How To Parent Right From The Start

0:00 Hi, I'm Maggie Langrick. I'm the publisher at LifeTree Media. We are a hybrid publisher of books that help heal and inspire. And we know that parents are constantly on the lookout for really solid advice to help them raise their children in the best possible way, which is why we are publishing a book by Dr. Vanessa Lapointe called Parenting Right from the Start, and it comes out this fall. Dr. Vanessa, we've seen your work on Droz.com and CBC News and Time and Today's Parent.

0:31 Can you, can you tell us a little bit about your work and what has brought you to want to help parents with these problems?

0:36 Yeah. So I'm a registered psychologist. I work with parents mostly and sometimes with their children around all different kinds of life struggles. I founded a clinic many years ago that now has about 15 therapists working in it. And we see lots and lots of different things walking through the door every single day. I've written a couple of books now. And I also come at this from the perspective of a parent who has been growing up kids now for about 15 years.

1:04 Years. And I faced some challenges in that journey with my own children. And so really bringing together the world of science, the world of psychology, and the world of on the ground parenting in order to understand how we're meant to do this.

1:20 Yeah, I hear you. I'm a parent, too, so let's, you know, let's dish a little bit. Can you tell us about some of the challenges or experiences you had as a parent that have felt fed into your book parenting right from the start?

1:31 Yeah, I think like a lot of parents, I did my best parenting before I became a parent. And I was studying in the field of psychology, and not just the field of psychology, but really specialized in the field of child psychology and child development. And so I sort of thought I had this going on, you know, like I was going to be able to figure all this out. And then rather surprisingly, became pregnant as a doctoral student.

1:57 And it just sent my whole world into a topsy turvy kind of spin. I had a miscarriage scare early on in that pregnancy, which left me for the remainder of the pregnancy very on alert and hyper vigilant and somewhat anxious about all of that. When my baby was born, my delivery process wasn't what I expected it to be. And so we kind of came into that whole stage of things with a big old jolt. And as much as as a mom, I had all of those really, you know, heartwarming kinds of experience experiences as a mom in the backdrop of all of that was a lot of overwhelming worry that things would go wrong, that I might not do it right, that maybe I was going to fail my kids, that maybe, maybe they weren't going to grow up to be independent and to be capable.

2:47 Maybe somewhere along the way, I was going to throw the whole thing off course. And it might be sort of a curious thing that I had all of those kinds of thoughts, because I'm Dr. Vanessa, I'm supposed to note these things.

3:00 We don't always go into it with so much training.

3:02 That's right. That's right. And yet there I was, just like every other parent probably in the history of ever feeling really overwhelmed by my entry into my own journey of parenthood. And so, really, I work every day to bring together what I do professionally and also have it imbue my personal life and the experiences that I'm having with my own children.

3:26 So your book is divided into two parts. Can you tell us what does part one focus on?

3:32 Yeah. So part one is really all about laying the foundation from which you can launch yourself into this whole world of parenting. And one of the things that I discovered as a mother and have witnessed over and over and over again in the parents that I have the privilege of supporting is that we must first grow ourselves in order to be able to grow our children. And all of those programs that we run under the surface that we might not even have said hello to yet, we might not even know that they exist under the surface will come raising up to our lived experience when we become parents.

4:07 And so worries that you're going to fail your kids, worries that you're going to do it wrong, worries that you aren't going to be good enough, that all comes from somewhere deep inside of you.

4:16 Or those moments when you hear your mother's words coming out of your mouth, the things that you swore you'd never say or do.

4:22 Yeah.

4:23 What is that about?

4:24 I know. So you can go into all of that with the best of intentions, and yet here you are, you've become your mother or you've become your father, and

4:32 not necessarily the parts of them that you loved.

4:34 Right. Even if there's lots of parts if my mom is watching that you loved about that there'll be a lot of those other pieces. And what happens is when you're a child, you enter into your very first intimate relationship in the context of the parent child relationship, and then in that relationship, your mind is formed, and so you go on in life and you grow up, and then you become a parent. Yourself. And at the moment you become a parent, you once again re enter the intimate space of the parent child relationship.

