Evidence-Based Parenting E-Book

Matilda Gosling

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 500

Beschreibung

'So useful … extremely well-researched' - The Times A search for 'parenting' returns over a billion unique hits on Google. How can parents know which approaches actually work to support their children to be happy, healthy and fulfilled while maintaining their own sanity? Evidence-Based Parenting draws directly on more than one thousand studies, and indirectly on thousands more, to create a single evidence base and reference manual for parents. This vast knowledge base has been condensed, for the first time, into straightforward ideas to support children's relationships, physical health, learning and play, behaviour, and happiness and well-being.

Leseprobe

For Pete, Lola and Ivy

Contents

IntroductionPart One: Cross-cutting parenting approaches 1 You 2 Home life 3 Being a parent: what to avoid 4 Being a parent: things that work Part Two: Focused parenting approaches 5 Relationships 6 Behaviour 7 Physical health 8 Learning and play 9 Happiness and well-being Epilogue: Your own approach 10 A simple road map Appendix 1: Limitations and approach notes Appendix 2: Links between Parts One and Two AcknowledgementsEndnotes

Introduction

The concept

This book aims to answer one question: what actually works when it comes to parenting? It draws on thousands of pieces of research on subjects such as child development, family systems, relationships, mental health and genetics. The evidence has been distilled into simple, practical suggestions to support children’s relationships, physical health, learning and play, behaviour, and happiness and well-being. All families are different – what works for one may be ineffectual or impractical to another – and this book recognises this by offering a variety of evidence-based alternatives. Parents can select ideas using their expert knowledge of what’s most likely to work for their own children.

The need for an evidence base

Given the fundamental importance of parenting to almost every human on this planet – if not as a parent, then as a child of one – an overview of the parenting evidence base is remarkably absent.

As a parent and professional social researcher, I spent years trying to find something that condensed high-quality research and evidence on how to bring up a child to be a happy, healthy adult in a way that preserves parents’ sanity. I found lots of books that took a particular philosophy and used it as a cornerstone for recommendations. I read in-depth descriptions of the different stages of a child’s development and how these relate to parenting. I found excellent work using the principles of economics to create decision-making frameworks for families. I discovered a huge range of writing by psychologists and parenting experts who used lessons from their own practice to construct advice for parents.

What I couldn’t find was a concrete summary of what works according to the vast academic and expert evidence base, much less a version of this distilled into a selection of ideas from which parents can choose according to their knowledge of what’s likely to work best. Parents are, after all, authorities on their own children. I also couldn’t find anything that attempted to paint the whole picture, drawing not only on parenting research but also on the full range of social sciences research, and even on other academic disciplines such as biology and history. If I’m writing about how to reduce arguments within a family, I need to understand the research on conflict. An overview of genetics research helps me to fathom out where a child’s environment can make a positive difference to their health. Knowing how to support children’s behaviour means I need an understanding of research on psychology and child development.

This book emerged from these gaps. The variety of research findings also informs the idea that what works for one child or family may be completely inappropriate for another. Parents need a range of evidence-based options. The most successful approach might work for sixty out of a hundred children, but what about the other forty?

The various ideas offered in this book help answer this question. What works in parenting can cut across different philosophies and concepts. Taking high-quality research as a starting point equips parents with the knowledge of what’s likely to work for them and their children, according to their particular circumstances. And my children have benefited from this approach, even if they roll their eyes every time I try something new on the back of the latest research paper.

What this book covers and what it leaves out

This book draws directly on well over a thousand studies and indirectly on thousands more to create an evidence-based reference manual for busy parents. It focuses on children between the ages of two and ten. There’s already a vast literature on babies, including reasonable evidence summaries, and teenagers are sufficiently different from younger children to deserve their own dedicated follow-up. I occasionally draw from research on teenagers and adults when I look at long-term outcomes of individual parenting decisions.

The geographic focus of the research reviewed for this book is mainly Anglophone countries – the UK, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – because culture has a strong bearing on which parenting practices work best.

I talk about parents and parenting in the interests of simplicity of language, but of course the ideas in here apply just as much to other caregivers. If you’re a step-parent or other guardian, please know that I include you when I talk about parents.

Finally, and importantly, this book focuses on positive strategies and things that can be changed. Those that can’t, such as how much money a family has or where they live, are irrelevant to what parents can do to make life at home easier or to support their children better.

How to use this book

Practical suggestions drawn from evidence are presented according to three levels of research quality:

High-quality research evidence: meta-analyses, systematic reviews, randomised controlled trials or longitudinal studies of more than 1,000 people.Moderate-quality research evidence: studies showing links but not causality.Anecdotal research or expert advice: suggestions based on clinical practice or similar.

Presenting the research in this way enables parents to make up their own minds about how to interpret the information. Most study findings apply to children in general, but no child is an average. In each section of the book, a number of approaches are covered. If one suggestion doesn’t work for you and your family, you can experiment with other ideas.

This book illustrates the evidence in a particular way, although there are many ways it could have been presented. Under any way of structuring the evidence, though, there’s inevitable overlap. There’s also debate within the research about precisely what it is that makes a positive difference to child outcomes. In some cases, particularly for lower-quality evidence, links between parenting decisions and outcomes for children may be due to some other, underlying factor. A link between children playing in nature and having higher levels of resilience might be explained by adventurousness. It’s not absurd to suggest that when parents model adventurousness, their children are more likely to be resilient, and adventurous parents are more likely to encourage their children to play in nature.

