Alyson Schafer considers herself to be a modern-day parenting expert. Her general message is that a lot of what we think is common, may not necessarily be right. One of the most interesting things about Alyson is that she is the third generation of parenting educators. Although she is the first to do it as a full-time job, she comes from a long tradition of Adlerian psychology and psychologist who have always been doing some form of educational parenting.
The core message I took away from our conversation is that we should focus on teaching children rather than rewarding or punishing them. Children have motivations just as adults have motivations. Children need to feel like they are accepted and that they belong. They need to feel like they are part of a tribe or a community. They need to feel like they are loved by their first tribe.
Another lesson I took away from the conversation is that we all need to have the courage to be imperfect. Having this courage to be imperfect allows us to try things are not good at so we can ride through failures and mistakes.
In our conversation, Alyson took me back to my background in psychology and reminded me of the work Alfred Adler and he focused on teaching humans to cooperate instead of competing for to concur or oppress the other person. Much of Alyson’s framing is informed by the Adlerian tradition. For her, one of her biggest insights is the notion of the usefulness of behaviour. Our behaviour, from the Adlerian tradition, is thought to be goal driven. She uses the example of a child getting out of bed much to a parent’s dismay. In that scenario what is the usefulness of getting out of bed? It might be that it provides the child with attention and stimulation. Our behaviours serve a purpose, so asking the question, what is the usefulness of that behaviour?
Alyson is trying to disrupt parenting. The extent to which we, as a society, pathologize children’s behaviour is particularly troubling for her. From her perspective, children are gravely misunderstood. One of the big ideas put forward by Alyson is that children should have a voice on a policy level. Additionally, if we do prenatal classes or breastfeeding classes, why don’t we have parenting classes. Instead of celebrating people for outing fires, why not celebrate people preventing fires.
Books mentioned in this episode:
- The books “the Carpenter versus the Gardner”
- Tipping point – Malcolm Gladwell
Links mentioned in the episode: