RIE: More Than An Unusual Parenting Theory
RIE is centered on the idea that infants and toddlers are whole people worthy of respect. It gets attention for some weird recommendations, like how we should ask babies' permission before changing a diaper or picking them up and how we should avoid distracting toddlers from a tantrum or seating them in a high chair. But underneath all that is something profound. A theory of how to build a relationship based on respect when words fail or are absent. A view of what it means to treat others with respect when we cant count on respect being returned. And a recognition that in any interaction with another person, all we can really control is ourselves -- the boundaries we draw, the energy we carry and the values we express.
In the following interview Ezra Klein speaks with Janet Lansbury, an RIE educator and the author of the books 'No Bad Kids' and 'Elevating Child Care.'
But I was wrong about that. I mean, not all of it. The playground is boring, and some of the cartoons — oh my God, Cocomelon. The cartoons are like psychological warfare against parents. And I mean, I guess art is subjective, but I wouldn’t say the art I’ve been given is all that great. But kids and parenting, it’s so interesting. It’s wondrous, a front-row seat to the development of human consciousness and a window, I’ve come to think, on who all of us really are.
If you pay attention, kids teach you a remarkable amount about adults, about yourself, and they do so in part by forcing you to live constantly in the extremes, trapped in a room with someone you love, someone you love helplessly whose experience fills you with genuine, deep compassion, who you will give every license to, and who is acting like a total monster, completely not showing you reciprocity or respect or anything. And what do you do then?
There’s a parenting philosophy called RIE — and don’t worry about what it stands for; trust me, it makes it more complicated, not less — that I’ve become a bit taken by over the past year. At its core, RIE simply says to view children, even infants, as whole people and to treat them with respect. And what’s fascinating to me is how much follows from that, and particularly how much follows from that about how you treat other adults.
There are a few tenets to RIE that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about in recent months, and not so much because of my sons as because of how they’ve caused me to reflect on other relationships in my life. It’s actually a lot easier with my sons. First, parenting is all about building a relationship even when words fail you, because words constantly fail children. But we know that, and so we make allowances for it. We know words fail children. I think it’s harder to appreciate that words constantly fail adults. We’re just better at hiding it and then more punitive towards each other in the aftermath.
Second, parenting really forces you to confront the truth that in any given situation or interaction, all you’ve got control over is yourself. That’s it. You can’t control another person’s behavior. You can’t control their reaction to your behavior. Parenting puts a fine point on this, but it’s true for friendships, for the people you know at work. It’s really very true for marriage.
And then finally, the way you treat others — I find this really profound— the way you treat others is a reminder to yourself of how you view them. Thought follows action. There’s a lot in RIE that’s pretty weird, actually, like asking permission before you pick up your baby, but it becomes more interesting to me when you realize it’s there for the parent to remind you that this other person is truly a person. How we speak to and about others shapes how we view them, not just how they view us.
So I wanted to have Janet Lansbury on the show. She’s the author of the parenting book “No Bad Kids.” She’s an RIE educator, an advocate, and she’s a host of the podcast “Respectful Parenting: Janet Lansbury Unruffled.” And you’ll hear in the show that I’m trying to do something a little weird. I’m trying to take a philosophy designed for how we treat children and apply to adults and, if you listen I think correctly, implicitly to politics. But that’s I guess the thing about parenting. It gives you, to my relief, a lot of weird interesting thoughts. As always, my email — EzraKleinShow@nytimes.com.
Janet Lansbury, welcome to the show.
JANET LANSBURY: Thank you so much, Ezra. I’m honored to be here.
EZRA KLEIN: So we’re going to refer to the style of parenting throughout this as RIE. And RIE is based on the belief that infants and toddlers are whole people worthy of respect. What does that actually mean?
JANET LANSBURY: Well, the easiest way to explain it is with this approach, we consider that this is a real person that has a point of view from the moment they’re born. And as we would with any other person, we want to consider that point of view and not just assume our own on top of it. And what the founder of RIE, Magda Gerber, used to say is it’s even more important to respect a new person to the world than it is to respect an older person, because this is a formative time and this is a time when they’re learning about their worth and their value and where they fit in the world. They’re learning about relationships and who they are in a relationship, and they’re unable to express their needs very easily. So this is the most important time to be very considerate of what they might want, what they might be communicating.
So we might just say, looks like grandma wants to pick you up now. Are you OK with that? And we’ll get a read from our baby as to what they think about that. You know, the baby is obviously not going to say yes or no, but we’ll get a sense does that baby seem relaxed, did they seem to welcome this interaction, or are they stiffening up, do they seem uncomfortable? And we want to try to honor that when possible. It’s just a very human way of welcoming a child into the world as, Magda Gerber used to say, an honored guest. How would we treat an honored guest?