Nothing has been suggested in this book that’s likely to harm your child. While you may want to prioritise suggestions based on the highest-quality evidence, it’s still worth looking at the other options in here. Sometimes the most interesting ideas come from lower-quality studies. These may contain evidence of things too specific to be tested in a big research trial, or perhaps it wouldn’t be ethical to test the findings in this way.

The book is organised into two main parts. The first covers universal approaches: these can be helpful for many children across multiple aspects of their lives. Avoiding harsh discipline, for example, is linked to better outcomes for children across a range of areas, including physical health, mental well-being and behaviour. When using this section of the book, it’s important to think about whether and how any recommendations apply to your own situation. Even some of these more universal approaches may not work for every family and every child. For instance, some children find making decisions difficult and stressful. Giving these children autonomy and room to make choices, unless done carefully and gradually, may not be helpful for them. That said, the diversity of ideas should mean you find plenty you can use. This part of the book is arranged into things you can do as an individual, within the structure of your home and family, and as a parent. There are concrete suggestions for each area, and thoughts on how you can put these into practice, such as looking at how you can dial down tempers when family members keep arguing. I’d have had no idea where to start with calming family conflict without having pored over the research. I’ve also seen how sorely clarity is needed in the research literature about what the findings mean, practically, for individual families. When the research says that household chaos is bad for children, what does that mean in terms of the day-to-day changes parents can make to make things a little less chaotic? In every case, the book draws out practical implications and examples. Theory is as good as useless if it’s not clear how to apply it.

The second part contains focused approaches for supporting your child with specific outcomes, namely:

Relationships: how to build your relationship with your child, bolster sibling relationships and support your child’s friendships.Behaviour: what you can do to minimise children acting up and to promote socially minded behaviour.Physical health: how to improve your child’s sleep, ensure they willingly get enough exercise, and help them to develop a healthy relationship with food and with their body.Learning and play: how to support your child in the areas of screens, outdoor play, learning and life skills.Happiness and well-being: how to promote your child’s mental health, resilience and self-esteem.

This second part presents the research in each of these areas and translates it into evidence-based suggestions. These offer a variety of avenues you can try based on your knowledge of what’s likely to work for your child, your family and your life. Part Two also presents troubleshooting sections for each area, looking at what you can do if your child is being bullied, feeling anxious or having regular meltdowns.

The Epilogue provides a summary of the book’s most important points. It recaps the main advice for parents and their children, according to the evidence, and discusses how parents can apply the different ideas to their daily lives.

There are two key points when reading this book:

It doesn’t need to be read from start to finish. You can dip into the sections you find most relevant to your own situation.It’s not a blueprint. There is no such thing as a perfect parent, and there’s no universal recipe for parenting. The evidence base is not there to provide a series of instructions, but instead is a constellation of ideas from which you can create your own path.

Full references are available online at www.matildagosling.com/parenting.

Parenting styles: warmth and control

I’ve included a brief introduction to parenting styles, as these are often used in research studies to explore what creates the best outcomes for children in specific areas such as behaviour or health. The most popular way of classifying parenting styles is to divide them into categories based on warmth and control.1

Authoritative parenting. This is the gold standard across the research literature. Authoritative parents treat their children with warmth while also setting clear boundaries. Imagine a parent who’s affectionate, creates routines and isn’t afraid to say no to their child. This parent listens carefully to their child and is flexible enough to change direction when something’s not working.Permissive parenting. Permissive parents are warm, with low levels of control. This is the parent (and we all know one, or are one) who gives masses of affection and little in the way of hard edges. The child of permissive parents is the one who stays up late and gets to raid the snack cupboard with abandon.Authoritarian parenting. Authoritarian parents are cold, with high levels of control. This kind of parenting was probably more common in our own childhoods, and even more widespread among our grandparents’ generation. The authoritarian parent provides much fodder for children’s literature – the classic idea of a distant figure exacting high standards of behaviour and compliance from their slightly fearful but internally rebellious child.Neglectful parenting. Neglectful parents, who show neither warmth nor control, have children with the worst outcomes of all. Rest assured that if you’re reading this book, you’re unlikely to be this kind of parent.

What does it mean to be warm and to exert healthy control? In practice, warmth can be physical, shown to your child through kisses, hugs and other warm gestures. It can also be shown in what you say, such as telling your child why you like the snail picture they drew or showing interest in their new-found dragon obsession. Warmth can also be measured by its absence: when children feel rejected by their parents’ hostility or indifference, or when they feel unloved or unappreciated.

While warmth is easy to define, control is trickier. There’s an important difference between healthy boundaries relating to behaviour and trying to control what children think or feel, or the decisions they make. You might show healthy control to a child who’s screaming at you by making it clear they need to express their anger without yelling. Unhealthy control might be expressed to the same child by telling them they’re wrong for feeling angry or showing them through your body language that you think they’re wrong. The ‘control’ part of the grid above relates to the healthy form of control. Ideas about how you can do this are explored in Chapter 4.

This illustration shows how authoritative parenting is linked to children’s relationships, their health, learning and play, behaviour, and happiness and well-being. Each area connects to many others, and pulling one thread of parenting may have knock-on effects elsewhere. In other cases, several threads may need teasing at once to make a positive difference to your child.