5:11 And this time you are meant to be filling the role of parent. But what will happen is in all of your moments of challenge, you actually get catapulted backwards in time and begin to relive the fears that you had as a child. So part one of the book is really about how do we address that? Like how do we make sense of, oh, I'm freaked out that I'm going to wreck my kid and somehow this has something to do with when I was 4 years old.

5:36 So I make that practical and real and allow parents to figure that journey out for themselves and their own lives. Then we go on and talk about the science of child development and bringing science alive in the parent child relationship and how important attachment and connection is as a foundational base for everything to do with healthy child development. We talk about how brains grow because of relationship and attachment. And we really make sense of the hierarchical system, structure or nature of the parent child relationship where parents are meant to be in the lead and children are here, where parents are meant to be that solid, steady support that the child gets to lean into rest, into the safe provision of.

6:20 And so that's the foundational part of the book.

6:23 Okay, so it sounds like part one of the book is really, really great at helping to anchor parents in who they are and bringing them into present time so they're not acting unconsciously out of, you know, triggers from the past. Can you tell us what's in part two of the book?

6:37 So part two of the book is where we get real about it all. And part two of the book takes the foundation from part one and applies it to very specific kinds of situations that are experienced by all parents who are grown up little human beings. And so we begin by talking about sleep and when sleep gets challenging and what do you do around all of that for your babies if you are going to be very science based, very relationship based and not, not falling into your own, your old patterns.

7:06 From sleep, we go on to talk about feeding. From feeding we go on to talk about toilet training. And all along we're constantly shifting back to what does this have to do with you as a parent and what's happening for your baby, what's happening for your little human that you can come alongside them and really make sense of them to help them grow. From toilet training, we go on to talk about things like, like aggression. And so if you have a child who's biting or hitting or throwing.

7:33 What does that mean? And how do you come in from underneath all of that so you can continue to support your child's development in the best possible way? We talk about what it is to bring another little sibling into the world and how that might affect the older sibling, and some things that you can keep in mind to make sure you're really flowing in, in a nurturing kind of way around that. And we also talk about welcoming other caregivers into your child's world.

7:58 And so if you're starting your child in daycare or you have a care provider coming into the home or your child's heading off to preschool, what are some things that you can be thinking about to make sure that that transition happens in a way that's really supportive to your child and also, once again, doesn't have you falling back into old programs and old patterns?

8:18 So those are really all the kind of the big sort of flash points and potential battle zones in parenting. And it sounds as though the book is really going to help parents to stay mindful of what child really needs and also to be clear about what their own kind of internal responses are so they're not getting hijacked by unhelpful patterns from the past.

8:37 That's right, because most parents that I've worked with, and certainly my own experience as a parent, is that the waters get muddy very quickly. So it helps to have this kind of overarching framework to make sense of why it's feeling that way and then to very assuredly, and certainly stepping forward as a parent to your little person. Wow.

8:57 This has been so inspiring. Dr. Vanessa, so before we close out the interview, what's the one piece of wisdom that you would love to leave parents with?

9:06 A lot of parenting comes from a place of antiquated bias and falling into the will of the dominant parenting pop culture all around us. And so if I could encourage parents on one little thing, it's to remember that you're not here to serve that culture. You're here to serve your little human and your little child that you've brought into the world. And don't forget also to serve yourself. That those two pieces work in tandem. They're like this beautiful dance going back and forth between you and your child of growth and discovery and both of you becoming everything that you were meant to be.

9:44 It's just such a marvelous addition. You know, I think that this is the book that I wish that I had read before my daughter was born.

9:52 Me too.

9:53 It is the book that I wish my parents had read before they had me. So it's called Parenting Right from the Start. And so much inspiring, heart centered, but really practical, applicable advice that isn't prescriptive. It isn't step by step do this, but it does give parents a kind of a compass, if not a map, at least a compass. It's like, this is how I know which way to go. And it's just so powerful. So I really hope that after all that you've heard that you'll go out and get your copy today.

10:23 The book is called Parenting right From the start, published by LifeTree Media and written by the fabulous Dr. Vanessa Lapointe. It's available to pre order now. Thank you so much for joining me. Dr. Vanessa and thank you so much for joining us with these videos.