Your Competent Child – Book Review-Suggestion + My wish for change

I recently had this book suggested to me by a reader and I loved it so much I had to share it here.

Your Competent Child questions the traditional family values and suggests that most of what we understand as upbringing ¨has a destructive influence on the quality of relationships between children and adults¨.

According to the author, Jesper Jull, until about 40 years ago, families would seek for a method of upbringing and we have been held up on the notion that children need to be taught how to behave.

Instead, we have finally discovered that children are full human beings (a notion present in the RIE approach as well), they are not to be taught how to become adults, they do it naturally by growing up. These notions are so simple written down, they seem unquestionable for me, and yet, we haven´t been treating children nicely at all. For one thing, we haven´t been treated with that much respect ourselves, or you have got to have pretty unconventional parents to have been. So it´s really hard to do it without any role models, we are to become the role models of raising children with respect.

The biggest problem of traditional methods is that they easily detach us from our children. Somehow, along the history of ¨civilization¨, we have lost the ability to convert our loving feelings into loving behavior.

But, Juul writes: ¨we are regaining the skills to improve our relationships with the latest attempts to find equal dignity between men and women, adults and children. And to do so, we have to start by forgetting a lot of what we conceive as right and wrong.¨

Juul has a different view on what is children´s cooperation and by competent, Juul means that ¨children are in a position to teach us what we need to learn¨.

As an example, he talks about a mom bringing her baby to daycare as soon as her maternity leave is over. Every morning, when she drives the baby there, the baby starts fussing and crying, making the separation hard. When the dad brings the baby, the girl doesn´t get bothered. The mom thinks the daughter is not cooperating.

Juul explain that the opposite is true: the baby is cooperating.

The mom is probably unhappy about going to work and is having difficulty to separate from her baby. The daughter somehow senses the mom´s feelings and cries. She means something like: ¨Mom, there´s something wrong here, something is unclear. I am letting you know this and assume that you will take responsibility for solving the problem so that we both can feel better¨.

This is an amazing insight into our children challenging behavior as a possibility for us to realize that something is wrong and we need to figure out what is and fix it. We, the adults.

¨Children cooperate. It is the task of the adults to realize what the children are cooperating with¨, says Juul and he proposes a new paradigm: ¨Children´s behavior, whether cooperative or disruptive, is just as important for the development and health of parents as the behavior of parents is for the development and health of children. The interaction between adults and children is a mutual learning process. The more we treat each other with equal dignity, the more we each gain.¨

Now we know that children are born fully human: social, responsible and empathic, that these qualities are not taught, but inborn. Our task as parents is not to teach so much as it is to interact in healthy ways.

It´s more important for parents to guarantee an environment of cooperation both ways in the house than to try to teach and mold desired behaviors. It´s about accepting our differences too and our children´s unique traits and way of developing.

The secret is in making sure our children can count on us to meet their needs, whatever they are, that we learn how to read their inputs, that often are not verbal as we would like them to be, but always are expressed in a competent way.

To reach a better understanding and respect, we must question our assumptions about parenting and engage with our children in more honest and meaningful ways. If you are curious about the book, here´s the link again (an affiliate link).

It is my hope that every day more families shift their traditional paradigms to positive parenting solutions. One my favorites sites with practical advice on how to do this is Aha Parenting. It will be a real revolution when masses of families start treating our children with the respect that all human beings deserve.