When children bend in response to their parents’ egos, Tsabary says, they become anxious and depressed.

She has a more refined lens focusing particularly on parents’ desires to control their children, especially in the service of achievement, which can stoke parents’ egos but doesn’t necessarily support children’s emotional and mental needs. Tsabary is not even talking about abuse or trauma. And last month, at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, developmental scientist Alison Gopnik urged parents to nurture but not shape their children, and to back down from the pervasive supervision, control, and directiveness of today’s intense parenting. Family therapists found that many of children’s behavior problems go away when parents alone receive counseling. Scholars validated the intergenerational transmission of trauma, linking child abuse to later adult violence. The Swiss psychologist Alice Miller wrote extensively about the ways that parents who were physically or psychologically harmed as children unconsciously pass on their wounds.

She may have a point: If the mother of that preschooler continues to be so controlling, I can well imagine a future for them of conflict and resistance.ĭespite the word “revolution” in the title, the message of Awakened Family is not new-but it does bear repeating.įor at least a hundred years, clinicians, scholars, and even poets have called for a shift in the focus of parenting away from the children and onto the parents. The problems that show up in children-anxiety, behavior problems, resistance-are not of their doing, but are really manifestations of problems with parents who are not sufficiently enlightened, awake, or conscious, according to Tsabary. In her fourth book, The Awakened Family: A Revolution in Parenting, Shefali Tsabary argues that parenting should be focused more on developing parents’ maturity-and less on children themselves.Ĭhildren come into the world naturally “awake,” or aware of who they truly are, claims Tsabary. From the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being.

The awakened parent