EZRA KLEIN: One of the things that I thought was interesting that you said is that the way many of us would normally treat a baby is to treat them as if for our own purposes. And to some degree, my experience is almost the opposite. I sometimes feel like we’re treating the baby— just what is it, for God’s sakes, that you want from me? What are your purposes? What will make you stop crying? You know there’s some passing the baby around, but then there’s also some just trying to figure out what will make a young kid settle.
What is the distinction there? Because you might say that is us treating the child with a lot of respect, but on the other hand, my sense is the RIE approach thinks we’re often doing comforting wrong too.
JANET LANSBURY: So one of the things that we can do to welcome this person is to try to understand their language and calm our own reactions to crying, because we have this primitive response to crying, most of us, that has been passed down through generations that we go into emergency mode, that we have to fix it, that we have to make it stop, that we’ve got to do anything to get that to go away. But that’s actually the communication, and it’s nuanced communication.
Everything is not, help, you got to fix this! Right now a lot of it is, this is new to me, or too much stimulation in the room, or this person was a little scary, or I’m tired, or again, over-stimulation happens so much more readily than we can imagine. They’re taking it all in. So even a moderately-stimulating situation for them is too much. With this approach, we try to calm ourselves to listen to crying and not be reactive to it, but try to respond to it as accurately as possible. So we’re not going to be perfect, but what encourages the baby to communicate is that we are trying to interpret it and not jumping to a conclusion or just trying to make it stop.
EZRA KLEIN: This may seem like a bit of a basic or even dumb question, but I think it’s important and it gets to something foundational here, which is, what makes infants and toddlers worthy of respect? When you say a whole person worthy of respect, I pause a bit, because there isn’t that same mutuality that we develop with adults over time or even with older children that I’ll respect you if and because you respect me. So what entitles babies and toddlers to respect?
JANET LANSBURY: With this approach, we understand that children have to receive respect before they can give it back to us and prove themselves worthy. We have to take that leap of faith. Yeah, we could see them as not worthy of respect, and then we will not actually see as many things in them that we can respect. They understand language from when they’re in the womb and they want to do things for themselves, even as a newborn. The people who observe newborns, even in NICU, they’ve studied infants that are trying to find their thumb. They’re trying to communicate. And they’re not just totally passive blobs. They’re very dependent on us, but they are able to do things.
And with this approach, yes, it does take a leap of faith to talk to a baby as a person for sure. I mean, that felt so strange to me at first. But when we do that, we’ll notice the baby on a changing table who we’re talking to about what’s happening instead of trying to distract them and just rush and get the job done. We’re talking to them and we’ll say, now I’m going to put this diaper under your bottom. Could you lift your bottom a little bit? And we’ll see them trying to, and we’ll see them one day that they do it a little bit. Or, when we ask them, are you ready for me to pick you up, or, I’m going to pick you up, and we just give that little moment, we will see them, an infant even a couple weeks old, stiffening their body in preparation to be lifted. But we’re the ones that have to do this first. We have to open that door to them as people. It’s very hard for them to prove that to us if we don’t open the door first.
EZRA KLEIN: I think it’s useful to ground us in some of these examples that you were just beginning to bring up, like the diaper change for the infant. But you also talk a lot about toddlers. I am blessed to have a three-month-old and a three-year-old, and one thing about toddlers is they have the capacity to say, no, I’m not ready to be picked up, I’m not ready to be put in the car seat. So what does it mean to respect a toddler as a whole person when you need them to put their car seat belt on, or you need to put their car seat belt on and they need to press all the buttons on the stereo in the front seat of the car?
JANET LANSBURY: Well, the way that we respect them is that we understand child development, and child development tells us that children, when they are getting towards the end of the first year, a big part of their job is to individuate from us and to become their own person a bit more. And this also repeats itself in a big way in the adolescent years. That’s why a lot of people say, you know, the toddler years and the adolescent years are similar, because these are times when children need to become more autonomous and become their own people. And one of the most common normal ways they do that is when you’re saying yes, I have to say no even if I actually want to say yes. But a big part of me has the impulse to say no just so I can be different, I can be my own person, I can feel my power as separate from you.
And it’s a time of life when Margaret Gerber used to say they wake up in the same bed at the same room, and it looks different to them overnight because they’ve grown so much. They’re growing so fast. And I remember this in adolescence. I remember one day looking in the mirror, and overnight my fingers grew into these long spindly things that were really freaky looking to me, and that kind of disorientation is happening for young children too. So if you consider all of that, it’s pretty amazing when they can cooperate, when they can follow directions, when they are using the reasonable centers of their brain. That’s pretty cool when they can do that, but it’s deceiving because we see them doing that, and then so many other times they can’t, particularly when they’re in the situation that you’re in right now with the emotional effect of the second child.
