Dr Vanessa Lapointe is a caring soul.

You can hear this in every word she speaks; every piece of advice she offers and wisdom she imparts to parents everywhere. She starts with kindness. When she speaks about children, it’s with the gravity of someone who has seen families brought to their knees by the struggles of the little people in their worlds, and her empathy for both the parents and the kids is boundless. But, she doesn’t just pat parents on the back and tell them they’re doing a great job – she also tells them they need to do their own work in order to parent effectively. She calls it ‘growing ourselves up’ and suggests that it’s a pretty important part of this parenting gig for all of us.

Our children have a way of holding a mirror up to us, don’t they? Annoyingly, if we want to be the parents they need us to be, we have to look at that reflection, even if it ain’t pretty!

Dr Lapointe is a psychologist, consultant, Huffington Post blogger and the author of Discipline without Damage: How to get your kids to behave without messing them up. Because we thought she wasn’t busy enough, we also got her to contribute a chapter to our new ParentTV book, Parents, this is the one thing you need to know, published by Affirm Press and edited by ParentTV’s very own Sam Jockel and Kerri Ryan. Luckily for us, being what our kids need us to be is the very topic Dr Vanessa Lapointe chose to write about.

‘That is at the heart of what it means to be a parent; parenting is not something that you do,’ Dr Lapointe says. ‘It is something that you be.’ 

So, how do we do this? How do we put ourselves under the microscope, and how do we shift the focus from what we’re doing in our parenting to how we’re being as parents? How do we learn what our children are communicating through their behaviour, and how do we meet those underlying needs with grace when what’s happening on the surface is triggering and hard?

We read Vanessa’s chapter, that’s how! She explains it better than we ever could.

Notable quotable:

Behaviour is always communication. Never has a child acted out or engaged in some kind of challenging behaviour just for fun. Their behaviour is always purposeful, and is meant to alert you to an internal struggle. In this moment, they do not need you to join the struggle, but rather are depending on you to help lift them out of it.

Dr Vanessa Lapointe

We recommend this top video from Dr Vanessa:

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Parents are pretty busy people, so we’ve made things easy for you by getting 33 of our most well-loved experts and educators to each tell us ONE thing that they want parents to know. Then, we put it all in a book called, Parents, this is the one thing you need to know, edited by ParentTV’s own Sam Jockel and Kerri Ryan! Want to nab yourself a copy? How about signing up to ParentTV and getting a book of your very own for free?

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