Partners who Parent

Advice Practical Parenting

According to clinical psychologist Dr. Emma Svanberg, many parents in today’s world feel like they are never getting it quite right. Expectations about what a ‘good’ parent is are impossibly high, at a time when policies that try to support parents still leave many families under intense pressure.

This is where her new book, Parenting For Humans comes in. It explores the many reasons why parenting can feel so hard and tries to empower parents to understand their instincts and to see their child as the person they are.

The number one thing Emma wants us to do as parents is throw away the imaginary rule book. If you are truly going to parent the child you have as the person you are, there will be no hack that can magically work for all parents. If it doesn’t work for you and your child, it doesn’t work, and the huge amount of conflicting advice is complicating parenting not making it easier.

Many of the concerns that parents and parentsto-be bring to Emma boil down to the simple question ‘Is this normal?’ yet over recent years, so little about our environment has been normal. Parents under immense pressure wonder if their own responses are what they should be, and also whether their child is behaving in typical ways.

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Emma suggests that perhaps the focus should not be on ‘normal’ but on the unique needs of your family and how to support them. Your job as a parent is to hold them not to mould them.

In this this extract from Parenting for

Humans, Emma looks at the relationship between you and your parenting partner.

❝Partners Who Parent Although sometimes we may feel that we do, we don’t exist in a vacuum. We are influenced not only by our histories but also by the people we are connected to and the environments we live in. These might be things that affect us directly– like state-led postnatal care, or the head teacher at your children’s school, or the accessibility of playgrounds in your area. But they go all the way up to the attitudes in your society and historical changes that you live through such as, for example, a global pandemic, #MeToo,

Brexit, #BlackLivesMatter, the repudiation of

Roe v. Wade, global recessions, the climate crisis. All of these interact with each other, and shift over the course of a lifetime. And, just as all of these things will influence our parenting, they will also influence our children. This is what we so often miss when we talk about parenting. We focus on the role of the parent in a child’s life, but less on the ways that children are born into whole networks of other people. Part of development is figuring out how to exist as part of these networks.

And we focus on what parents are doing, and hardly at all on what is happening in their lives and how this influences their feelings, their parenting capacity and their decisions. One of the most important influences on our parenting journey is who you are raising your child or children with. It’s obvious really, isn’t it, but where in all the stories about love is the one about how love can be stretched to its limits at 4am when you’re both looking at each other over screaming children, with your eyes pleading ‘DO SOMETHING!’ Or, stretched to breaking point when you’re looking at a partner who is fast asleep despite those screaming children . . .

When we talk about parenting, we tend to focus on a mother and a child. We rarely discuss parenting as a couple, the role of fathers and co-parents, or the impact of parenting solo. But, here in the UK, the majority of people parent in an opposite or same-sex couple. And while the number of lone parents is increasing, with one study finding that a third of families they studied had experienced single parenthood, blended families are also increasing due to those lone parents finding new partners. Families shift and change over time, so a child might be raised by parents, grandparents and step- parents in their lifetime. And we as parents might have to negotiate our parenting decisions with all those people too.

Somehow, we have to join our maps

❞together with the maps of numerous different people – some of whom want to go in a very different direction to us.

Extracted from Parenting For Humans: How

to Parent the Child You Have, As the Person

You Are by Dr Emma Svanberg published by Vermillion on 2nd March. RRP £16.99

About the author

Dr Emma Svanberg, aka Mumologist, is an award-winning clinical psychologist, speaker and campaigner with expertise in attachment and perinatal psychology