Perry - The book you wish your parents had read (and your children will be glad that you did)

Philippa Perry has been a psychotherapist for the past twenty years. A faculty member of The School of Life, she has presented several documentaries including The Truth about Children Who Lie for BBC Radio 4 and Being Bipolar for Channel 4. Most recently, Philippa has worked on a BBC Radio 4 programme, The Age of Emotion, and contributed towards the radio documentary Humiliation. She lives in London with her husband, the artist Grayson Perry, and her cat Kevin. They have one grown-up daughter, Flo.

This book is dedicated with love to my sister Belinda

This is not a straightforward parenting book.

Im not going to go into details about potty-training or weaning.

This book is about how we have relationships with our children, what gets in the way of a good connection and what can enhance it.

Its about how we were brought up and how that has a bearing on how we parent, about the mistakes well make especially those we never wanted to make and what to do about them.

You will not find many tips, tricks or parenting hacks in this book, and at times it may upset you, make you angry or even make you a better parent.

I wrote the book I wish I had read as a new parent, and I really wish my parents had read it.

Recently, I watched a stand-up routine by the comedian Michael McIntyre in which he said there are four things we need to do with our children: get them dressed, feed them, wash them and put them to bed. He said before he had his children he had a fantasy that being a parent would be all running through meadows and eating picnics, but the reality was that each day was an ongoing battle getting them to do just these four basic things. There was much laughter from the audience as he described persuading them to have their hair washed, to put on a coat, to go outside or to eat a vegetable. It was the laughter of parents, maybe parents like us, whove been there too. Being a parent can be hard work. It can be boring, dispiriting, frustrating and taxing while at the same time being the funniest, most joyful, most love-filled, brilliant thing youll ever experience.

When youre bogged down in the minutiae of nappies, childhood illnesses, tantrums (toddler and teenager), or when youre doing a full days work and coming home to your real work, which includes scraping banana out of cracks in the high chair, or another letter from the headteacher summoning you to the school, it can be hard to put being a parent in perspective. This book is about giving you that big picture, to help you pull back, to see what matters and what doesnt, and what you can do to help your child be the person they can be.

The core of parenting is the relationship you have with your child. If people were plants, the relationship would be the soil. The relationship supports, nurtures, allows growth or inhibits it. Without a relationship they can lean on, a childs sense of their security is compromised. You want the relationship to be a source of strength for your child and, one day, for their children too.

As a psychotherapist, Ive had the experience of listening to and talking to people who struggle with different aspects of parenting. Through my work I have had the opportunity to look at how relationships become dysfunctional and what makes them work well again. The objective of this book is to share with you what is relevant when it comes to parenting. This will include how to work with feelings yours and theirs how to attune yourself to your children so you can learn to understand them better and how to have a real connection with them rather than getting stuck in exhausting patterns of conflict or withdrawal.

I take the long-term view on parenting rather than a tips-and-tricks approach. I am interested in how we can relate to our children rather than how we can manipulate them. In this book I encourage you to look at your own babyhood and childhood experiences so that you can pass on the good that was done to you by your own upbringing and hold back on the less helpful aspects of it. Ill be looking at how we can make all our relationships better and good for our children to grow up among. Ill cover how our attitudes in pregnancy can have a bearing on our future bond with our child, and how to be with a baby, a child, an adolescent or an adult child so you can have a relationship with them that is a source of strength to them and satisfaction to you. And, along the way, have far fewer battles about getting them dressed, fed, washed and put to bed.

This book is for parents who not only love their children but want to like them too.

The clich is true: children do not do what we say; they do what we do. Before we even consider the behaviour of our children, its useful essential, even to look at their first role models. And one of them is you.

This section is all about you, because you will be a major influence on your child. In it, Ill give examples of how the past can affect the present when it comes to your relationship with your child. I will talk about how a child can often trigger old feelings in us that we then mistakenly act on in our dealings with them. Ill also be looking at the importance of examining our own inner critic so we do not pass too much of its damaging effects on to the next generation.

A child needs warmth and acceptance, physical touch, your physical presence, love plus boundaries, understanding, play with people of all ages, soothing experiences and a lot of your attention and your time. Oh, so thats simple then: the book can end here. Except it cant, because things get in the way. Your life can get in the way: circumstances, childcare, money, school, work, lack of time and busyness and this is not an exhaustive list, as you know.

But what can get in the way more than any of this, however, is what was given to us when we ourselves were babies and children. If we dont look at how we were brought up and the legacy of that, it can come back to bite us. You might have found yourself saying something along the lines of: I opened my mouth and my mothers words came out. Of course, if theirs were words that made you feel wanted, loved and safe as a child, that would be fine. But so often they are the words that did the opposite.

What can get in the way are things like our own lack of confidence, our pessimism, our defences, which block our feelings, and our fear of being overwhelmed by feelings. Or when it comes specifically to relating to our children, it could be what irritates us about them, our expectations for them, or our fears for them. We are but a link in a chain stretching back through millennia and forward until who knows when.

The good news is you can learn to reshape your link, and this will improve the life of your children and their children, and you can start now. You dont have to do everything that was done to you; you can ditch the things that were unhelpful. If you are a parent or are going to be one, you can unpack and become familiar with your childhood, examine what happened to you, how you felt about it then, how you feel about it now, and, after having done that unpacking and taken a good look at it all, put back only what you need.