Patti Wipfler and John Gottman are two parenting experts who each lay out 5 skills every parent should know. Both have developed their models through research and careful observation. There is a great amount of overlap in their models which also align with the findings of other parenting experts such as Dr Daniel Siegel.

Contents of this page:

Books:

1. Listen by Patti Wipfler
2. Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child: The Heart of Parenting by John Gottman

Websites:

1. Hand in Hand Parenting website
2. https://www.gottman.com/parents/

Summary

Books

Listen by Patti Wipfler

This is one of the most intriguing and helpful parenting books I’ve ever read. It is especially relevant to younger/pre-teen children but can also be applied to teenagers. Patti Wipfler outlines 5 fairly unique yet extremely practical tools that I would recommend to any parent.

Wipfler’s 5 tools. I’ve laid out an additional

1. Special Time: Making sure that each child gets specific one on one focused attention from each parent. During this time she recommends the parent follow the child’s lead and let the child choose what they want to do while the parent engages with their full attention even for just 15 minutes a day. No texting, no wandering to the kitchen for a snack. Your full attention communicates the message “you matter” to your child more clearly than almost anything else can.
2. Staylistening: Wipfler is a keen observer of children and proposes that children are actually quite brilliant in their inherent ability to process feelings and emotions. She proposes that often when children have an outburst of emotions over something small they are actually trying to process a backlog of negative feelings over something bigger. The solution of staylistening is when a parent simply sits with the child and listens and validates how big the feelings are until the storm of strong feelings moves all the way through and passes over. This may take just a few minutes, or it may go on for 30 minutes or more if the child is working on something large. But eventually, if the parent can stay tuned in and adequately relaxed and calm the child will come out the other side. Here is a real life example: Day after day a second grader was protesting going to school. He would cry and refuse to get out of the car upon arrival. The parent had recently read Wipfler’s book and decided instead of trying to force the child, he would simply use staylistening. As the child cried, the parent would simply acknowledge how difficult it was. While they did not agree to take the child home or allow the child to hit them, they simply listened and validated how big and scary it felt. Eventually, the child stopped crying and started talking. This child had some speech challenges so it took a few minutes to understand what he was communicating, but eventually it became clear that there had been an incident where an older student had yelled in his ear in the bathroom and scared him a great deal. Once this became clear, appropriate adults were able to be brought in to make a safety plan and the child soon felt safe to go to school again. However, this resolution may not have been reached if the parent had not taken time to simply slow down and staylisten. Another example was a 4 year old who always found something to get upset about at dinner. One dinner, the father set aside 30 minutes to simply stay at the table and stay-listen to the 4 year old. He screamed and cried and the parent validated his feelings. After about 30 minutes the boy simply took a breath and almost seemed to shift into a completely different and contented state. After this, the nightly dinner meltdown simply stopped for a long time. There was never a clear reason why he was upset, but the listening clearly helped him move through it.
3. Playlistening: Playlistening is a great counterpart to staylistening because sometimes the best way for everyone to move through a big feeling is not listening and validating for a long time, but playing and being silly. Playlistening mixes play with validating and welcoming a child’s big feelings. Playlistening can be done when kids are already feeling happy and is very similar to simply being playful and rough-housing. It can also be used at times when a child is starting to feel upset as long as it is done in a way which is in tune with the child’s emotions and needs and is not attempting to force them to simply feel happy and playful. For example, Wipfler strictly warns parents never to use tickling to try to force laughter out of their child when they are upset because it is too forceful. Playlistening is rather an invitation into playfulness that allows the child to choose to follow the parent down that path of fun and silliness and allows for connection, movement to release big feelings, and joy all mixed together.
4. Setting Limits: Wipfler is a strong advocate for setting appropriate limits for children and holding boundaries, but recommends combining this skill with another skill such as playlistening or staylistening. For example, a parent may need to take their child to the grocery store and has placed the child in the back of a car but the child refuses to get into their car seat. The parent may combine staylistening with setting limits in the following way. As the child cries, every few minutes the parent calmly repeats the boundary, “now it’s time to get into your car seat.” The parent does not allow the child to get out and run away or to hit them, but they do validate the child’s feelings, remain calm, and continue reminding the child calmly but clearly to get into the car seat. Ideally the parent could take the needed time to let the child work through their feelings which are probably about something else anyway. The child will very likely voluntarily get into the seat once these feelings have been worked through. While it is more work on the front end, Wipfler hypothesizes, (and I agree with her) that combining stay-listening with setting limits likely allows children to process the big feelings associated with various unresolved stressors in their life so that they don’t continue to affect them in the future.
5. Listening Partnership: Wipfler encourages every parent to have a friend they can call who is able to simply listen to their big feelings without trying to give advice, dismiss, or judge them. In essence, the friend staylistens to the parent’s big feelings in the same way the parent staylistens to their children. This allows parents to have an outlet where they can let off steam so that they don’t accidentally start releasing those big feelings in negative ways on their children. Wipfler cites many real life examples of how even a brief call with a good listening partner during a moment of high stress can shift the emotional state of the parent in a very positive direction.