Authoritative parents, those who successfully combine warmth and healthy control, are more likely than other parents to have children with good mental health and high self-esteem. Their children are less likely to suffer from perfectionism, have behavioural problems or act aggressively. Children with authoritative parents are more likely to act in a socially minded way and to do better at school. They have a more secure relationship with their parents, better relationships with their siblings and find it easier to make friends. They’re less likely to be bullied. These children are more likely to exercise and to be a healthy weight, and are less likely to take up smoking when they get older.2

It is helpful to keep this warmth-and-control framework in mind when you read the rest of the book, but it’s not worth getting too distracted by it. It’s more useful to think about what works in practice. How can you show warmth to your child on days you might be struggling? How can you set healthy boundaries while avoiding controlling your child in ways that might be less helpful for them? These questions, and many more, are explored in the chapters that follow.

Influences on parenting styles

Parents affect their children not just by their parenting styles but also by who they are. If you’re naturally pessimistic, your child is more likely to become Eeyore than Tigger. And parenting styles aren’t always as much of a choice as they might appear. For example, parents who find it hard to control their emotions are more likely to be authoritarian with their children – it’s tricky to be warm with your child if you’re drowning in your own feelings. How much stress parents are under also has a direct effect on their parenting style. It’s easier to be a ‘good’ parent if you’ve had lots of sleep, you’re not worried about money, you live in a safe area and you don’t have multiple demands on your time.

Just as parenting styles can affect children and how they sit within the world, children themselves can influence the parenting they receive. Being warm and responsive can be instinctive when you have a child who wants hugs and to snuggle in a chair with stories, but it’s taxing when you have one who’s raging at you for cutting their sandwiches into the wrong shape. That’s not to say that how you act as a parent can’t make a child less likely to scream at you, but children have different temperaments. It’s much harder to parent well when you don’t have an easy child. A child’s agreeableness can also fluctuate with their mood, of course. As any parent knows, the same child can morph from angelic cuddler to vengeful havoc monster in seconds.

Individual parenting decisions can only do so much. Outcomes for children are dictated by their local area, the society in which they live, and national economic and social policy. Do children have local green spaces they can reach easily? Are they able to breathe reasonably clean air? Do parents get paid enough to allow their children to be brought up with good food, access to toys and things to help them learn, sufficient space within the home and parents who aren’t worn down by financial stress? These questions are beyond this book’s scope, but it’s important to be clear that parents aren’t single-handedly responsible for their children’s health and well-being. Parents can only do as much as the system around them permits.

A note on ‘good enough’ parenting

One of the most stressful things about being a parent, at least in my experience, is thinking about the things that are lacking or being done badly. I think about the club my older daughter’s desperate to attend but can’t, because her parents are both working and it’s too far for her to walk. I think about the fact that both my kids eat too much sugar, which we have somehow achieved at the same time as over-controlling what they eat. I think about long days and evenings and tiredness and me reacting badly to yet another fight between the two of them. I think that I don’t play enough with my children. I think about the time on the way back from school when I’m hurrying home to work, and my daughter sits under a tree and refuses to move because I haven’t gone back to school to get the book she left behind. The only thing I can think of at that moment is to threaten not taking her to see her best friend the next day.

But show me the perfect parent, and I’ll show you a perfect child. They don’t exist. Donald Winnicott was an early parenting theorist who came up with the idea of the ‘good enough’ parent. (More accurately, he came up with the idea of the good enough ‘mother’, although we’ll forgive him that, as he was doing most of his writing in the middle of the last century.) He theorised that there’s value in children not having somebody who’s available and responds immediately all the time. Children need to learn to tolerate frustration. Making mistakes gives us the opportunity to repair them and to model for our children how to do this.3 The key is to try to limit these mistakes, as far as possible, and to make sure our children aren’t overwhelmed by them.

This idea is different from the rest of the book, as it’s based on logic and experts’ views, not on the results of stacks of research reports. The reason for this is simple. There’s no easy way to test outcomes for bad parents versus good enough parents versus perfect parents in a research setting, and it’s hard to test something with a group of people who can be found as often as werewolves and unicorns.

I think this is probably my most important point. Amid mountains of data and suggested approaches, it’s vital to say that no parent should try to hold themselves up to impossible, or even exacting, standards. Some ideas in this book will be helpful, some ideas won’t – no family or child is the same, after all – and you’ll only be able to put some of the more successful ideas into practice some of the time. And that’s OK.

Part One

Cross-cutting parenting approaches

Chapter 1

You

Balancing parenthood and general life can wear down the most patient of parents, of which I’m certainly not one. We all have competing pressures. By the end of a typical week, I might have taken one child to the optician to replace a lost pair of glasses, dropped off a forgotten musical instrument at another child’s school, booked dentist appointments, done four or five drop-offs and pickups at different clubs or friends’ houses, cooked multiple meals, put on a mystifying amount of laundry, paid several bills and worked a full week. The gruelling nature of the list probably sounds familiar to you even if the items on it vary. Patience and calm are the aims; irritability and fatigue are often the reality.

But research points to a need to prioritise parents’ own well-being. Decent parenting depends on the parent – how you feel has a massive impact on your child. While life can get in the way of a full night’s sleep, eating well, speaking to friends and doing activities that make us happy, these things help us be kind and loving with our children. It’s a predicament that requires hard choices. When my children were small, I eventually overrode a sense of guilt so I could exercise in my lunch break instead of finishing work as early as I could to spend time with them. I think it was the right decision (I was much nicer to be around).

This chapter looks at what you can do for yourself that will also help your child. So much of what we’re told we need to do for ourselves requires time, but it’s not always possible to wring more hours from a busy day. Some suggestions in this chapter can be done with minimal time input, such as redirecting your energy away from intensive parenting and reframing negative thoughts. And when all else fails, you have the e-nanny. Screens aren’t necessarily a bad thing if the content is good quality and you’re a better parent because you’ve had some time to yourself.

