This Book Will Make Parenting Easier (And Also Change the World!)

Make your family life easier today–and raise liberated children who will grow up to change the world

Do your children resist doing every single thing you ask them to do? Is getting in the car seat (or toothbrushing or sugar or screen time) a constant challenge? Research-based parenting educator Jen Lumanlan offers The Problem-Solving Approach, a simple yet revolutionary framework for rethinking our relationships with children. She provides an alternative not just to outdated discipline methods like spanking and shaming, but to conventional ones like time-outs, countdowns, and rewards, which don’t address underlying challenges.
This book connects the dots between the ways we use our power as parents and what that teaches our kids about how power is used in the world, including replicating systemic harms like racism and sexism. Lumanlan asks us to look beneath challenging behaviors to find and meet the deeper needs that our children have–and that we have too. This approach makes things radically easier in the short term because many of the problems we face with our children–tantrums, stalling, resistance, mean words, and hitting–melt away when we can meet their needs. It also reveals our needs as parents and enables us to meet these too–perhaps for the first time. In the long term, it helps us to raise children who confidently advocate for themselves, and who treat others with profound respect. Lumanlan shows how replacing conventional parent-child power dynamics with connection and collaboration can create a more peaceful home now and a better world for all of us in the future.