So the behavior makes sense. And how can we help them? We can respect that they really are doing the very best they can, that they actually at that moment cannot get from the house into the car seat. They can’t manage it. So knowing this, we can help them through the transitions. We can be the heroes that foresee a transition is going to be tough, and then we do what I call confident momentum, and it’s based on us knowing and understanding that it’s probably going to be tough for my child, or at least we’re prepared for that idea. And now I’m going to be ready for my child to stop and pause and say they need to go run over here and do this or that, and I’m not going to rush, but I’m going to close the gaps.
I kind of think of it as the way that a tennis player hits a tennis ball. You reach back and you follow through with momentum. You don’t just try to hit the ball right next to you, and that’s kind of what we have to do helping children through these transitions, especially at these ages. We have to foresee that it’s going to be tough, get ready for it, and then, you know what, here we go. I’m going to help you along. So maybe we’re holding his hand or we have our hand behind his back and we’re escorting him, ready to help him through.
EZRA KLEIN: I should say that the sun rises and sets on my toddler for me, and he’s pretty deeply emotionally legible to me. But one of the ways in which I found parenting him through the adoption of language so transformational for me and for the way I look at the world is that it’s really caused me to rethink the role of language and reason in a lot of my relationships. And this is something that RIE has also caused me to think a lot about— that children pose a question, I think, of how to be in respectful relationship with a being who can’t use language and reason in the way maybe you do or I do. But I also think, more than we want to admit, that’s a spectrum. I think adults fool ourselves with language and with our own presumption of rationality. My rationality, or the rationality of whoever I’m speaking to, are words. Certainly my words often confuse our needs. And then, of course, there are people with disabilities or who have other barriers to communicating through language. So I’m curious about this, that how you think about the way language can both clarify and obscure our emotions and our conflicts.
JANET LANSBURY: So verbal communication is the least-reliable important part of communication, even though the words that we use do create images in our mind, and that is important. But children are adept at something that we do discount as adults. They’re adept at open-hearted, genuine communication that often doesn’t have words attached to it yet. And that’s something that they bring to us that I believe we can or should appreciate and maybe model ourselves after more.
Even my acting teacher that I loved— I wasn’t a good actress, but I had an acting teacher that was so inspiring to me in so many ways, and I think of him a lot in terms of the work I’m doing with parents, which is strange. But there are all these commonalities, and one of them is that he said, what you’re saying is the icing on the cake when you’re in a character. It’s what you’re feeling. It’s how you’re perceiving. Those are the things that are the most important to be as an actor, and then saying those words, that just comes out of the non-verbal, that just comes out of these more important places that communication springs from.
We try to get children to say manners, right? We try to get children to say hello, goodbye, thank you, I’m sorry. And so often we miss the children are actually saying it much more beautifully and genuinely without the words than a child who says, thank you, Mrs. Lansbury. But I would much rather have a child look at me after they’ve been to my house, or hung out with me, or whatever they would be thanking me for, and look at me with that gaze that children have that really is pretty singular to them. Or, actually, Magda Gerber had— one of my favorite quotes of hers is, “There are three kinds of people who will look at you this way— a lover, an insane person, or a baby.” And she would say that in response to a baby in one of her classes looking at her or looking at someone with that openness, with that I’m showing you my soul and I’m looking into yours.
And as adults, maybe we feel we’re supposed to, that that’s our job, to get them to say something. And often it squashes what they are saying that is really pure and valuable and just expressing their essence to us.
EZRA KLEIN: Something that people are going to hear in my questions in this conversation is a continuous comparison between toddlers, and even babies sometimes, and adults. And I to say that I understand adults have more developed frontal cortexes and the whole thing. We’re not just toddlers, but I do think we are more like children in a lot of ways than we give credit for. And there’s something about parenting that I found very moving, which is the generosity that many parents at least treat their children with, and the generosity they treat their feelings with.
And so when, you know, your kid, when my baby or my older son is upset, I go through this long checklist in my head. Are they thirsty? Are they hungry? Are they tired? Do they have an owie? You know, there are all these reasons you could be upset. And something I’ve noticed with my older son is it when he is upset as his language has developed, he will find something to attach that upset to. Often it’s the airport. If he’s very tired, or if there’s a lot of disruption, he wants to go to the airport and he’s really upset that we can’t go to the airport.
