MOMENT | World leading child psychologist: "THIS is the only parenting skill you really need" - with Dr. Gordon Neufeld

0:08It's not knowing how to be married. The more books you read, the worse it gets. It is not knowing about this. The juice of a marriage is you can see this is when you really believe you are the other's best bet and you act like it and you are true to it and you are busy figuring out how to be that where you don't have confidence. And that is juice. And as soon as you lose your confidence, do you get deflated? As soon as you lose the confidence that you are your partner's best bet. The deflation, it just takes the air right out of the sails. Now that is the same about parents. You can take a 16 year old and I have that research in my book and you have a six year old and you inflate her.

0:56You give her the message. You are your child's best bet. Oh, your baby is so lucky to have you, honey. You are going to be just what that child needs. And you watch that six-year-old who's never had a baby before, who knows nothing about it, who can come from a family of abuse. All of a sudden, she finds that place in her and alpha, give me that baby. And all of a sudden things start right. Why? She's dancing. She's dancing. It's a dance. This is the oldest dance in the universe. You don't dance for a book. This is a dance. You have to find that place in you. We have lost that place. We have lost that confidence.

1:32Now, if you come to your child this way, the rest will start coming. You'll figure it out. And my father told me this long ago. He said, you know, Gordon, you are making the biggest mistake of your life writing a parenting book. And he said, Dad, I laughed. I said, Dad, why? He said, you must never tell parents what to do. Well, I said, Dad, actually, I'm trying to write a book that I don't do that, but go ahead, tell me. And he said, well, Gordon, he said, I don't know why people can't figure this out anymore. Nobody knew what to do. It's always been a bluff. Only some of us knew how to bluff until we got there.

2:13You have to actually step up to the plate and say, I've got this. I am going to be your answers to your needs for significance and belonging, for affection, for love. I am going to do this. I'm going to hold on to you. I've got this. And then we pedal like crazy to underneath the surface to make it come true. But the first step is not knowledge. The first step is that actually stepping up to the plate with all of the ignorance we know we have. And we just said, it's my baby. I'm the mother. I'm the father. I'm their best bet. I've got this. I'm going to do it. And it's like when you can say to your partner, you're lucky you have me.

3:01When you have that, you know, you have something special. When you both have it, that's mutual. And when you have that with your child, oh, are they ever lucky to have you as a mom? And that would be true long before there were ever any books, long before there was any knowledge that could have been read. So books, for the most part, get in the way. I'd like to think my book is different because I'm trying to speak to the relationship, but knowledge actually gets in the way because we think the answer is in knowing what to do. This is tricky because it's not in having the answers. It is in being the answer.

3:37It's not having the answers. It's in being the answer. And the same as marriage and relationship. Once you stop being the other's answer, the marriage falls apart. If it's not reciprocal, it's not having the answers. It's being the answer. And that is what we are meant to be to our children. And that is an attitude. It's a dance. It's accepting that role. Once you accept that, the other starts all developing in its place. The knowledge has a place to hang on to. But if you don't, the knowledge has no place. It makes you more dependent. You're starting, you know, I would have parents who say, well, just tell me what to say.

4:10Tell me what to do. I say, you'll never parent from that place. That is the worst place to parent. If you are looking for what to say and what to do, you have lost the whole idea of what the dance is about. You just get in there. You are the answer. From that place, every situation will inform you.

4:37You know what's coming up for me is I did transformational coach training. And in one of the modules, we just had to sit with someone, no words for like an hour or something. That was magical. And the connection and the wisdom, it's just made me think about that and how actually there's no words really. There's no words for what you're describing, why certainly I don't know the words, which is just that beauty of that connection and trust with another. And if it's with a child, that's the essence of it, isn't it? That's the juice. That's the juice. And it doesn't necessarily make it easy. It's messy.

5:22It's complicated. It's not always easy. But the simplicity of it should not be lost. And again, it's the oldest dance. The attachment is the oldest dance. It's one takes care of another. You step up to take care. You step up to be the answer. You don't figure out how first. such a beautiful phrase that might write that on my fridge i am my girl's answer i always ask the same question at the end of every episode which is if you could give just one gift to all the mothers in the world what would that one gift be and why well that's easy especially we've just talked about it and so it's easy it's confidence it's confidence it's the confidence or the arrogance.

6:06I don't know what to be the arrogance in the right way of not the arrogance and thinking you know more, but there is a certain natural arrogance that is in any relationship as a friend, when you believe that you're the other's answer, this confidence is I'm convinced that the real crisis today is a crisis of confidence, not a crisis of knowledge is a crisis of confidence. And the more dependent we become on others and experts, the less confident we become. that's why i'm trying to turn this around yes yes yes i've written a book yes i'm seen as an expert yes i've taught parenting child parent relations in university for umpteen years yes i have you know created these courses but the fact is is how do you speak to the relationship not to the knowledge and so that is my wish i would so often wish this i would say to my clients sometimes in my office, I just wish there was a confidence pill I could give you.

7:04Because if you could walk there in your alpha instincts, in your alpha caring, believing that you are your child's best bet and looking to be the answer your child needs. And if this was there, the rest would follow.