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INTRODUCTION

START AS YOU WISH TO GO

I WILL NEVER FORGET how it felt to find out that I was expecting my first son. I was a graduate student at the time, and had eyes only for the finish line of convocation. Four years and I would have a doctoral degree. Finally, I would be able to practise in my chosen field. But the universe had other plans. Around the end of my first year of doctoral studies I began to wonder if I had a low-grade virus or some other illness that was causing me to be so fatigued all the time. I booked an appointment with my physician, determined to get to the bottom of it. Imagine my surprise when test results revealed that I was pregnant. The father of my children had the wisdom to snap a picture of me right in that moment. The look on my face says it all: absolute disbelief mixed with a significant glimmer of excitement. I didn’t know it yet, but right then and there everything changed.

Not long after, I had a miscarriage scare. As I was rushed in for an ultrasound, I remember thinking, “I have only known the possibility of this baby for two short weeks. How am I so attached to him already?” At that point, I had been pregnant for only about ten weeks, but when the flickering image of my son’s little heart finally presented itself on that ultrasound screen I sobbed with relief. In fact, I cried so intensely and for so long that the technician insisted I pull it together so she could complete her exam.

From there, I found it difficult to relax into the certainty of the pregnancy. I made many worried visits to my physician, thinking something must be wrong. At one such appointment I said to her, “I just can’t wait for him to be born. Then I can stop worrying!” She looked at me with the knowing eyes of a mother and a professional who has seen it all. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, “that’s when the real worrying begins.” I didn’t want to believe her—and in truth, there’s been so much good alongside the rest that the scales have certainly balanced—but, in a way, she was right.

I was not prepared emotionally or otherwise for parenthood, despite being a psychologist in the making. I watched my baby son closely. I revelled in the miracle of him while fretting about his current cold. I delighted in his first smiles, in those moments when his sweet toes made their way to his mouth, and even when I was surprised by a baby boy’s wayward plumbing. But alongside all of that, I felt a shift in me that was unsettling. I knew something about who I was, and I understood myself as changed, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on how.

As happens, I had so many things to consider as a parent. Should I sleep train or not? Should I baby-wear? Is child-led weaning and feeding the way to go? Is my baby supposed to be socializing with other babies? Is co-sleeping okay or not? How do I manage behaviour when those first tantrums emerge? Like many parents, I turned to medical practitioners for advice, as well as to other parents, my own parents, my in-laws, and my siblings who were raising children. The messages were mixed, and they left me feeling more confused.

I remember thinking I had no choice but to sleep train. I sat outside my baby’s door, trying to take to heart his father’s reassurance that we were doing the right thing. I lasted four awful minutes. As a graduate student, my clinical supervisor had trained me on what constituted a “good timeout.” I tried it. Once. It also felt awful. I joined a baby and parent group for the socialization because that’s what new moms did, but I felt like my baby needed time with me most of all. I determined I would stop breastfeeding when it felt naturally right, despite some social pressure to “cut the apron strings.”

After each of these uncertain moments, that unsettled part of me would rear up and ask: What if I’m doing it wrong? What if I’ve failed? What if I’m not good enough? What if I’ve messed it all up? There was a constant battle between the ill-boding script running in my mind and my deeply felt sense that I could do this—that I was good enough, that there was no possible way I could mess this up as long as I listened to myself. My real self. Not my assumed self. My wise self. Not my fearful self. My intuitive self. Not my reactive self. I was self-assured enough to determine my own way about sleep training and co-sleeping, about compassionate discipline, and myriad other decisions. Sometimes I hit the mark and other times I didn’t.

As I walked on in my journey of parenthood and witnessed my children walking their journey of development, it would be some time before I understood what was happening inside of me for my own growth and, simultaneously, outside of me for the growth of each of my children. There were many fretful years of parenting a child with developmental and learning differences, a child with behavioural challenges, and a child with some medical hiccups; many years of figuring out who I was as a person and as a parent; and many years of struggling within a marriage in the context of this change. And then something happened.

I woke up.

You see, it was as though I was asleep, playing out my life in a dazed, dreamlike state. A true grasp of what was happening was ever so slightly beyond my reach. Unbeknownst to my rational and intellectual self, I was beginning to converge on a life-altering idea: that before I would be able to help my babies grow up to be the kind human beings I dreamed they would be, I first had to grow myself up. This meant realizing that my perspective, and all the feelings that flowed from that, was inspired by my internal self. That internal self was a culmination of my life’s experiences, especially those from childhood, when my impressionable mind was being formed. And so, in order to grow myself up, I had to understand my childhood experiences anew. This was the only way I’d be able to make sense of why I grew up to see the world as I do.

