Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I'm going to be talking about a topic that I don't believe I've ever spoken about here on this podcast in all my 10 years of doing this.

The topic is obedience. So I've been sharing this respectful parenting approach inspired by Magda Gerber

and her Rye approach. I've been sharing this since 2009 online. And almost all of my posts,

I don't know, 600 or something, they are mostly still on my website and you can read them for free

just so you know. Some of them have long, long comment threads, 200 comments, some of them. Everybody

was really engaged in reading articles back then. Now maybe not as much. But it was an interesting time and I learned a lot.

And one of the things I learned or one of the things I noticed is that this word obedience was a

bad word to people. People considered, and maybe this is still going on, that obedience is this

terrible thing. You should not be going

for obedience. An obedient child isn't a good result to have. It means we're being too strict.

Maybe you notice this still happens. Ideas seem to get taken to an extreme, right? I guess that's

what kind of feeds the algorithm of extreme ideas,

but it seemed like, again, obedience had become this terrible thing, that how dare you want

obedience as a parent? But when we really consider what that means, and the dictionary definition,

I checked, is compliance with an order, request, or law, or submission

to another's authority. So there was this sentiment at the time when I was starting, and maybe

this is still going on, where people were believing that it was this negative thing that we should

actually want a child who's obedient thing that we should actually want a child who's obedient,

that we should actually want children who aren't obedient, who always question authority,

or aren't expected to respect the wishes of an authority or their parents.

But that's not really true for most of us.

I don't believe that.

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