Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

This episode is going to be centered around a really important point that I actually don't think I've had a chance to make on this podcast.

And what makes it important to me is that it's a common misconception about the approach that I teach.

Sometimes people get the impression it's about making this perfect bubble for our child to be in, where everyone respects them, and is kind and polite about boundaries and is interested in them, lets them have their feelings,

and that maybe this could become a problem if our child is with other people that don't have

this same approach, that don't have this respect for children or I don't even want to say this respect for

children because a lot of people do respect children, but the way that they do it is different.

And what we want to do as parents, our goal is to raise children who can flourish in any kind of environment.

We want to give them the foundation, the sense of themselves, the sense of boundaries that

other people have, how to respect others, and that we believe in them to be able to navigate

their life with people and experiences and experience disappointments, experience

situations of conflict, to be resilient in all of these situations.

What made me think of this is that I have two notes from parents.

Both of them are emails that I received recently, and the topics are quite disparate.

So one is a five-year-old girl that's having trouble getting along with her grandma,

and the other is a two-year-old who's finding that her hugs aren't well-received by some of her peers.

So what these have in common is they're both about children adapting to other people's

boundaries that aren't their parents.

And how important it is that we set them up to succeed at that as best we can.

We're not going to be perfect. So that's what I want to talk about. But yeah, mostly I want to dispel this idea that what I'm suggesting is that we

create this world that's so ideal for our children where they're so treasured in the center of it

and that now our child is going to need

...