But it’s not really about the airport. On days when he’s not that frustrated, it doesn’t really matter that we’re not going to the airport. But it’s really fascinating to see feelings come to settle on a justification, and it makes me think about how often my feelings come to settle on a justification, how often I’m having a stressful time, or I don’t feel well, or I have an owie, or I haven’t slept. And so a slight that is reasonable — you can’t really argue with me on it, but that I might have shrugged off at another time — becomes a real splinter, and I really start pressing at it and telling you about how it was wrong, or I was wrong, or you’ve wronged me. And it’s something that you discuss a lot, this capacity of children, you often frame it as, to brilliantly find outlets for their emotions in things they can get upset about. How do you understand that process? How do you understand it in children? And has it made you look at adults any differently?
JANET LANSBURY: I think you expressed it beautifully. And as parents, we can get stuck on the specifics. Oh gosh, maybe we took them away from the airport too early, or maybe we should plan more trips to the airport, or whatever it is, instead of seeing what’s beneath it, which is there are things in my life that I don’t control. Usually it’s somewhere around there, and one of them is that my parents just had another baby, and the other is I’m only three years old and I have this side of me that wants to have control and be autonomous in my world, and this other side that realizes that I’m really not in a lot of areas.
So it’s those emotions, and then there’ll be a tipping point, and that tipping point is just a symbol of what’s going on with them. And I guess we do that too as adults. I mean, I’m not very adept at adults. Children have taught me a lot about adults, and I’ve gotten comfortable with things with children that have helped me as an adult to be much more aware and to be better at boundaries and understanding my feelings. All of these things children have taught me, for which I’m eternally grateful. But yes, they do absolutely tend to grab at a specific to express a larger feeling that they have. And it’s good to know that as parents, because it will help us not to get stuck and worried about the specifics.
And your process — first of all, I love the way you feel about your son. I love hearing that he’s such a big person to you and a big part of your world, but in those moments when he’s upset, it can help us more, instead of going to those, what could be going on, how can I fix this, but instead to calm ourselves — just like I was talking about with an infant — to calm ourselves, to feel that part of us that never goes away that I just want to stop it, fix it, make it better. What could it be? Maybe if I just give her something to eat, maybe if I just do this or that I can make him better. I want him to be better. This is my world. My world is unhappy. Let me fix it. If we can notice that and just let it pass through, know that that’s our own human nature and how much we love our child and the generational discomfort of emotion that’s been passed down to us, and just wait and be open to it. Like so many things in life, that’s when the answers, the real answers, do come. Not when we’re in with a busy head trying to figure it out, but when we’re really allowing it to be unsolved.
EZRA KLEIN: This is what has struck me so deeply about RIE I think. So many of the parenting models I found, and also to some degree just models for being a person, are about how you change the behavior of other people, particularly your children — how you discipline them, how you persuade them, manipulate them, distract them. And I am not a full on RIE’er in the sense that I do some of that too. I’m not going to lie, I’ve been known to do a distraction. But it’s very much as you just alluded to when you said that you first need to calm yourself.
It’s very much about you and your reactions to the potential emotional tumult or difficulties around you. In a way, it’s almost an inversion of the normal expectations about parenting. It seems to me that RIE is much less about how your children act in the moment at least then about how you should act as a parent, and also just a person moving through the world in relationships.
I want to see if you could talk a bit about that locating of both the responsibility, and I guess to some degree the power in the parent regardless of the reactions happening to their behavior.
JANET LANSBURY: Oh, we have so much power and it’s important to be in touch with that. For example, I’m a big believer in children getting to actually choose and come up with one day that they want to — or maybe you expose them and you just show it to them— they want to pick up a hobby or maybe take a lesson, if you can make that happen, or try a sport. And I think a lot of times, parents maybe think they’re doing that, but even the thing of dad comes in and says, hey, do you want to try t-ball? The way a child will naturally feel is, my dad wants me to try t-ball. It’s not as open as we maybe believe it to be because we are so powerful and the urge to please us, even when it seems like they’re doing the opposite, is huge based on beginning with I’ve got to survive, so I’ve got to please these people. But it continues. And so that’s an example of our power.
So when we have an emotional reaction, it will take our child almost out of what they’re feeling or add to it in a big way with what the big gods in the sky are feeling, which is us. And without us feeling OK and comfortable, they really don’t have a chance of being comfortable. So I don’t know if that’s good news or bad news, but it’s just the way it is.
EZRA KLEIN: So I want to talk a bit about boundaries here, because I think this is pretty important, both what they are and how we set and react to them. So how do you define a boundary?
JANET LANSBURY: I define it as protection. It could be physical protection or, as with holding our child’s hand in a parking lot, whether they want their hand held or not, we go into that with, ideally, confidence, and we’re proactive, and we understand that our child may resist this because this is a transition maybe. And so we’re ready to do that. And obviously having a safe environment where your child can be so they’re not able to get into things that are dangerous, those obvious things. But then also the less obvious ones, which are protecting our child in terms of the relationship that we have with them, protecting them from being annoyances to us, for us to become resentful, those things that poison the relationship.
