Amber Elliott - Superparenting!

SUPER

PARENTING!

BOOST YOUR THERAPEUTIC
PARENTING THROUGH TEN
TRANSFORMATIVE STEPS

Dr Amber Elliott

Foreword by Sally Donovan

SALLY DONOVAN

When a developmentally traumatized child comes into our lives with their precious few possessions and their certain belief that they are not secure in their world, we have a job on our hands to begin building a trusting and lasting relationship with them.

It might not be too long before we realize that almost everything we thought we knew about childparent relationships is wrong. The basic rules of how things are done, how folk cooperate with each other and who calls the shots get torn up (and quite possibly thrown in our faces). Our first response is usually to try harder to parent harder, louder, tougher. And it doesnt help. Mostly it makes things worse. Its like charging at a locked door with our fists, when what we need is a key.

We learn about the special kind of parenting our children need therapeutic parenting and we make our first tentative steps at introducing it into our repertoire. Its approach and methods make sense and seem kind of straightforward, until, that is, we actually have to carry it out with a child who is stuck deep in their trauma.

In this book Dr Amber Elliot refers to the kind of parenting that foster carers, kinship carers and adopters carry out as superparenting, and it is just that. It is way more demanding than the average, what everyone else is doing type of parenting. The knowledge, practice, thought and finesse required to navigate our way through the day, the week, the term, the year with a traumatized child is astonishing and frequently under-estimated. Therapeutic parenting is psychologically complex and at times overwhelming.

Ive come to realize that the overriding reason why many of us find therapeutic parenting so difficult is not our child, but the cultural baggage associated with children and parenting that pervades our society. Im talking about a particularly British style of cultural baggage here, which has seeped into our brains whether we live in the UK or a part of the world that has had British values thrust upon it. When I was a child, you did what you were told, partly out of fear and partly out of a strong desire to be good or to be seen to be so. You worked hard. You ate your vegetables. You didnt answer back. You certainly werent encouraged to develop much in the way of critical thinking. And what you sometimes hear trotted out by the traditionalists, that in the good old days children respected authority that bit isnt true. You complied with authority to keep out of trouble. Most of the time you despised it, particularly when you witnessed that the way it threw its power around was unfair and sometimes cruel. It created a huge gulf between children and adults. In therapeutic parenting, were working to connect with children, to bring ourselves in closer, not to drive them even further away. This is why traditional methods can fail so spectacularly. Thats why we can find ourselves pounding on locked doors until our knuckles are bruised, screaming Why cant you just do what I tell you to do?

Ambers first book, Why Cant My Child Behave? , hit this spot perfectly and resonated with its many readers. In this, her second book, she gives us permission to understand and accept our parenting impulses and to appreciate their power over us. She does this with real heart and without a shred of blame. Amber is one of those professionals we all hope to have in our lives she has an immense amount of knowledge and experience of child development and trauma and she gets it. If you are a therapeutic parent, you will instantly know what I mean by that. Getting it is shorthand for not having to explain or justify yourself.

Superparenting! sets out why we bounce back into old habits when we are under strain and the ways we can build in opportunities to re-centre ourselves. Amber includes lots of useful, everyday scenarios, many of which will be familiar to readers. I spotted myself a few times (hello Yolanda). The scenarios are presented in a way that doesnt make you feel as if youre failing. They are always a jumping-off point for taking new and hopeful perspectives. And then we are offered a choice of tools to fit the many different situations we find ourselves in.

We are all of us doing our imperfect best for our traumatized children, and Superparenting! meets us where we are with heart, hope and encouragement. We need plenty of all of these when were walking alongside a child, building a real and long-lasting connection, especially when we are fending off the authoritarians whilst were doing it. Building a connection is impossible when we are either side of a locked door. What Superparenting! does really well is hand us the keys to unlock meaningful connections with our children so we may build relationships based on the firm foundations of trust and safety.

Sally Donovan, author of The Unofficial Guide to
Therapeutic Parenting The Teen Years

I wanted to write a little guide to using this book because it is a book to be used, a reference really, rather than something to be read cover to cover in the expectation that youll absorb it in its entirety.

Trying to parent children when they are showing you their trauma-triggered behaviours is tough, and none of us are perfect. Superparenting! is an attempt to acknowledge the superhuman lengths that trauma-parents (parents and carers of traumatized children) go to, and the heroic strength it takes to be empathic in the face of challenge, resistance and sometimes even aggression. It is also a nod towards our superkids these fantastic people who have survived their trauma, getting through childhoods that many of us would struggle to even imagine.

Superparenting! is most certainly not a book that will provide you with perfect ideas. I dont have all the answers, at least, not all the right ones, not the perfect ones for you and your child at every given point in time. So, on that basis, this book cant possibly exist to tell you that anything youre doing is wrong. It might make you reflect and even cause you to change tack, but you must not allow yourself to engage with the mistaken idea that if you like the ideas in this book, then it means youve previously done parenting wrong in some way. Were broadly anti-shame here, so please let yourself off that particular hook.

Theres a quote from Ann Voskamp that I love: Shame dies when stories are told in safe places. My dearest hope is for this book to be somewhere safe for you, where you can leave your shame at the door and take from it what you need.

I hope this book will give you some ideas. However, if what youre doing works, then please keep doing it. Your job is too hard to throw away good ideas that are already working. You may, however, want to test the parenting strategies you are currently using against the following questions to see if they are preventing you from being therapeutic in your parenting.

Does your strategy only work for the short term? (Sometimes, though, thats better than nothing.)

Does it work by creating fear?

Does it work by creating shame?

Does it work by recreating old, unhelpful (even abusive) patterns?