I didn’t have the luxury of doing my inner work on a therapist’s couch—I had to do it on my feet in the full colour of life. I had to accept that any angst I felt as a parent had nothing to do with my children, their apparent challenges, or the ups and downs of parenting. Rather, that angst came from the un-grown parts of myself. The two-year-old me who learned to be frightened when scary things happened. The four-year-old me who learned to be ashamed when scolded for my behaviour. The six-year-old me who learned to be unsettled when I worried my parents would divorce. And it isn’t like I had a terrible childhood. This is just my story, and these are my feelings. You will have your own. We all do. But when I started to make sense of where my feelings came from, I also started to make sense of why parenthood had unsettled me, why I had all this worry in me, and what needed to shift so I could step in with the energy in which I wanted my children to be bathed.

How did this—and does this continue—to play out in my life as a parent? Only every moment of every day! Some of those moments are big and some are small. For example, when my youngest son developed hearing and language exceptionalities, I had to connect with my fear of the future for him, my distress at how his school years would almost certainly play out, and my drive to control the factors that I perceived to be contributing to his circumstances. Once I connected with that fear, distress, and need for control, I realized those feelings came from a long-ago time, a time when my neural connections were wiring up and things around me felt distressing and out of control.

The mind sees only what it believes, and what it believes is based on our experiences. Those beliefs will colour everything that happens in our lives, as parents and otherwise. The best part is that as all-encompassing as beliefs are in their influence over our lives, there is nothing absolute about them. They can change. Our beliefs are misty, nebulous, and fabricated. They are a concocted narrative that emerges out of a collection of occurrences. As William Faulkner brilliantly wrote, “The past is never dead. It is not even the past.”¹ We see life only through the lens of our earlier experiences. Dr. Helen Schucman, clinical psychologist and author of A Course in Miracles, tells us that “we see only the past.”² We aren’t seeing reality or absolute truth. We are seeing our version of it. When unaware of this, we are essentially blinded by our beliefs. We cannot see what is happening, and that means “we are never upset for the reasons we think.”³ We are upset because we are peering through a veil of childhood wounds. We fall into those wounds when a present-day circumstance sends us back in time and triggers the feelings we would have had as young children when—even with the best, well-intentioned parents—our needs were not fully met. When we are in a wound, we are by definition age-regressed. We are responding from our three-year-old or four-year-old self. My belief as a child that things were uncertain created the experience of fear and distress, and the feeling of being overwhelmed. So, when challenges arose in my adult life (as a parent or otherwise), I could only react through the lens of fear, distress, and overwhelm, seeking control.

My son’s situation provided a gift. It triggered those feelings, which gave me a chance to look at them and to grow myself up in light of the new understanding that was emerging from my self-growth process. I understood that it was my little-girl self who was scared, distressed, and even frantic for control, not my mama self. And with this realization, the little-girl pieces of me could rest in the assurance that all was well, that my grown-up self could be trusted to take the lead and find the way through.

With this more settled existence, my ability to be present for my son completely shifted. I could see the gift in the challenge and the veil that had been lifted to reveal a path of hope, support, intervention, and growth. Only through these experiences of growing myself have I become more available to my role as a parent. I know now that my boys’ earliest years, as well as their present growth and development, would have been different had I understood what was happening within me prior to their arrival. I would have parented right from the start with less angst and more swagger. If I’d known—through all the normal, beautiful, loud, chaotic, fun moments of my sons’ early years—that I was responding to them from my child self during periods of angst or uncertainty, they would have benefited from bathing in the warm energy of my contentment instead of the stifling energy of my alarm. It’s possible that this would have smoothed out parts of their path. But it didn’t turn out that way, and as a result, they have had the gift of figuring things out as have I—and that in itself is perfection.

MY JOB AS a psychologist is to help children grow in the best possible way. I always feel humbled and privileged to walk alongside parents in their journey of raising their children and helping them to grow up. Many of my clients are parents with children over the age of three who are presenting with challenges such as mental health issues, developmental exceptionalities, suicidal tendencies, self-harm, rebellion, or other difficulties along their developmental journey. During my almost twenty years of working to support parents and children through all sorts of challenges—and in figuring it out personally along the way—I have come to an understanding. I believe that many of these issues could potentially have been prevented if things had happened differently in the child’s first few years of life. These first precious years are crucial when it comes to laying the foundation for what follows.

And yet, the dominant pop culture often has parents raising their babies, toddlers, and preschoolers in ways that are no longer supported by the science of child development. We fall into this pop-culture parenting trap because of the transfer of beliefs, from one generation to the next, about who children really are. The “original sin” view of the child, for example, prevalent in the Middle Ages and into the early 1600s, propagated the sense that children are born full of evil and require adult direction to be purged of it. In the late 1600s, the “blank slate” view had adults believing that children were hollow vessels just waiting to be filled and moulded by our guiding hand. And let’s not forget the “flowery meadows” view, popular in the 1700s, which had grown-ups somewhat neglectfully releasing their children to the proverbial flowery meadows to blossom without adult interference. Though none among us would likely admit to a staunch espousing of any of these biases, the reality is that their influence continues to invade the minutiae of day-today parenting. We are irritated by the inconvenience of development and want to hurry it up with techniques and strategies. We are frustrated when children don’t respond as we think they should. We set consequences and mete out punishments to get them to fall into line. Well-intentioned, all of it, but also antiquated and out of touch with the science—and heart—of child development.