Look after yourself and support your well-being

Research shows that children are better off when their parents are OK. Unless you’re already in the best mental shape of your life, it means either reducing stress or finding ways to manage its impact. This can seem daunting when sources of stress stem not only from general life but also from the fact of being a parent. Routine childcare is more stressful than interactive childcare – preparing meals and getting children to go to bed is probably going to have more of a negative impact on you than playing games together. Mothers tend to find childcare more stressful than fathers do, possibly because they often pick more of it up and are more likely to combine it with other domestic tasks.1

Stress can have its uses if it prompts us to balance our well-being scales a little better, while in other cases, a cue may come from an outside source. My own realisation that I needed to tip the scales more favourably came after I was referred by my doctor for a short period of counselling. This was meant to help me deal with the intense sadness I felt at my dad’s terminal cancer diagnosis, but it reminded me that there were many other areas of my life in which I could look after myself more. The downsides to stress, though, tend to outweigh any utility. Sometimes it’s possible to get into a negative spiral of stress within a family. The stress of being a parent makes children more likely to act up, which then causes further pressure for the parent.

Many sources of stress can’t be magically eliminated. If you have a child with autism spectrum disorder or developmental delay, you’re more likely to experience stress than other parents. If you’ve previously experienced postnatal depression or you have an ill child, your stress levels are also likely to be higher. Your well-being can be affected by financial problems, relationship difficulties or whether you live in a country with supportive family policies. Much of my own stress when my children were very small was internally driven – a creeping sense of ineptitude and an inability to vault over the high bars I’d set myself – but that didn’t make it less real or more controllable.2

All parents experience at least some stress during their children’s early lives. Our frequent lack of influence over its causes makes it important to find other ways to promote well-being. Better well-being can also help protect your child from some of these uncontrollable sources of stress. Even if parents work unusual hours or shift patterns, children are less likely to be affected if their parents are happy and healthy. And while children are affected by their parents’ state of mind, sometimes it’s the children who influence how their parents feel. Parents are less stressed when they have a good relationship with their child, and I’ve run out of fingers and toes to count the number of times my excellent mood has been punctured by a small child who just wants to complain about everything.

What can we do to reduce stress and increase well-being when there’s often little give in our lives? Many things don’t need another adult, money or lots of available time, of course. They can be done while your child is asleep or otherwise distracted; screen time can be invaluable in clawing you back some much-needed headspace. You might want to listen to music or a podcast, read a book, have a hot shower, stretch, lift some heavy weights or chat to a friend. Whatever it is that soothes you, your child will benefit from you being more at ease. Even the ideas with the strongest evidence base are unlikely to work for everybody, though, so don’t worry if you try something and it’s not a success. I’ve tried mindfulness. It’s never going to help me. However, high-quality research throws up a lot of great ideas, so there should be something in the next few paragraphs that chimes with you.

Physical activity is linked to better well-being, but it can be hard to build structured exercise into full days. Workarounds include taking your child to school or clubs on foot, getting off the bus a stop early, or carrying heavy shopping bags home. Small bursts of movement throughout the day can keep your metabolism high. These can be as effective, or even more effective, as doing the same amount of exercise in a single session.3 If you have stairs and you’re at home, you could walk up and down them a few times once an hour, or do some hourly squats or press-ups. (You may be in the ‘don’t tell me to move’ camp. ‘People will detest you for writing this paragraph,’ said my partner. I blame the research.)

Reinterpreting how you think about events that upset you is another way to improve mental health.4 ‘Cognitive reappraisal’ involves finding alternative, more positive explanations for a situation. If a friend cancels dinner with you, you might focus on how overstretched they are instead of worrying they don’t like you enough to prioritise you. If you cancel a trip because you become ill, you might think about now having time to watch a TV programme you’ve been wanting to see or to catch up on sleep. This approach is most useful in situations over which you don’t have control. If you can change a negative situation, you should do so. Your mental health benefits more by changing something awful (or even merely irritating) than it does by accepting it.

Better sleep improves well-being. Tired parents are less likely to be confident about their abilities than those who are better rested, and this lack of confidence leads them to parent less well. The amount of sleep you get may be out of your control, of course. If it’s not, you could try tested strategies like avoiding screens and bright lights near bedtime, reducing the amount of alcohol you drink, going to bed and getting up at the same time every day – including at weekends, however unpleasant that feels – and following a bedtime routine. If you’ve lain awake for more than twenty minutes, it’s recommended you get up for a bit so your brain doesn’t start to associate lying in bed with not sleeping.5 I’ve found that it’s not tempting to do this at 3 a.m. on a cold winter’s night.

Paying attention to the present moment, also known as mindfulness, can reduce parental stress and improve outcomes for children. Kids of mindful parents have better mental health and are less likely to act up.6 You could try an app offering mindfulness meditations, do regular body scans (moving up from your toes to your head to notice how different parts of your body feel) or perhaps pay regular attention to your senses, noticing what you can see, hear, feel, taste and smell at different moments during the day. To show that research findings do not apply to every person, I get spikes of adrenaline when I try to be mindful. For me, paying attention to the present moment reminds me of the things taking time to be mindful has prevented me from doing.

Research also tells us to avoid intensive parenting if we want decent levels of well-being.7 Parents who invest the most time in providing emotional support for their children report worse mental health. This may be because their own needs aren’t met if they have little time available for anything beyond their children. Intensive parents have certain beliefs: they’re the more capable parent, happiness comes mainly from being a parent, parents should always provide stimulation for their children, parenting’s hard (they may have got that bit right), and parents’ own needs are secondary to the needs of their children. It’s worth questioning these beliefs if any of them sound familiar to you.

