For over a hundred years there has been a debate between parenting with gentleness and reassurance versus setting limits and letting children learn from their own experiences. I would like to offer the Loving Authority model as a ‘middle ground’ between the hovering, helicopter parent style and the extreme “Tiger Mom” style of parenting.

"We don't have faith that you can make it in this world without us."

In order to build the skills it takes to deal with whatever life hands us, parents and children have to know how to deal with feelings of frustration, confusion, disappointment and fear. I was never taught how to do that so I couldn’t teach my children, which is why I offer skills that help parents learn how to regulate their own emotions. Our fears can get in the way of allowing our children to learn from their hardships while they are young.

What will the consequences of my actions be?

We all want our children to be resilient, know how to manage their own lives, be accountable and think for themselves. Today we are on the threshold of a huge paradigm shift in the way we understand human relationships because of what we are discovering about the brain. This is helping to define more conscious and less fearful ways of parenting.

Setting limits and following through with consequences is love, if empathy comes first but this doesn’t seem to come naturally to most parents.

Empathy is a crucial ingredient in attuned communication but hard to access in stressful situations. Attunement is the ability to empathize, accept, and reciprocate what someone else is feeling. When a parent can develop this skill it literally helps a child develop an integrated brain. This is a part of what it means to be “emotionally intelligent.” This term is only ten years old. This missing link could be why parents and parenting experts have had such a hard time clearly defining effective parenting. In my book and workshops, I will expalin how Daniel Goleman defines emotional intelligence, and how his definition correlates with Dan Siegel’s cutting-edge neuroscience about the brain, empathy and relationships.

Meanwhile, please feel free to comment or ask questions if you would like to know more.