Beyond the invasion of bias, our dominant child-raising pop culture has also flourished due to the misguided twisting of developmental science to suit the needs of the time-starved, outcome-focused modern world. We don’t have time for development to play out naturally, so we try to hurry it along. We seek experts who can crack the code and give us tricks and strategies to this end. We fret about university acceptance and life success almost from a child’s first breath. We hyper-schedule our children’s lives with enrolment in every possible enriching extracurricular activity to make sure they are in the running, forgetting that nature already has a brilliant plan in the works that will have our child in the lead by a long shot.

But how are soon-to-be parents and parents of young children to know all of this? There is no parenting handbook that walks you through the importance of doing a deep dive into your familial history to understand your biases, to grasp the influences that shaped your own mind, and to come to terms with how all of this might affect what you bring to the raising of your own child. That non-existent handbook also fails to explain the advances that have been made in the psychology and understanding of child-raising practices. It can literally take the accumulated experience of a few graduate degrees in psychology and child development, sloshing your way through the trenches with a child or two, and spending your life’s fortune on psychotherapy to make sense of it. And who does that as part of the preparation for baby’s arrival? “Honey, I think we should go with a neutral colour in the nursery—and also, let’s review our family tree to see what fear-based parenting practices might have been transmitted down the line,” said probably no soon-to-be parent ever. Is it any wonder, then, that there are very few (if any) among us who can honestly say that we were completely ready for the tidal wave of emotion and the life-changing interpersonal dynamics that can unravel even the most robust new parent?

During the emotional roller coaster and challenges of welcoming a child to the world, many parents are overwhelmed and frustrated. Since children don’t arrive clutching a manual, parents sometimes tend to raise them according to the practices of past generations. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Today, we can draw on the very latest science of child development, and an ever-deepening understanding of the complex psychological interplay between parental self-growth and a child’s healthy growth. Combined, these gifts offer parents an opportunity to raise their children well, right from the start.

This is what brings me—and, I hope, you—to this book. It is my greatest hope that I might offer all parents an alternative path, one that is fuelled by the science of child development, the very best that psychology offers, and my own journey as a mother. I believe this is a better path than those we have been treading thus far. A path that will allow you to raise a human being, from the beginning, in exactly the way nature intended. A path that will allow you to start as you wish to go, and an overview of where to begin your journey so it feels tangible and approachable rather than ethereal and slightly beyond reason. A path that may keep you out of my office with your behaviourally challenging six-year-old, your anxious and overwhelmed nine-year-old, your reactive and tuned-out fourteen-year-old, or your despairing and undone eighteen-year-old. A path that will have you laying a conscious and informed foundation for your child’s upbringing before they take their first breath, or at least early on enough in their sweet little life that the foundation you’ve laid will require only slight tweaks and modifications (and not full demolition!) in order to be truly spectacular. A path that will not only have your child growing as nature intended but will also leave you open to receiving the greatest gift you will ever be offered. I’m talking about the gift of growing up yourself—a gift that will allow you to live your fullest, best life and, along the way, be fully available to your child as they do their own growing. And the best thing about this gift? It comes direct from your child’s heart.

This book is organized into two parts. Part one provides a clear, easy-to-understand foundation that will set you up for really making sense of how to support your growing little. I pull back the curtain on the human mind so that you can understand the origins of your own big feelings about parenthood. I explain the science of attachment and walk you through exactly how this essential-to-life relationship forms between you and your baby. I take you into the inner workings of the growing brain so you can see what is happening for your child as you literally direct their neurons to connect in specific ways. I will reveal to you the natural hierarchy of the parent-child relationship and champion you to head out of the gates fully in the lead, so your child can rest capably into your care. And I will share with you the secret wonder of why toddler tantrums are a parenting win, and how healthy development includes lots of ups and downs. At the end of part one, you’ll find “Dr. Vanessa’s Parenting Principles”—a handy primer to remind you of what you most need to absorb from this book in order to parent right from the start.

In part two, we get down to the work of applying all that is explained in part one to the nitty-gritty reality of your everyday parenting life. Are you trying to sort out the always-tricky issue of sleep? Do you have a child who is refusing to feed, or nursing constantly, or has become incredibly picky about food? Do you have a little one who is biting or hitting or kicking? I’ll help you navigate the wild world of toilet training, figure out what sibling rivalry is really all about, and manage the transition that occurs when new adults, such as caregivers, are introduced to your child’s life.

It’s typically said that babies don’t come with a manual, but perhaps this book is that manual. Read on. You’ve got this. You really can parent right from the start. And if at any point you feel unsure about that, just know that I’ve got you. We’ll get there together, one chapter at a time.