One aspect of intensive parenting can support parents’ own mental health. This is the investment of thought and effort: doing some research to support your child’s education, perhaps, or finding out-of-school clubs that match their interests. My younger daughter likes hanging upside down like a monkey. It took years of doing nothing, followed by a four-year waiting list, to discover that she would get enormous pleasure out of an aerial circus class. A little more dedicated research earlier on might have got us there sooner.

Time spent with your children – chatting to them, playing games together or watching a film, perhaps – can boost well-being. For many parents, this is the most enjoyable part of their day. At the same time, don’t beat yourself up if this isn’t among your top activities. Your children need your input, but it doesn’t mean you’re an awful parent if you’d rather be working or running or hiding in a corner with a book.

Wider social support is another key ingredient in parental well-being. For those who don’t have close family or friends nearby, options include local community groups or parenting networks. Online communities might help for those with nothing physically near them (though you need to be careful not to compare yourself with other parents on social media. Mumsnet can be invaluable, but it’s not real life).

If your child’s other parent lives with you and you’re doing more than your fair share of childcare, your well-being is likely to be supported by finding better ways of distributing responsibilities. Stress is higher for parents when their partners are less involved than they’d like them to be. I’ve seen marriages end over less. And if you’re in a less-than-happy relationship, it could probably do with some attention. A strong relationship with your partner means that any feelings of misery and insecurity in other areas of your life are less likely to affect your child. Ideas on how to strengthen your relationship are given in the next chapter. If it’s your work, not your relationship, that’s making you miserable, and your job allows for it, you could request flexible working. This has been shown to reduce stress for women and for single parents in particular.8

Strategies to support children’s behaviour represent another potential stake in your happiness palisade. Parents are more content when their children behave well, just as parents’ well-being influences how children behave. I’m happier when my children are chatting away about their day than when they’re scrapping about who got the biggest square of chocolate, and they’re more likely to be in a chatty-not-fighty mood if I’m outwardly happier. (You might well say ‘Dealing with behaviour is all very well in theory, but how do I stop my child from daubing my cat with purple poster paint?’ Ideas about behaviour are covered later in the book, so you may need to accept your unusually coloured mog until you get that far.)

It’s important to go easy on yourself when you’re hurting, when you believe you’ve failed to do something, or when you don’t meet the standards you’ve set for yourself. Being understanding and warm towards yourself is key. Self-compassion helps to improve well-being by reducing any guilt and shame you feel as a parent. If you want to know more about how to be self-compassionate (which is an extremely difficult thing to do if you have a history of being self-critical), it’s worth looking online for the work of Dr Kristin Neff. She offers good, practical advice in this area, and makes the point that we can all learn to be self-compassionate because we do it for other people.

One simple way to be more compassionate towards yourself is to ask the question ‘What do I need?’ and go from there. The answer to this doesn’t need to be about big things like money or relationships. It could be about what you need right now, like a stretch or some breathing exercises, a cup of tea or to give yourself five minutes away from your child while you leave them in a safe space. Ask this question of yourself regularly and respond to the needs you identify.

Expert advice tells us we should consider our own needs, not just those of our children. If you find it hard to make time for yourself, a first step is to list a few things that are important to you – time with friends, a hobby, some exercise. The next step is to schedule time for these things, using another parent or childcare as needed, or doing them while your child is occupied by something else. A Duplo set or Minecraft, depending on your child’s age, are your friends here. Even taking ten minutes a day for yourself can be a good start if you haven’t allowed yourself any time so far. It’s good to be open with your child about giving yourself time; if you’re clear about the need to care for yourself, they’ll be more likely to feel able to do the same for themselves.

Personal well-being is only one tool in an arsenal of things you can do as a parent to help your child (and this arsenal is large enough to fill a book!), so don’t panic if none of these suggestions sounds right for you. If you’re concerned about your well-being and don’t know how to improve it, there are plenty of sections later in this book that can help insulate your child from any negative impacts. But if you’re feeling very anxious or low, it might be an idea to get some support from your doctor or mental health services.

Be aware of and manage your emotions

Some researchers believe there are six major emotions – happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise and fear. Others think there are twenty-seven; more subtle variations might include joy, contentment, envy and rage. Still others have counted many more, creating envy in me of what must be their sophisticated emotional landscape. Healthy management of emotions is rightly seen as something we need to help our children to develop, but it’s just as much a thorny issue for parents. My child’s unlikely to learn patience if she witnesses me railing at traffic or twitching to get on with my day while she ambles over a meal.

When parents show unhealthy anger or express other negative emotions in response to bad behaviour, children behave even worse in future. An angry response to siblings bickering at the dinner table upsets children and makes them more likely to behave that way again, or even to fight with each other more. Positive behaviour is linked to parents reacting well to how their children express their feelings and being able to discuss them: ‘It’s been a long day. How about we reset? How are you both feeling?’ is more likely to get a positive result than ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, will you two just stop it?’

Managing emotions in a healthy way means taking a moment to think about how to react to a particular feeling – should I shout at my child for dropping the contents of her cereal bowl on the floor and making me late, or should I ask her to help me clean it up? It also involves being aware of how you are feeling, changing the way you think about things when your previous way of thinking is unhelpful to you, and being self-compassionate about feeling angry or scared. If you’re feeling on edge because your gas bill has arrived and it’s not going to be easy to pay it, you might pause to recognise that it’s a tough situation, and that it’s not surprising you’re feeling upset. This recognition may help you avoid transferring the stress onto your child.

