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The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by Philippa Perry Book Summary

Book Name: The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read
Author: Philippa Perry
Pages: 240
Publish Date: 7 March 2019
Language: English
Genre: Self-help

Summary:

The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by psychotherapist Philippa Perry is for parents in all stages of parenthood, from pregnancy to being a parent to babies, toddlers, teenagers, and even adult kids.

Although this is technically a parenting book, it will help you improve your other relationships too. So in that sense, even if you're not a parent, you will benefit from this book written by psychotherapist Philippa Perry.

This book has easy-to-understand language. All concepts are explained with real-life examples and scenarios, which helps to make theoretical concepts practically applicable.

Philippa's approach is very non-judgmental. She says that all parents make mistakes. She has shared some of her own parenting mistakes, but mistakes can be repaired.

She talks about the concept of rupture and repair. She says ruptures are those times when we misunderstand each other, when we make wrong assumptions, or when we hurt someone. Ruptures are inevitable in every important intimate and familial relationship. It is not the rupture that is important, it is the repair that matters.

The way to make repairs in relationships is firstly by working to change your responses—that is, to recognize your triggers and use that knowledge to react in a different way. Or, if your child is old enough to understand, you can use words and apologize. Even if you only realize that you acted wrongly towards your child many moons after it happened, you can still tell them where you got it wrong. It can mean a tremendous amount to a child—even an adult child—when a parent makes a repair.

Reading this book, I felt like I was guided by someone very warm, wise, knowledgeable, and experienced. During the couple of weeks it took me to read this book, I tried to apply the concepts while talking to my kids and responding to their problems. I noticed that applying these principles worked way better than my default responses.

I felt good with the new way I was responding and so did my kids. It was almost a little magical. I will definitely be reading this book again. My biggest takeaway from this book is the importance of validating our children's feelings. It's a total game-changer.

As parents, we want our kids to be happy, but we cannot expect them to be happy all the time. When they are angry, sad, or frustrated, instead of trying to minimize their feelings or distract them or push them away, we need to empathize with them and validate their feelings.

Feelings are never right or wrong, they're just feelings. To you, something might feel like it's too small to be upset over, but to your child it's a huge deal. So we need to look at things from their perspective.

For example, in the book there is the case of a little girl named Nova who was going to ride in the car with her cousins. One of her cousins unknowingly sat in Nova's usual seat. Nova started to cry. Her dad would normally say something like "Don't make a fuss, just sit somewhere else," or maybe ask her cousin to move. I would have done something very similar myself. But what he did was crouch down low so he was on the same level as Nova and softly and gently said to her, "It's really hard for you to see Max in your seat. You really want to sit there, don't you?"

Nova's crying subsided a bit and she looked at her dad. He really felt for her and she saw it in his face. He told her she'd be able to sit there next time. Telling Nova off and persuading her in the past had just been making her more stubborn. When she saw that her dad really did feel sorry for her, she no longer needed to keep clinging to her point.

Her dad validated her feelings. Validating the feelings of kids doesn't mean that they get what they want every time. In this example, Nova did not get to sit in her seat, but she felt understood and that was enough to calm her down.

One of the hardest times to acknowledge your child's feelings is when you feel differently. For example, maybe your seven-year-old child sighs deeply and says, "We never go out." You may feel like countering with, "But we went to Legoland just last week," or "We go out all the time." You may feel angry that the effort and expense of taking your child to a theme park seems to have gone unappreciated.

Denying your child's feelings can start to alienate this person with whom you want a loving lifelong relationship—this person whose happiness you really care about. Changing your reaction might feel counterintuitive, but all of us feel better when our experience is acknowledged and not argued with, and children are no exception.

Realize that your child is only telling you what they feel. Use this as an opportunity to connect with them, to talk about their feelings rather than push them away. Denying unhappiness does not make it go away, it just digs it in a layer deeper.

Let's go back to our example and see how we can validate the feelings of the child who says, "We never go out."

Child: We never go out.
Adult: You sound bored and fed up.
Child: Yeah, we've been indoors all day.
Adult: That's true, we have. What would you like to do?
Child: I'd like to go back to Legoland again.
Adult: That was fun, wasn't it?
Child: Yeah.

The child is more likely to feel satisfied with this conversation and it's less likely to escalate into an argument. Your child isn't stupid; they know they can't be in Legoland every day. But they need their parent to know they want to be with them and to feel this with them. It's about soothing their feelings as they learn the unpleasant lesson that life does not always go their way. This is true for everyone—child or adult.

When we feel bad, we don't need to be fixed—we want to be felt with rather than dealt with. We want someone else to understand how we feel so we don't feel lonely with that feeling. Even when a child can talk, they may not be able to articulate a feeling as well as you can. This is why, in this example, the child describes how they feel as "We never go out," rather than the reality of "I feel restless, cooped up, and at a loss to know what to do with myself."

Notice again that validating the child's feelings did not mean that the parent took them to Legoland that day. Validating our children's feelings calms them down, stops their tantrums, and strengthens the bond between us and them.

This also applies to teenage children, adult children, as well as the other relationships in our lives. There's a passage from this book that I have to read out to you. Philippa says, "I often see parents thinking they can treat children like things to be efficient about, to deal with and fix. It's usually because the parent is busy, life is busy, and this is how the parent has learned from their own parents to deal with children. It is a dominant old-fashioned ideology that promises you can slot parenting easily into your busy life. But too often there is a price. If you don't treat your child as a person, if you have dealt with them rather than felt with them, you might find when that child becomes a teenager or an adult and you want to have a conversation with them, they are not very forthcoming with you."

So my first big takeaway was around validating the feelings of your child. My second biggest takeaway is around setting rules and boundaries with your children.

Philippa says when parenting a teenager, remember what it was like to be a teenager yourself—straining at the restrictions your parents put in place to try to stop their fears from coming true. Adolescents do need to keep some things private. They need this privacy in order to forge their separate identities.

Teenagers may also lie—or lie by omission—to create space for themselves. It isn't that they are necessarily up to something tremendously bad. They're up to something that they may want to keep for themselves or in their friendship group because they are separating from the tribe of family and parents and forming their own new tribe.

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