BROADCASTS.com

I always thought the infant phase would be the hardest part of parenting, when all the baby does is eat and sleep and cry.  Now I have a toddler I’m finding it’s harder than having a baby, some of the support systems that I had when she was a baby aren’t there any more, and the parenting skills I need are totally different.  How do I even know what I need to learn to not mess up this parenting thing?  Should I go back to school to try to figure it all out? In this episode I’ll tell you the history and principles behind the podcast and what we’ll learn together. Note: When I revamped the website I decided that after two years of shows, some of the information in this episode was out of date.  I recently re-recorded it to highlight the resources I’ve created for you. Please do subscribe to the show by entering your name and email address in the box below to receive updates when new podcast episodes and blog posts are published, as well as calls for questions and occasional requests for co-interviewers.  And if you’d like to continue the conversation, come join us in the https://www.facebook.com/groups/2174808219425589/ (Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group)!   Read Full Transcript Hello and welcome to episode 000 of Your Parenting Mojo – the podcast that aims to bring you rigorously researched information and distill it into a toolkit you can actually use to support your child’s development, and make parenting easier on yourself. I’m your host, Jen Lumanlan, and I originally recorded this episode in August of 2016 when the show launched. But by the time October 2018 rolled around I’d been recording for two years and a lot of the information in this episode was out of date so I decided to re-record, keeping the parts that are still relevant and adjusting the parts that had changed. So in this episode, called Parenting Philosophy, I’ll share a bit about my background and what I believe about parenting, because I find that most people who put information out there make you do the work of trying to see how your beliefs and theirs fit together, and instead I want you to understand where I’m coming from and how this fits with your approach to parenting. I never thought I’d be a parent, but it happened on purpose and not by accident. My daughter is named Carys, which means “one who loves and is loved.” She was born in June 2014 (in case I forget to mention how old she is in future episodes). Before Carys was born I spent a lot of time on my birth plan, figuring I had 18 years to work out how to be a parent. When I finally got my act together I discovered the wealth of information about babies that’s available when your main concerns are related to feeding and sleeping, and our first year progressed fairly uneventfully. Carys slept through the night early, was not at all resistant to trying new foods, and after she got over some initial gassiness, was generally fairly easy to be around. A lot of the advice on parenting an infant expires around age 12 months when the child is really mobile and interested in investigating the world and I was left feeling “now what?” So I started to do a lot of reading, and in the process of doing that reading and telling other people about it (but only when they asked me!) I realized I was having fun. So I decided to start a podcast so I could share what I’m learning with other people in a format that you can do while multitasking – commuting, working out, walking the dog, whatever – because goodness knows, you don’t need something *else* to read about how to be a parent. Two principles underlie this podcast. First – respectful parenting, also known as Resources for Infant Educarers or RIE. I actually held off on doing an episode on RIE for a long time because I didn’t want my listeners to think I was some kind of crazy hippy before I had many episodes out, but I did finally record two episodes on this – the first one is an...