How Low Demand Parenting Will Change Your Life

Update: 2024-10-28

Description

What it's about:

In this episode of The Low Demand Parenting Podcast, I’m diving into what low demand parenting really looks like. As an autistic adult, mom of three, and someone who’s been on this journey myself, I’ve seen firsthand how letting go of traditional parenting pressures opens the door to more trust, connection, and joy in our families. Inspired by Ross Green’s Collaborative and Proactive Solutions, I share how releasing control and truly respecting our kids’ boundaries can change everything. We’ll talk about how meltdowns are a form of communication, how to build genuine trust, and the growth that comes when we parent from a place of understanding and reflection. It’s all about moving away from power struggles and toward a more peaceful, respectful home life.

12 Days of Low Demand Holidays:

I'll say it: Holidays can be the absolute worst. This transformative course is tailored for families navigating the unique challenges of the holiday season. Discover impactful video lessons, a comprehensive workbook, and recording of an interactive Q&A to empower you through the festivities.

See all the details here!

Ready to Start Dropping Demands?

If you’re ready to dive deeper into low demand parenting, I’ve got some great FREE resources to help you get started!

Quiz: Why is Everything So Hard? – This quick, insightful quiz will help you understand why parenting might feel so overwhelming right now and give you personalized steps to lighten the load. Take the quiz here.

Free Chapter: Low Demand Parenting – Curious about my book, Low Demand Parenting? Download the first chapter for free and start your journey toward more ease and joy. Get the free chapter here.

Transcript:

Hello, we are going to talk this week about how low demand parenting is different from other parenting techniques. And after years of practicing low demand, what the most powerful demand drops have actually been. Let's talk about how low demand parenting is different from some of the other techniques and tools and strategies and mindsets that you might've encountered.

I want to go back to my early parenting days, when I was eager, so desperate, in fact, for strategies that would help me parent my three kids, who I adore with my whole heart, and who also seemed to struggle. Every day with what I had been taught to see as ordinary aspects of being a human and the strategies that professionals and books and blogs and podcasts recommended were things like timeouts or time ins, punishments or consequences or natural consequences, reward charts, sticker charts, praise, praise, Ignoring.

And every one of those techniques that I tried chipped away or outright destroyed the relationship I wanted to have with my kids. Clear kind boundaries and developing emotional vocabulary enraged and alienated them. Picture schedules, consistent routines, and enforced sensory breaks all fell flat.

Nothing worked. All of the best techniques that I was taught failed. And at every turn, it was my fault. I felt like such a failure. Discovering Ross Green's work changed my path. Ross Green is the author of many books, including The Explosive Child and The Parenting Approach, called Collaborative and Proactive Solutions.

When I discovered what Dr. Green describes as releasing adult controlled plans, or Plan A, and his encouragement for us to embrace true collaboration, it felt like freedom. When I truly gave up on My responsibility as the adult being to control the outcomes and the plans, I wept for days. I felt deep relief.

I told my kids, I'm not going to force you to do things anymore. If you don't truly consent to it, we don't do it. We didn't even know what kind of life that would look like. It felt like stepping off a cliff. But there was a method. There was a path. And I felt like if we follow this, we'll be okay. The focus in Dr.

Green's work is on collaborative problem solving. The hard part is that this kind of back and forth, genuine, collaborative approach was still way out of reach for us. My children's trust in me and in themselves was low. The new scripts and questions that they proposed that I use were triggering. And I could tell we were going to spend a long time just letting things go and building trust day after day.

And so that's what we did. We stuck right there, letting things go and building trust, and we developed low demand parenting. And here is what we have learned. I've learned that children's trust is earned day after day. We live in a world that disrespects children and routinely violates their boundaries.

Children are regularly controlled and manipulated by adults in full view of everyone. Low demand parenting restores genuine trust by fostering children's inner voice, by listening to their boundaries and respecting their needs. This is a fundamentally anti adultist approach. Adultism is when adults believe they're better or more important than kids and teens, leading them to ignore or control young people's opinions, feelings, and choices.

Adultism creates an unfair power imbalance where adults make all the decisions and young people aren't treated with respect or seen as capable. I have learned that parents meet their own needs while honoring their children's boundaries. Boundaries are a huge topic in traditional parenting circles. For traditional parents, parents meet their needs by controlling their kids.

Something like, I need my mother in law to think I'm a good mom so you must behave at her house. In low demand parenting, adults learn to identify the deep need, motivating their tendency towards demands. And to honor our own need while dropping what's too hard for the kid. In low demand parenting, we adults learn to identify our deep needs that are motivating our demands.

And then we practice honoring our own needs while dropping what is too hard for our children. As a low demand parent, I have learned to heal my relationship to myself. What if you had been trusted and listened to as a child? What if the people in your life honored your boundaries and found creative ways for you to flourish just as you were?

As we parent our kids, we give ourselves permission to grieve our pain and to heal old wounds. There's a lot of talk right now about being cycle breakers. And I believe that this kind of parenting is integral in that reality, that we have some cycles we're desperate to break.

As children, we knew things about the world.

We knew things about ourselves that mattered and somewhere along the way. As we were not listened to, not trusted, not respected, not centered, as adults used their power and control over us and told us who we were, and told us, more importantly, who we were supposed to be, we lost some of those threads. And so many of us, as adults, are desperate to come back to who we once were.

This journey of parenting our children becomes a healing journey. For us in our relationship to our own childhood and to our inner children who live in us today.

In low demand, we view meltdowns as a sign of trust and a communication that something was too hard. In other parenting schemas, meltdowns typically mean something is wrong. It's a failure, a mistake, a problem. In low demand, meltdowns are just more information. They share that our kid trusts us enough to share their big feelings and something came up that was too hard. The adult then becomes the demand detective, discerning what happened, what crossed the line, what was too hard about that situation, and what information does that give us about what to drop in the future.

Low demand works for easy kids and for tough ones. This was something that frustrated me so much as I explored different parenting techniques and trying to find ways to meet the needs of my really tricky kids. So many techniques work for lots of easy kids! But that's the reality with easy kids. Most everything works for them. But if it doesn't work for the ones who are extremely sensitive, if it doesn't work for the ones who feel so deeply, if it doesn't work for the ones who are disabled or have slower processing time or react to question asking, if it doesn't work for them, then it doesn't work.

Easy kids are easy kids. That's the whole point. Easy kids are often hiding their discomfort under a veneer of helpfulness and people pleasing. They are too scared of what would happen if they spoke up and named their needs. Maybe some of you were easy kids. You might remember how it felt. Easy kids can be jealous of their more reactive siblings ability to self advocate. They wish they could speak up. They wish they could say wha