Sana Khadar

A few other mindsets that Lindsay writes about include mindset number two, my child has psychological and emotional needs that must be met.

Number three, my child is vulnerable and requires protection.

I mean, some of these you'd hope are very obvious to all parents, but of course we know that's not always the case.

Mindset four is my child's behavior is how they communicate their feelings and needs.

And one more thing related to mindsets that really stuck out to me.

It's this line in the book where you say it's about generational change and you say it's no longer adaptive to teach children to be unquestioningly compliant, to be obedient or to always look to authority for direction.

In the future, there may be no institutional rewards waiting for our children, no gold star or gold watch in exchange for their loyalty and good behavior.

Can you talk a bit more about why you put this in and what you were getting at?

Yeah, and with AI changing everything, why does emotional maturity put us in better stead to deal with the upheaval heading our way?

Yeah, you said it, the upheaval.

You know, towards the end of the book, you kind of boil down your advice to absolutes, behaviors you absolutely should avoid in order to, you know, have an emotionally mature child and be an emotionally mature parent.

There's quite a few of them.

I'm wondering, first off, if you had to pick just, you know, one or two or three of the most important, what would they be?

But at what point do you do punishment?

Because surely there's at some point you might need to if the behavior continues.

I mean, this is going to be different for everyone, obviously, but are you saying never punish at all?

Just on the absolutes, there's a few in there that make just total sense, like no hitting, don't berate or humiliate your child, don't use your child as an emotional confidant, no tricking, fooling, shocking or scaring kids.

One that stood out for me was yelling is for emergencies only, which...

That one made me a little bit angry, if I'm to be honest, because I was like, wait, what?

Then we are doing parenting totally wrong because many mornings when we're trying to get out the door and our little one is dragging his feet and we've got a deadline we have to get to at work and, you know, I've got an interview I have to show up for and things are all falling apart.