Being aware of your emotions is the first step in supporting your child to be emotionally aware (something covered later in the book). This awareness may be as simple as linking physical feelings to emotional states. When you feel angry, you might notice that your face is hot and you feel light-headed; when you feel worried, it might be hard to breathe in deeply and you may have a tight sensation across the top of your stomach. The second step, if you sometimes feel overwhelmed by your feelings, is to find ways to manage them healthily.

High-quality research suggests that healthy management of emotions means taking time to consider your thoughts and feelings, rather than avoiding them.9 People who try to suppress what they think or feel tend to focus on their thoughts and feelings more than they would have done otherwise. If somebody says ‘Don’t think of the Eiffel Tower in a thunderstorm,’ it’s hard not to imagine it. The same is true if you tell yourself to get over your feelings. You might want to find alternative explanations for things that would normally make you feel sad, angry, frustrated or otherwise negative as part of this process. Cognitive reappraisal, which I talked about earlier in this chapter, can help you feel better. Again, it’s most useful in situations over which you have no control.

Distraction is another tool when you find yourself endlessly focused on a particular feeling or event. This is different from suppression; you’re not exactly trying to ignore what you feel, but instead you’re giving yourself a break when you can’t stop thinking about something. Interminable rumination is a track my mind slips into with ease when something is wrong. Distraction can be achieved through a hobby (for me, running, painting or cooking a hellishly complex meal can give me a break, however brief) or even something as simple as turning on the TV, listening to the radio or reading a story to your child. Distraction is also a good way to improve your mood.

Mindfulness practice also turns up in the research relating to emotions. Emotions tend to be healthier, with more good feelings and fewer bad ones, if you focus on the moment at least once a day. Another research-based suggestion is to make sure, within reason, that you show your feelings to your child. Parents who feel they need to conceal sadness, anger and hurt from their children are less able to help their children manage their own emotions. A friend of mine not only shows her difficult feelings but explains her moods to her young child – perhaps saying she’s grumpy as she’s feeling premenstrual. This helps her child realise that her mother’s moods are not her fault. Parents and children are in a worse mood and get on less well when parents hide their difficult feelings, according to the research. If you are feeling uncontrollable anger or raging sadness and your child is present, then it is best to step away.10

Showing your feelings to your child can be tricky if you’re not used to it. You could use a template to make it easier: ‘I feel… when… because…’ You could say ‘I feel happy when you hug me, because I love you,’ or ‘I feel sad when I can’t see Grandad very often, because he’s so important to me.’ You could also make time towards the end of the day, perhaps at dinner, to talk about how everybody’s day was and how they’re feeling. Part of this conversation means sharing your own experiences and emotions – obviously making sure the things you say take account of your child’s age and stage of development and aren’t likely to cause stress. You might say, ‘I had lunch with [best friend’s name] and it made me happy,’ or ‘I got stuck in a lift, and I was so bored and uncomfortable.’ It is best to avoid thoughts about how frustrated your child made you feel when they smeared jam over the freshly painted walls.

My own model for this is a counsellor friend with a much better-cultivated set of emotional resources than I have. She talks about her feelings with her children lightly, perhaps sharing her worries because she has to give a big presentation at work. Her children respond positively and as a result are comfortable exploring their own feelings with her. Jam-based exploits aside, there will be times when it’s important to show your child you feel angry, sad or afraid. This is probably harder than signalling your joy when your football team has won a key match or you’ve had a promotion. Showing negative feelings should be done in an age-appropriate way, ensuring your child doesn’t believe they’re to blame for the way you’re feeling. And touching on difficult adult feelings is different from exploring them in depth. The former is probably healthier from your child’s perspective.

A further point is to use ‘I feel’, not ‘I am’, when describing feelings. ‘I feel cross’ suggests a passing state, while ‘I am cross’ suggests you identify with the feeling. Using language to imply impermanence allows people some distance from their fear or fury. This sense of transience can help children understand emotions better and avoid becoming weighed down by them. You can use language in this way when talking to your child about how they feel as well: ‘It seems you’re feeling sad tonight.’

Part of healthily managing your emotions is being emotionally available for your child. In the research literature, emotional availability is based on four main elements.11 The first of these is parental sensitivity, which involves picking up on your child’s emotions and expressing your own genuinely. Sensitive parents respond quickly to their children’s signals, are flexible according to their needs and can mend things when there’s conflict. You might show sensitivity if you notice your child is withdrawn and you sit with them quietly until they feel comfortable enough to talk about what’s bothering them.

The second element is structuring. This means helping your child explore and learn in a way that suits them, while also promoting their independence. It means giving your child clues – but not too many – about things they don’t know yet, being clear about any rules relating to learning and showing your child what expectations you have of them. You might, for example, choose to structure some maths for them. If your child has started subtracting numbers to two decimal places at school, you could ask how much change they’ll have from their £3 pocket money if they decide to buy the £1.75 toy they want.

Element three is non-intrusiveness. Being non-intrusive means trusting your child to be able to find solutions to problems and make decisions, and being present for them when they need you. It’s a fine balance. Non-intrusiveness also involves trying not to be overprotective or interfering. If your child tells you about a problem they’re having with a friend, you might ask them what they want to do about it rather than offering a solution.