Wipfer’s book lays out each of these skills in much more detail and provides a lot of examples. I highly recommend reading it. Also, much of the same content can be found in the workshops or the free articles of Wipfler’s website: https://www.handinhandparenting.org/

Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child: The Heart of Parenting by John Gottman

John Gottman and his wife Julie are world famous for their research on marriage and couples. However, many people do not know that John Gottman also did extensive research on parents. He observed volunteer parents interacting with their children doing various activities in the lab and then correlated the observations with various outcome measures such as how well the children functioned socially and academically. While Gottman’s book includes a variety of important parenting topics including building emotional bonds and creating a positive family climate, I am going to focus on two of his topics: what he calls emotion coaching and teaching children problem solving. I highly recommend reading the book for a more thorough explanation.

Gottman’s 5 keys to emotion coaching.

1. Recognize/become aware of the child’s emotions: What is your child feeling beneath the anger, or acting out behaviors you see on the surface. If you pause and get curious, can you actually begin to resonate and feel what they are feeling below the surface? Maybe you suddenly recognize a deeper loneliness or fear? The better you get at the core skill of attunement, the easier this part of emotion coaching will be.
2. Recognize a child’s emotions as an opportunity to connect: In the often artificial pressure and rush of modern life, children’s feelings can feel like one more obstacle to getting things done. A morning melt-down that makes everyone late for school and work can be seen as an obstacle, or it can be reframed by a skilled and emotionally tuned in parent as an opportunity to connect.
3. Listen with empathy, validate your child’s feelings: Use your imagination to put yourself in your child’s position. See if you can feel what they are feeling. This is essentially the same thing that happens when we watch a movie and feel the emotions of the main character along with them. However, you are deliberately putting yourself into your child’s shoes as you imagine and feel what it is like to be them in this moment.
4. Help your child find words for the emotion he or she is feeling: When children are able to identify and name their emotions it can help them calm and relax. They realize that other people have these feelings too and everyone can live through them. For more information of the brain mechanisms involved you can see Dan Siegel’s work on name it to tame it. This is a very effective tool to have. It should be noted, however, that Patti Wipfler suggests that if you are using the strategy of staylistening you may actually not want to mix in the strategy of naming feelings because it can dampen the feelings in a moment when the goal is to allow kids to move through and express their feelings. Most parents will probably find that both strategies are helpful at different times.
5. Set limits while exploring problem solving strategies to address the concern at hand. Setting limits allows children to know they are loved. Brene Brown has pointed out that the adults in her focus groups tended to be embarrassed to say that their parents gave them no limits but proud to talk about all of the stories of the silly or crazy or annoying rules their parents had. Her conclusion is that children instinctively know that parents give them limits out of love. I believe John Gottman would agree. Gottman also lays out keys for problem solving with children below.

Gottman’s 5 Steps for Problem Solving With Children

“Once you have spent time listening to your child and helping her to label and understand her emotions, you will probably find yourself naturally drawn into a process of problem solving.

1. Continue setting limits. Children need some clear boundaries about what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior.
2. Identify the goals you want to accomplish by solving this problem.
3. Think together through possible solutions. Let the child come up with answers. Write them all down. Don’t try to assess whether or not they are realistic at this point.
4. Go through the list of possible solutions and evaluate which ones could work and are in line with your family’s values?
5. Work together with your child to choose a solution.”

Websites

Patti Wipfler and the Hand in Hand Parenting Team have tons of resources for parents incuding free articles, free webinars, paid courses and groups, and a parenting community support network. The organization seems to be doing tremendous work in supporting parents in the hard work of raising children in the modern world.

https://www.handinhandparenting.org/

John and Julie Gottman have a ton of resources for parents with kids of any age as well as resources for couples and singles on their website www.Gottman.com. If you hover over the link for parents, you will see a list of sub-options including free parenting articles and several affordably priced parenting courses including, “Emotion Coaching–The heart of parenting” and “Bringing Baby Home.”

https://www.gottman.com/parents/