When we allow our child to do something or we give in to something that we don’t really want to do — like, let’s say our child is in our drawer of stuff and a part of us thinks, oh, gosh, it’s just a drawer of stuff. What’s the difference? And maybe I’ll just ask them, oh, could you not go in there, but they’re still doing it. Instead, we listen to ourselves and realize, I don’t want them going in that stuff. So I’m going to be protective and proactive, stop them early, not expect them to be able to stop themselves, because children often can’t. And we take their hand, we close the drawer, we escort them out of the room, whatever it is, we let them know, you know, I don’t want you in there. I’m going to help you stop, or I’m going to close this, or we’re going to go in the other room.
Similarly, when we’re playing with them and they want us to do it again and again and again, and we stop and say, I don’t want to do this again. This is all I’m going to do. And we allow our child to be upset about that because, as we were saying earlier, often that will be a cathartic experience for them where their reaction is fueled by all the lack of control that they have in their life, other stresses that have been building up inside of them. So it’s a positive thing always when children have these reactions, much more positive than if we say, OK, I’ll do it again, and now there’s a part of us that’s kind of resenting our child, that is annoyed. We don’t want to do that to our relationship, and our child doesn’t want that either. They would much rather be able to have their reaction than to have us have this unclean relationship where I’m not really being honest with you and I’m going along with things because I feel like I have to to prevent you being upset, which is a lot of the reason that we do it.
So if we could approach all of these boundaries as I’m protecting you, I’m helping you, I’m helping you not bother me, I’m helping you be safe, number one, and maybe I’m helping you if you fall apart at your behaviors going wild in a situation, I start to see that happening and I know that once children start to go there, once they start to become dysregulated in a situation — and it can come up when we least expect it— because again, children get overstimulated. They get tired way more than we can imagine. They just woke up and now they’re tired again. We want to help them in those situations not just fall apart. Not that we’re embarrassed about them— well, maybe we are— but the reason is that we don’t want them to be stuck hitting other children or falling apart in the market if we can help it. We want to help them have some privacy when they’re having those feelings and not be stuck there, just as if Ezra and I were going out for lunch as friends and I start to fall apart and start yelling at waiters and waitresses or something, then he would help me out of there. He wouldn’t get mad at me he would notice, oh, Janet’s not at her best today and I’m going to help her not expose this to the world. So it’s a helpful attitude.
EZRA KLEIN: The thing I find most moving in the discipline here and most applicable and difficult in adult relationships is right here. It’s this idea that you are allowed— it’s even healthy to set your boundaries, and then that those you’re in relationship with are allowed to have whatever emotional reaction they want to your boundaries, and it is not your job to try to control that. I thought about this a lot. You write, quote, “Dealing with these situations openly with patience, empathy, and honesty, braving a child’s tears and accepting temporary bad guy status, these are paths to a loving relationship, trust, and respect. This, believe it or not, is real quality time.”
And I think this is a place that’s hard for a lot of parents, and also just a lot of people. We don’t just want a boundary to be respected. We also don’t want to be subjected to the pain and discomfort and disconnection of another person, be they a spouse, or a child, or a friend, or a colleague, their negative reaction to my boundary. So how do you deal with the emotional tumult those reactions create in you, particularly when you think the boundary is fair and reasonable and frankly the least the other person could do?
JANET LANSBURY: Well, this is where, again, I can’t profess to be good at this with adults. But with children, I would reframe it as, it’s not just connection. You said the word disconnection. It’s actually allowing a child to be mad at us or upset, frustrated, sad. Any emotion a child shares with us is the most quality connection that we can have with them because it’s based in trust. It’s based in, I’m not afraid of you being all sides of yourself. You have a right to feel however you feel. Not seeing this as a problem, but that is the problem that we, as adults, as you said, we see it as a negative instead of, whoa, this is the child that’s going to be able to tell me when I’ve crossed lines with them or just how they feel about everything. This is gold. This is the most positive thing.
It’s a 180-degree shift from the way that we naturally feel. That’s why I call it our lifelong struggle, and it’s the biggest challenge we have as parents. You know, when we tell our child that they can’t go to the party, we want them to say, oh, you’re right, mom or dad or whatever, not be, oh, I’m really mad at you. If we could see that as positive that they’re sharing that and healthy for them in their emotional development and just gold for our relationship, then we could see this entirely differently.
EZRA KLEIN: Why do you think, as somebody who is literally a professional at taking this attitude towards children’s reactions to a boundary, that it’s still hard for you with adults or that it feels different to you with adults?