The final element is non-hostility. This is probably the most straightforward part of emotional availability, and it’s self-explanatory. Instead of being hostile, emotionally available parents are pleasant and patient. (I want to like this idea, but I resent the concept of parents who can respond to a child-led coup with endless equanimity.) These parents are assertive when needed, and they’re able to show anger in an appropriate and controlled way. A non-hostile response to being shouted at by your child might be to say that you’re happy to discuss the reasons they feel upset when they’re ready to talk to you calmly.

Make time to reflect on your childhood experiences

When American author and shame researcher Brené Brown did a TEDx Talk on vulnerability, she described going into therapy. She said to her therapist: ‘Here’s the thing: no family stuff, no childhood shit. I just need some strategies.’ But family and childhood always matter. Her therapy turned, she said, into ‘a year-long street fight. It was a slugfest. Vulnerability pushed; I pushed back. I lost the fight but probably won my life back.’ Her advice was to embrace vulnerability – to recognise that showing other people we’re vulnerable allows us to connect with them better. Part of this means teaching our children that they’re imperfect, like us, but that they belong and they’re loved despite – or because of – these imperfections and vulnerabilities.12

Childhood experiences affect our own vulnerabilities and, by extension, the way we act with and feel about our own children. If your mother was frequently angry with you, you may be quick to feel fury with your own child. If your brain turns into molten lava when your child makes a cheeky comment, it may be because you weren’t allowed to do the same when you were younger. Being aware of important history that might affect your approach to bringing up your children can help you to be a more effective, sensitive parent. When your child says or does something that reminds you of a traumatic event from your childhood, this awareness also makes you less likely to freeze in the moment or to want to get away.

If you give no thought to your childhood and how you were raised, negative aspects of your experience are likely to repeat themselves in your parenting. Even if you had a really hard time as a child, making sense of those experiences can help protect the next generation from feeling their effects. You can divert the force of nature that is history repeating itself.

Childhood experiences can be at the heart of parents’ frustrations with their children. It’s important to admit to ourselves when we find our children’s behaviour aggravating. It’s possible to feel deep love while recognising that, right now, little Betsy’s acting like a total bloody nightmare and you need to reset. Pretending otherwise isn’t going to solve the issue. Instead, those difficult feelings can be managed without thinking your child is at fault for causing them. It’s important to work out why the pressing of a seemingly innocuous button can incite anything from minor irritation through to blinding rage or sorrow. This process helps us avoid acting on these feelings. It’s not the negative feelings themselves that are able to cause harm, but what we do with them.

This recommendation doesn’t apply only to people who experienced huge trauma, though. Everyone had some degree of childhood difficulty or even minor inconvenience that still resonates today. As one early researcher and psychoanalyst in this area, Selma Fraiberg, so beautifully put it: ‘In every nursery there are ghosts… Even among families where the love bonds are stable and strong, the intruders from the parental past may break through the magic circle in an unguarded moment, and a parent and his child may find themselves re-enacting a moment or a scene from another time with another set of characters.’13

You’ll probably also see echoes of your childhood playing out in things that are an ocean away from anything difficult or traumatic. I have a messy parting because my mum always combed my hair apart in a straight line. My daughter combs herself a straight parting because mine is always messy. There’s a pleasing symmetry in this.

So what can we do with this knowledge that the shadows of our childhoods fall on our own children, and that we need to consider the shape of these shadows to help us be better parents? High-quality research tells us to watch out for hostility and harsh discipline if we had a difficult time as children. Parents who have had tough childhoods are more likely to shout at or be coercive with their children and to discipline them harshly, all of which can increase behavioural problems.14 I’ll outline ideas on how to steer away from these approaches later in the book.

It’s important to get a sense of your child’s thoughts, which may be hard for you to do (and about which you may be less curious) if you had a painful childhood.15 When parents can focus on what their children are thinking, these children are better able to learn about themselves and society. This learning, in turn, supports their development. Being curious about your child’s thoughts and getting a more accurate sense of them may be as simple as asking questions when you’re unsure, or as complicated as reading around on childhood development and mental states.

Being aware of the emotional impact of traumatic, abusive or otherwise shattering childhood experiences is also crucial. It’ll help you keep a healthy perspective – one in which you’re aware of things that might trigger difficult feelings and memories while also being able to meet your child’s needs. But you should always be aware of your own levels of comfort and seek professional help if thinking about your childhood is having a negative impact on your mental health.

If you had a difficult relationship with your parents, it may be helpful to write a list covering your similarities and differences to them. The list might include what you liked about how they brought you up, how your own approach to parenting chimes with and differs from theirs, and thoughts about who and how you want to be in future. A journal is another tool you can use to log difficult feelings that come up for you when you’re with your child. Writing down when you feel particularly upset or angry can help you spot patterns and work out what might be driving these feelings. As part of this process, you could think about what your child does that drives the strongest reactions in you, and what happened to you as a child when you acted in the same way.

There’s value in thinking about areas of parenting that you find almost irrationally upsetting, as you may be able to find clues as to why that is. My own children laugh at how enraged I get if anybody, including them, uses my towel. I thought it was just a quirk until I gave it some proper time and consideration, and realised that towels and similar items represent boundaries. When I was a child, my family prioritised closeness over boundaries, so now I fiercely protect the things I believe I shouldn’t need to share with anybody else – towels, pillows and socks. This realisation doesn’t mean I’ll lend my children a pair of socks. I won’t. My socks are mine. But it does mean that I sometimes remember to check my reaction if I spot a pair of smaller feet clad in them.

