Digital Sextant

ScreamFree Parenting

The Revolutionary Approach to Raising Your Kids by Keeping Your Cool
by Hal Edward Runkel

I’m generally a calm guy.  I don’t usually rant and rave or scream.  But I also have a three-year old at home, a little person who has perfected the art of pushing my buttons and who can, with a few well timed and well-aimed misbehaviors, send me into froths of anxiety, sometimes leading me to raise my voice.  I don’t like being that person.

Runkel’s book actually doesn’t have different insight than other books I’ve read.  It’s a new phraseology on the same old arguments, ideas about how to interact with kids, on setting boundaries, on being who you need to be to be a good parent.  Whew, that’s an awkward sentence.

He uses the term scream to refer to a whole raft of behaviors parents use when they lose their cool, from literally screaming to shouting to giving up (Oh, just do what you want) to begging or pleading.  All these are, for Runkel, screams that do a disservice to you and your child.  Or me and mine, as I read the book.

So here’s what I get from ScreamFree Parenting:

1. Give your kids space and try to lose your anxiety about it.  If they have their own space, they will develop to be their own people.  This includes letting children face the consequences of their choices and make decisions for themselves in many things.
2. You can’t control their reactions, only yours.  If you’re consistent and calm for yourself, principled in your actions, you will serve your children well.  This includes setting clear and consistent boundaries and enforcing them from a position of careful decision-making, not passion or anger.
3. You must take care of yourself to take care of your children.  He uses the oxygen mask on the plane as an example — put on your own before you put on theirs.  Similarly, Runkel urges parents to find fulfillment for themselves and in themselves, not in their children.  By being our own people and loving our children for being theirs, you provide them both a model for how to behave, and you release them the burden of having to be your support.

As I said, these aren’t amazing insights, but a new way of phrasing them that I particularly like.  In the final chapter, Runkel urges that parents act from a position of principle, setting boundaries and punishments because they need to be set, rather than out of desperation.  It’s a cool system and one that I’ve already found some benefit from working into my daily interactions with Avery and Finn.