JANET LANSBURY: Well, I’m improving, but because I do expect more of adults. There was a time that I remember, though, where I really consciously did this. So I was about to teach one of my classes and I was looking for a place to park and it was trash day in this neighborhood, and the trash cans were all blocking the — it was a residential street that’s right off of a big business street where the classes are held. And there was no place to park. I was running pretty late as, unfortunately, usual. And I saw a place that I could fit into if I just moved those garbage cans a little bit. So I moved these garbage cans over maybe three or four inches. I park my car. I get out of the car and this man, elderly man, comes out of his house, which I’m parked right in front of his house, and starts yelling at me. Why did you do this? Whatever it was. You moved by trash cans! And of course, I wanted to say, come on, I moved it three inches, and what’s the big deal?
But instead I said, wow, you really didn’t want me to — you didn’t want me to move those. You didn’t like that I moved those trash cans. And he went on this tirade for a bit longer. And then he started to calm down, and then pretty soon, I was saying, I have to go to work. And he said, oh, where do you work? And he knew somebody else in that building, and he was saying, oh, could you say hi to that person for me? And it ended on this amazing note. But it was hard. It was not intuitive for me to let that happen.
And when I think about it, it’s like what we’re talking about about the feelings that touch off other feelings. So this thing of the trash cans, so what? But it triggered in him all of this feeling of maybe that he’s elderly and life feels out of control and he can’t do all the things he used to be able to do, and here’s somebody getting in his space. It really made sense afterwards when I thought about it, but I was quite proud of myself for doing that. It’s not easy because I don’t give adults that same pass for being immature in their self-regulation.
EZRA KLEIN: There’s this line that we don’t read books as they are, we read books as we are. And I definitely, when reading the book, this was just in all capital letters, blinking marquee lights, because I find this to be the hardest thing in all of my relationships. Forget the guy whose house you parked in front of. My marriage, my friendships, my family relationships, and my children — I use the word disconnection because the thing that is most painful for me is a feeling of disconnection, the feeling of turbulence in relationships that are very important to me. And yet, I can think back on my own core relationships in my life, and a lot of them needed moments, periods of turbulence in order to reorient around something important, be it a boundary of mine, or an issue of the other person’s, or just a new situation in our lives.
And that’s why I find the way you look at this with children really interesting, because with children you very naturally make their reaction part of a holistic process, a process in which they’re working out feelings. It’s healthy. You reframed it to me as it’s part of a connection. And then with others, you know, with adults who we expect to have more emotional regulation, it’s not, right? It’s, well, my boundary was reasonable. You should accept that I was right about this. It’d be nice to be in the aftermath of it.
And as I’ve become a little older and wiser maybe, at least I find it intellectually less reasonable to expect that of others. I mean, at some point I should learn that you don’t get that. And at the same time, emotionally it’s very hard not to expect that of them.
JANET LANSBURY: Yes. But it is always about them, as you’re saying. It’s always about them and what they’re going through, and it’s really not about us. It’s about them. And it’s definitely about that with children. Those sayings — children are always doing the best they can, that they’re not giving you a hard time, they’re having a hard time. It’s the same with adults, and I’ve been trying to train myself into this, that it’s really about them. And maybe being not open to that this is somehow reflective of me and how you feel about me and all this, it’s something going on with them, it’s always the case. We could say that across the board. The more unreasonable something seems, the more we can know that it’s about that person. The person having a hard day that snaps at you, it’s not about you. But we need to constantly remind ourselves. That’s the only way that we’re going to be able to change this generational pattern that we’ve all gotten into with emotions.
This dad wrote to me. He’s a long-time listener of my podcast and he wrote, hey, I realized that everything you talk about, it all comes down to letting a child have their feelings. And I said right, that’s it. That’s the whole thing right there, letting another person have their feelings.
EZRA KLEIN: But it’s a little harder than that, because in the name of your podcast is the word unruffled. Part of it is also not just letting them have their feelings, but acting in a certain way during their feelings, not becoming part of a process of emotional escalation. And that’s something that I just take from this whole philosophy of parenting. And it seems broadly applicable in life, but way easier to say that than to do it, which is how you are often matters just a lot more than what you say. The same words, or frankly no words, delivered angrily or calmly or condescendingly or kindly or just sullenly, solemnly, are very different words.
JANET LANSBURY: And how we are is always about how we’re perceiving, and so that’s what I feel my job is, is to help parents perceive their child’s behavior, their child’s emotions, and their role in it accurately and in a helpful manner. But the perception is everything. Our perception is — going back to the perception of a baby will change what we see and what we feel in any given moment. The perception of our child’s emotions as a positive opportunity for us to show our child that emotions are healthy, that whatever they’re feeling is not even their choice right now. It’s what they’re feeling, and feelings come and go, and it’s healthy, and I want you to share with me.
