All right. I'm with Aaron Stuple, everybody. Welcome to Walkins. Welcome. Thanks for taking the time to come talk to me.

Thank you so much for having me.

I am fascinated with how you came about writing this book, The Sovereign Child. Most importantly, can you just give a brief overview about the book and then we'll kind of dig into it. I'm actually more interested in what

your upbringing was like. Oh, wow. Yeah, the book is about basically rejecting the idea that

compulsory rules are good for kids and acknowledging that almost all parenting books or styles of parenting come down to a question of where do you draw the line?

You know, we want to be lenient and we want our kids to be, you know, to have autonomy and freedom, but we also need to impose rules.

We need to have these firm boundaries.

We've got to make sure that they're healthy and they are successful and their brains don't rot out watching YouTube.

And the point of this book is to really step away from that question altogether and to recognize that we don't know where to draw these lines, right?

These lines are ultimately arbitrary. When you take a baby home from the hospital,

they don't give you the answers for where to draw these lines. And so we're figuring this out on our

own. And the point of this book is that there's a better question. There's a better way to look at this. And instead of,

you know, what do I have to make my kid do? Or what do I allow and disallow? A better question is,

how do I resolve the conflict that my kid and I are having? If my kid, I want my kid to brush their

teeth and they would rather be doing

something else, are there ways to, you know, for both of us to get what we're looking for,

can I make teeth brushing an enjoyable thing that they would do on their own? You know, if they're

jumping on the couch, do I have to, you know, install a rule that there's no jumping on the couch because the coffee table is here and you might fall and hurt yourself?

Or can I problem solve? Can I move the coffee table out of the way?

Can I figure out some other way that you can have fun in the living room jumping around that's not going to

break something or cause an injury or something like that. Yeah. That's the basic idea.

And it's grounded in a philosophy instead of, you know, just my kind of idea about raising

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