Parenting Beyond Power

How to Use Connection and Collaboration to Transform Your Family -- and the World

By: Jen Lumanlan MS MEd

Narrated by: Jen Lumanlan MS MEd

“I’m in love with this book! It illuminates the forces that make parenting so difficult, and helps us develop better relationships with our kids—and ourselves.”
—Hunter Clarke-Fields, MSAE, author of Raising Good Humans

Parenting is hard. But when we replace conventional parent-child power dynamics with collaboration, family life gets easier today—and we create a better world for all of us in the future.

When we see our children stalling, resisting, having tantrums, using mean words, and hitting, we want to just make it stop. But conventional discipline methods like time-outs, countdowns, and “consequences” teach children that it’s OK for more powerful people to control others—a lesson they take out into the world. This is how we learned White supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism from our parents—and we will replicate this with our children unless we make a different choice.

Research-based parenting educator Jen Lumanlan offers a simple yet revolutionary framework for rethinking our relationships with children. This new approach helps us to look beneath challenging behaviors to find and meet children’s needs, and ours too—perhaps for the first time in our lives. It involves empathetic listening, understanding feelings and underlying needs, and problem-solving with our children to find solutions to conflicts that work for everyone.

Family life becomes radically easier in the short term because behavior problems tend to melt away. In the long term, we’ll raise children who confidently advocate for themselves and treat others with profound respect.

Includes sample scripts, flowcharts, and resources to help parents learn and implement this new approach.

* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF of charts and resources from the book.

An aproach that meets everyone's needs in resolving conflicts.

I like the idea of observing and analyzing the needs and feelings of all parties involved in a conflict and then try to meet EVERYONE's needs rather than negociate, compromise and sacrifice, which are the instinctual tools I've been taught to think of in high stress situations. The latter only leads to bitterness and resentment and only fixes the conflict in the moment but not long term. I also like that the Problem Solving aproach can be adjusted to an individual's unique needs and family and it's not just a script to memorize, even though I badly need scripts. It challenges me to think for myself, It's like a puzzle I can resolve. It helps me to now aproach a conflict with curiosity rather than needing to avoid it because of hurt feelings. The book is so much more, I agree with all the ideas on how current patriarchal and capitalistic societies are promoting more bullying and bigotism and the change in society starts with how we parent. Are our needs really rooted in our values or are we just copying what we've learnt as kids and seen others do without really reflecting on it?

I wish the book spent more time describing the examples given. I understood the situations because I was familiar with the stories from listening to the podcast, but if I were only to read the book without the podcast, I don't think the examples come across that well. Just my impression.

Overall, a revolutionary book. I recommend 😁

Practical ways to parent in line with your values

I've read a lot of parenting books, some with overlapping ideas to this one, but Parenting Beyond Power is the most succinct, useful, and insightful of them all. The author does an excellent job of reading for the recording as well.

Parenthood without overpowering

I loved this book and will re-read it often. Approaching parenting through the lens of dismantling patriarchy, racism, and capitalism is such a brilliant approach. So many good tools for parenting, discipline, and building community.

Transform the world through better parenting

Jen does a great job of not only teaching respectful strategies for collaborating with children to meet everyone's needs, but also showing how embracing these strategies can lead to change in the broader world. Highly recommend to anyone looking for an alternative to "because I said so" parenting!

Good advice, mixed plot

I really want to recommend this book because it contains powerful messages and great, easy to understand parenting advice, but I wish the author had written two books and not conflated racial/socioeconomic inequities with parenting. Parenting is stressful enough without piling on a bunch of extra guilt. This book felt more like an apology letter from someone who has nothing but the fact that she was born white to apologize for. If you can see past that, by all means, great book.