People ask me sometimes, who do you recommend for teens or eight-year-olds, or who’s like you for teens? And there are some people that are giving compatible advice that I recommend, but if I’m honest, and I don’t want to sound smug, I haven’t needed anything else because of this perception that Magda gave me about my job in building a relationship with my child or my job in relationships and what I can expect about my child, what I can expect from their behavior, and what they need from me. Once we have that, we’re free.
And that’s what I want to give parents. I want them to not need to read my book or listen to my podcast again. I don’t want people to be dependent on me. I want people to be self-reliant, and that’s what Magda Gerber gave me. I still thank her almost daily for the relationship I have with my three children. That’s what I want to give parents, and it’s confidence in themselves too.
Parents often say, I went to the playground and my child did this, and I was felt everybody was judging me, and I was embarrassed. And I want you to be the person on the playground that feels like people are probably going to judge me and have their own opinions of this, but I’m going to be a model of respect and relationship with my child.
EZRA KLEIN: But that’s hard to do in the moment. You have a line that, what parents need to do is, quote, “stay anchored during the storm, patiently accepting and acknowledging our child’s displeasure.” But the question is, how do you stay anchored? What do you anchor to? I mean, freedom in a perspective is potent, but you know, all of meditative practice the world over is about trying to get you to calm and observe your emotions in the moment, and it’s hard. As a meditator, it’s really hard.
So I’m curious, what are the practices that you find to actually be anchoring, the practices where you can know all this, but it allows you to maintain that unruffled demeanor when you’ve been a little ruffled, when the storm has definitely moved some hairs out of place on your head?
JANET LANSBURY: Yeah. So there’s a few things. One is almost everything is normal. Questions parents bring to me, the issues their children are having, they’re 99 percent typical and expected for that child in that situation. There’s other things that I’ve personally used, which is I used to use, with my oldest daughter, who had a lot of tantrums and she’s an intense person, very capable, amazing person, but not always easy as a toddler, quite ready to take over the whole house and was just very intense with her emotions. So I used to pretend I was a superhero with this shield on. I would put on this shield in my mind that the feelings would bounce off of. So I could still be available to her, but I wasn’t letting things inside me to make me feel bad and like a failure and mad at her maybe, or — I was deflecting the feelings.
And I saw that when I’m in these situations, when I had to carry her out of a park because we’d gotten off a plane earlier in the day and somehow in my adult mind I thought, oh, sure she can go to this birthday party in this park after, and I feel OK, and I wasn’t even thinking. Of course this is way too much for her. She can’t handle this and her behavior showed that. But I was putting on my hero cape to get her out of there, not blaming myself, but just helping where I needed to help.
So using imagery like a hero, or some people use a monk or a rabbi, or I like the anchor because I can imagine myself an anchor in a storm in the ocean. And we tend as parents to fast forward to, our child is going to be blowing up in board meetings and freaking out, or my child can’t take direction from an adult at two years old. So how are they going to graduate from college? We project all these things, but really, almost everything is normal. And if we really thought about it, it would make sense later on. We don’t have to think about it right there in the moment. Just thinking about, I’m OK, it will pass, this is the best thing I could do right now, and my child will feel better after they express this all the way.
EZRA KLEIN: Is there a danger that as a parent or a person trying to be unruffled in these moments that the better you get at this, the more you are learning to repress your own emotions, that your emotions in response have validity too. I don’t want to take them out on my three-year-old exactly, but I’ve thought about this particular issue as I like to try to ladder it up to my other relationships. And on the one hand, I think it’s good in my life to try to be unruffled, and I think I usually am. I’m somebody who finds it pretty natural to discipline my emotions. On the other hand, that means they don’t express all that easily, and sometimes they can course in me for a lot longer than it seems they do in people who have a more intuitive and authentically-explosive response to provocation. And so I’m curious how you see that question, how you see the legitimacy of your emotions even as you’re trying to model this way of being in the world.
JANET LANSBURY: Well, I actually see this whole thing the opposite way. First of all, we’re not trying to be unruffled. We are getting a clear perspective on the situation, which is all those things I was just talking about. My child’s emotions are healthy. They will pass. It’s nothing to do with me. All of that. So that’s what we’re focusing on. We’re not focusing on just, OK, feel fine. You don’t feel fine, but feel fine. We’re focusing on what’s actually going on there and what’s the most helpful for us and for our child, and what will bring us together.
So what this does is teach us, through our child — I mean, children are amazing teachers this way — that oh, so their emotions are healthy and normal and they pass. We see this experience with our child. We witness this multiple times. Oh, that means my emotions are also healthy and normal and will pass. That’s different than repressing feelings.