When you feel angry in the moment, you can give yourself space by telling your child you need time to think about what’s happened. If you have a lot of anger relating to your own childhood that’s spilling over onto your child, and you can afford it or can get referred by your doctor, you could look into getting support through some kind of talking therapy. If this isn’t an option for you, writing exercises can be helpful – setting aside regular time to write about what happened and how it made you feel, or writing letters (ones you never share) to the people who hurt you. Writing can be a powerful tool in helping us to process difficult things that happened in the past.

Try to create boundaries between work and home

If you work, you’ll be familiar with how tough it can be to balance work and family life. Boundaries can be incredibly hard to put up and maintain, and may require a huge amount of emotional investment. Guilt is often wrapped up in this, especially if your child plaintively tells you that she believes your work is more important to you than she is (a helpful critique made by Daughter Number Two, who knows precisely how to target my vulnerabilities). If this happens to you, it’s worth avoiding lengthy explanations. Instead, you could try reflecting back what they’re trying to say to you, perhaps offering a remedy: ‘It sounds like you don’t think I’m around enough right now. Maybe we could do something about it at the weekend?’

Setting hard edges between home and work can have negative repercussions if the reason for constructing them is for the benefit of employers rather than parents or their families. Some employees (research shows that it’s usually women) feel they must show themselves as being flawless, dependable workers who don’t let family commitments get in the way of doing their job.16 They believe, often with justification, that they must present an ultra-reliable version of themselves to the world to protect their jobs and opportunities for promotion. This is draining, and it’s an area over which individuals have only limited control, especially if they’re in low-paid or insecure work. Legal employment protections haven’t caught up with the way that people are working now. There’s an absence of legal protection over the right to an uninterrupted home life – and, if you’re a shift worker or on a zero-hours contract, certainty over when you’ll be working. It’s down to the decency of individual employers as to whether you get the support in this area that, in an ideal world, you would be offered.

There are things you can do, though. One of these is to consider your mood when you finish working. If you’re feeling negative about work, your mood can affect the quality of your relationship with your child. It may be particularly important to consider mood if you’re working from home, as you don’t have as much time to turn it around as you do if you have a journey to spend resetting. Parents whose work commitments conflict with their family obligations are more likely to be harsh with their children, with a knock-on impact on their children’s well-being. And while the number of hours parents work doesn’t affect the quality of their relationship with their children, tiredness from work does.17

Mood is a hard thing to control, and negative feelings about work may need to be closed down to prevent you carrying your stress into time with your family. One thing that may help you create a sense of separation is to have or create a ‘boundary marker’ between home and work. This might take the form of a journey, if you travel to work. You could do something during this time that you wouldn’t do anywhere else, like listening to a podcast or reading a book, to help mark it as a separate space or decompression zone.

It’s also important to create a mental separation between work and home, and to focus on the value of doing so. You might choose to find ways to distract yourself from thoughts about work if you’re contemplating it in your downtime. I’ve found it helpful to write a list of tasks and a note of any work-related worries just before I leave my desk, as there are fewer things to scream ‘Don’t forget me!’ in my ear when I’m brushing my teeth or reading my daughter stories. People who are keen to keep work and home life separate are more likely to be psychologically detached from work when they’re away from it.

Working from home makes the boundaries between home and work particularly porous. I started working from home at the beginning of the pandemic. My children were old enough to have a reasonable degree of self-sufficiency, but my day was still punctuated by urgent information bulletins that we were out of milk, the dog had stolen a shoe, a bank statement had fallen through the letterbox, a scab had started bleeding or there was extreme hunger that needed immediate sating. At one point, deep in the pandemic – with two homeschooling children and both adults working in separate makeshift corners – I found myself howling: ‘There’s another parent in the house! Leave me alone!’

A first step may be to develop confidence in your abilities to be able to balance work and family demands. One study found that those who feel confident in this area (for example, believing they can give enough attention to things they find important at work and at home) experience less conflict between work and family.18 Taking regular breaks from work is also helpful for those who work from home. This can make dealing with any interruptions less stressful, as you get breaks from being interrupted as well as a breather from the work itself. I have an alert on my watch that vibrates gently once an hour if I’ve been sitting down. In theory, I stand up, stretch and perhaps do a few plank walkouts or some lunges. In reality, I’m usually deeply absorbed in whatever I’m doing and promise myself I’ll do these things the next time my watch reminds me.

Another suggestion is to create a separate workspace, if you have the physical room to do so.19 It’s easier to maintain boundaries if you’re not working where you sleep or cook. You may need to get inventive if space is lacking. When my first daughter was young, I worked from home with her once a week. Our flat was small. My solution to her lack of space to play and my lack of ability to work was to rejig her playpen so I was sitting inside it. She had the run of the room, but she couldn’t access my precious laptop through the bars. It was my own miniature workhouse.

It’s worth being clear with your child when it’s OK to interrupt your work and when they must not, except, perhaps, if they’re bleeding or on fire. You might say that if you’re on a call when they want to talk to you, they need to wait until you finish. You could come up with a joint signal together – perhaps a thumbs up – to show you know they want your attention, and you’ll give it to them as soon as you’re able to do so.

Boundary markers aren’t just the preserve of those who travel to work. You could create a short routine to act as a boundary marker once you’ve finished at your desk and before you rejoin your family. This might be a five-minute physical stretch or a set of breathing exercises. If there’s another adult in the house or your child isn’t at home with you, you could go out for a short walk to mark the end of the working day. I often mark the boundary between work and home by watering the houseplants I haven’t yet managed to kill.