The Blog

Truth in Parenting

Tearing your hair out over lack of sleep, daycare decisions, homework enforcement, or what to do with the toddler tantrum? Want to feel better about your own tantrum as you try and manage it all? Read my Truth in Parenting blog for evidence-based reassurance (The Art and Science of . . . ), my own True Mom Confessions, and get a sneak peek of what my book offers with Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Diaries. Not sure where to start? Try here.

Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn

How to Have High Standards without Demanding All A’s

It may seem counterintuitive to reduce pressure on grades, especially if we see our child as achieving below their capacity. The instinct to increase pressure makes sense. But we know from the science of motivation and autonomy-supportive parenting that the more pressure our kids experience, the worse for their wellbeing and academic performance. But reducing pressure does not mean discarding expectations for academic performance.

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Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn

Homework: From Headache to Harmony

No matter our personal opinion about the utility of homework, our child will likely come home with some version of schoolwork at home, and we have to decide how to approach it. Some parents may simply email the teacher and state, “We’re not doing homework in this household.” For those of us either on the fence about the value of homework or pro-homework, approaching it within the autonomy-supportive framework can help us all thrive rather than barely survive.

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Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn

Redefining Success

Earning top scores and grades as the way to be successful becomes constricting and oppressive for many of our children, and feeds controlling parenting. Not to mention the pressure from kindergarten on to make sure our child is prepared to be competitive for a “worthy” college. I titled my book chapter about school, “Raising Real Success: From Grades to Grit” because the first step toward change in our unhealthy achievement culture is to tackle our mindset about school by redefining success. 

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Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn

How to Keep the Love of the Game

Let’s shout it from the rooftops: internal motivation is what often leads to better performance over the long run. And persistence. And joy.
How can we nurture internal motivation as a vehicle for performance, skill growth, and staying with activities instead of quitting? How can we help preserve the love of the game? Or instrument. Or performing art.

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Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn

Child Independence Needs a Comeback

I’ve been hearing from parents everywhere that they have noticed even less independence in their children since the pandemic. My theory is that pandemic life fed the flames of intensive parenting due to the high stress and anxiety about our children’s welfare. In place of encouraging independence, the fear of all bad things happening to our children (including actual life and death fears) made us more protective.

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Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn

Raising a Strong Sense of Self

We don’t discuss this enough, this parenting challenge of recognizing our child’s separate self and refraining from projecting our own idea of who they are, yet it’s so crucial to raising our kids. The core of autonomy-supportive parenting is that we are raising our child to be who they are (and to know who that is), and not who we want them to be.

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Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn

Parenting While Human

Our kids feel pressure when we are controlling, but that might be because we are feeling so much pressure. The more we feel pressure—whether that’s external from work/family/community expectations or internally driven by our ideas of “good parenting”—the more stressed and defensive we may get to prove to everyone else and ourselves that we know what we’re doing. That combination of pressure, stress, and defensiveness to prove ourselves can increase the impulse to control.

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Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn

How to Influence Instead of Control

By definition, parenting includes having expectations and standards for our children, setting limits, and directing our children to do things they don’t want to do—like pick up stinky socks littering the house. (Please tell me that’s not just my kids.) So, how do we accept our responsibility to actively raise our children while not controlling them?

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Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn Autonomy-Supportive Parenting Emily Edlynn

The Control Conundrum

The reality is that we want to feel in control as parents, and we usually don’t. Feeling out of control naturally leads to more controlling behaviors, which ends up doing more harm than good in parenting. Such as undermining our child's personal sense of control. When we control our children more, they feel more out of control themselves. We rob them of exactly what we are seeking for ourselves.

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The Empathy Problem for Parents

Well-intentioned parenting guidance of late seems to advise a bottomless well of empathy for our children. But the pursuit of this level of empathy compromises our children’s emotional health. The current rising star of “gentle parenting” revolves around understanding our children’s emotions, with the aim of helping them develop their own emotional skills. I am in full agreement with the importance of understanding and validating our children’s emotional experiences; however, what I see in real life is how this spotlight on empathy may be dovetailing with continued intensive parenting practices to explode into a crisis of our young people developing poor emotional skills.    

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