For me, what this has done is help me get more in tune with my feelings. I mean, I’m recognizing feelings now that I didn’t for so long that, oh, yes, you should be angry because that’s something, especially with women, that we’re not allowed to be angry as little kids. Sadness is OK, but not anger. That is unacceptable. So it’s taken me a long time to realize that when I’m angry, I can trust that. That’s right to feel that. It’s OK to feel that. That’s just a part of me. And yes, parents often think that I’m saying to stifle, stifle, stifle and just don’t feel it and feel fine and be unruffled. That’s not what — Unruffled comes from the soul and the heart and it’s a way of seeing and not being threatened. It has to be genuine, ideally. Sometimes maybe we’ll fake it, and that’s OK. Fake it till you make it. But what we’re going for is actually feeling safe in those situations.
EZRA KLEIN: I think that’s a nice place to come to a close here. So always our final question. What are three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to the audience?
JANET LANSBURY: Well, the first, because I’m a big believer in our sources, would be “Dear Parent: Caring for Infants With Respect,” which is Magda Gerber’s book. There are a couple of books by her, one that she co-wrote “Your Self-confident Baby,” but this one is completely in her voice and it’s very gently, simply written, as the title indicates — dear parent. It’s a note to parents, but so profound at the same time. And her perspective is still revolutionary. The things that she knew from extensive observation of babies and toddlers, extensive observation — she knew way ahead of all these scientists that do more contrived experiments that are also valid. She knew all of this stuff. She knew the wonderful things Alison Gopnik has studied. She understood how capable babies were because she observed them behaving naturally and she observed them responding to respectful relationships where they were treated like people. So she was able to see all these things. So anyway, I recommend that book very much.
Another one, and this might be very pertinent for you if you haven’t read it, is “Siblings Without Rivalry” which is by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. It’s an old classic. I love this book. I kept it by my bedside through most of my children’s childhood because, similar to Magda’s book, it is deceivingly simple on the outside and just very deep and counterintuitive. But when you hear it, you say, yes, oh my gosh, this makes so much sense, of course.
And here’s one that maybe you can relate to, Ezra. They talk about how this common thing that we do as parents — and it sounds, to me, I would have thought this is a good way to connect with my child, to say to your older child, oh, you’re so good at this, and the baby can’t do those things, and you’re great at this and you’re better at this, and it feels like we’re having this connection and we’re complimenting them and we’re telling them how special they are. Well, what the child actually gets from that— this is in the book— is, uh-oh, there are comparisons going on from my parents and sometimes I’m going to come out on the wrong end of these comparisons maybe. So it’s this discomforting experience for children.
EZRA KLEIN: When you read something like that, how do you decide if it’s true? I hear that, I think, definitely, maybe. We just had a conversation with our older son about how he can eat corn, but the baby can’t. And maybe he thought there are comparisons happening here, and maybe he thought, eh, babies can’t eat corn.
JANET LANSBURY: Well, I think that’s different from praising him in a way. I think that’s different from — that’s just very factual.
EZRA KLEIN: Fair enough. But to the broader question, how do you know if something like that is true? And I have this book, “Siblings Without Rivalry,” and very much intend to read it, I should say.
JANET LANSBURY: Yeah. Well, it’s a deep read. So it takes a while to digest. And I think that’s the thing with all information that’s out there, especially about parenting. There’s just so much out there, and how do we decide? And studies are showing that really there’s a lot of great ways, and your child will probably be fine, and who cares if you decided they were a person from when they were born or later. Maybe it doesn’t matter that much in the end, but something resonates with you or it doesn’t, and that’s what RIE was for me. It was these ideas I never would have thought of, never would have occurred to me. But when I heard them, I thought, yeah, that’s how it should be. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Wow. That makes so much sense. So it’s very personal I think, these ideas, whether you decide that they’re right or not. It’s a personal thing and we can all make our own decisions.
And then the third book, I kind of had a tie in my mind between “The Hurried Child” by David Elkind, which I just think everybody should read, especially it seems now more important than ever. The parents I talk to, maybe they don’t even want to have their child be in a class every day and their one-year-old and their two-year-old and their three-year-old have all these extracurriculars, but they’re feeling all this peer pressure about that. So they’re succumbing to it to the detriment of their child, and he explains why, and it’s actually very reassuring in terms of doing less and letting children mature and have this window of time where they’re just explorers and getting to follow their inner direction. It’s a really good book.
But then the other one is “Biased” by Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt, which it’s all about how the mind naturally develops implicit bias. And her story is amazing how she went — she was determined to get to the source and the source and the source of why this negative bias against Black people — and she was so brave in her journey looking back and figuring this out. And just all these things that even her child had negative bias towards Black people — and her child is Black, she’s a Black person, so — because of the media. And it’s just fascinating. The whole thing is fascinating to me.
EZRA KLEIN: Janet Lansbury, thank you very much.
JANET LANSBURY: Thank you so much.