capitalist culture is based on getting ourselves and others to suppress our needs. When we can understand and meet each other’s needs, we are dismantling that culture.
Sarah: There’s a passage in the beginning of the book that speaks directly to BIPOC parents, to acknowledge that some of the strategies in your book could potentially be riskier for them, which is something I’ve never seen another parenting book do. It’s much less risky for me, a well-off White parent, to pick my battles and sometimes send my kid out into the world with a wild-looking outfit and unkempt hair without any fear that someone is going to call child services on me. How did you decide to include that piece of the book?
Jen: Both systemic racism and the ways that individual White people respond to individual people of color impacts whether those people of color can get their needs met, and how they can meet their child’s needs. And it would have been disingenuous, I think, to have not acknowledged that. But figuring out what to say about it was challenging. I had a group of podcast listeners who helped me work on the book, and we bounced this idea around for a while. How do I say who this is for? How do I make it inclusive of everybody who wants to read it (and my listeners who identify as BIPOC say these methods are useful for all parents).
When my daughter was little and wanted to go to school in pajamas, I just sent her in pajamas. She will open snacks in grocery stores and we’ll scan the empty package at the checkout without fear that we’ll be caught ‘shoplifting.’ That a BIPOC parent may not be able to risk these things speaks to the racism in our society, and that I had no idea about the discrepancy speaks to my White privilege.
I addressed the book primarily to White parents because frankly it’s our work to do to shift our racist society to a point where a BIPOC parent don’t have to fear being reported to Child Protective Services—or the police—for parenting choices that White parents are able to make without fear of such repercussions.
If White parents want to raise anti-racist children, we have to do more than telling them to be anti-racist, though that is also essential. We have to be in a relationship with our children that breaks down the power dynamic that leads to racism.
Sarah: What do you hope parents will take away from this book?
Jen: It’s been gratifying to me that early readers have been in touch to say things like: “Now I understand why my mom went all-in on capitalism, after she escaped a domestic violence situation” and “It’s so uncomfortable for me to talk about White supremacy but you open up this topic in such a non-threatening way.” I want parents to have a better understanding of why parenting seems so hard right now, and to know that it’s not because they are terrible parents; it’s because these social forces have really hurt us.
Then with that understanding, the rest of the book provides practical tools in the form of a repeatable framework that we can use to address any challenging situation with our child (or with any other person, really). When we understand our true need and our child’s need (and the book helps parents to do this), we can find strategies that meet both of our needs. It’s a beautiful, joyful, easeful way of being in relationship with other people and it doesn’t mean our children can’t be successful. We hurt so much now because we weren’t allowed to be our whole selves. Raising children who can do that gives them a great deal of confidence to take out into the world.
We aren’t indulging the child, we are helping them to see that we parents are people with needs too, and that both of us deserve to have our needs met. When our children have a model for seeing and meeting multiple people’s needs in a relationship, they will take this out into other relationships as well.
About the Author
Sarah W. Jaffe is a lifestyle writer with Romper whose work has appeared in Slate, Catapult, Mutha, and The Rumpus, among other places. Her work has focused on mental health, the healthcare system, and the foster care system. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and 4-year-old daughter and is currently getting an MFA in creative non-fiction at The New School.
Related Posts
Mother Doll: Excerpt from the Novel by Katya Apekina →
Embracing the Shadow: Healing My Teenage Self Through Motherhood →
“Eternally Grateful to Grow Up in NYC”: Jennifer Baum Looks Back on the Just City →
