Parenting Beyond Power

How to Use Connection and Collaboration to Transform Your Family -- and the World

By: Jen Lumanlan MS MEd

Narrated by: Jen Lumanlan MS MEd

Parenting is hard. But when we replace conventional parent-child power dynamics with collaboration, family life gets easier today—and we create a better world for all of us in the future.

When we see our children stalling, resisting, having tantrums, using mean words, and hitting, we want to just make it stop. But conventional discipline methods like time-outs, countdowns, and “consequences” teach children that it’s OK for more powerful people to control others—a lesson they take out into the world. This is how we learned White supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism from our parents—and we will replicate this with our children unless we make a different choice.

Research-based parenting educator Jen Lumanlan offers a simple yet revolutionary framework for rethinking our relationships with children. This new approach helps us to look beneath challenging behaviors to find and meet children’s needs, and ours too—perhaps for the first time in our lives. It involves empathetic listening, understanding feelings and underlying needs, and problem-solving with our children to find solutions to conflicts that work for everyone.

Family life becomes radically easier in the short term because behavior problems tend to melt away. In the long term, we’ll raise children who confidently advocate for themselves and treat others with profound respect.

Includes sample scripts, flowcharts, and resources to help parents learn and implement this new approach.

* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF of charts and resources from the book.

©2023 Jen Lumanlan (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“I’m in love with this book! It illuminates the forces that make parenting so difficult, and helps us develop better relationships with our kids—and ourselves.” —Hunter Clarke-Fields, MSAE, author of Raising Good Humans

An aproach that meets everyone's needs in resolving conflicts.

I like the idea of observing and analyzing the needs and feelings of all parties involved in a conflict and then try to meet EVERYONE's needs rather than negociate, compromise and sacrifice, which are the instinctual tools I've been taught to think of in high stress situations. The latter only leads to bitterness and resentment and only fixes the conflict in the moment but not long term. I also like that the Problem Solving aproach can be adjusted to an individual's unique needs and family and it's not just a script to memorize, even though I badly need scripts. It challenges me to think for myself, It's like a puzzle I can resolve. It helps me to now aproach a conflict with curiosity rather than needing to avoid it because of hurt feelings. The book is so much more, I agree with all the ideas on how current patriarchal and capitalistic societies are promoting more bullying and bigotism and the change in society starts with how we parent. Are our needs really rooted in our values or are we just copying what we've learnt as kids and seen others do without really reflecting on it?

I wish the book spent more time describing the examples given. I understood the situations because I was familiar with the stories from listening to the podcast, but if I were only to read the book without the podcast, I don't think the examples come across that well. Just my impression.

Overall, a revolutionary book. I recommend 😁

Practical ways to parent in line with your values

I've read a lot of parenting books, some with overlapping ideas to this one, but Parenting Beyond Power is the most succinct, useful, and insightful of them all. The author does an excellent job of reading for the recording as well.

Transform the world through better parenting

Jen does a great job of not only teaching respectful strategies for collaborating with children to meet everyone's needs, but also showing how embracing these strategies can lead to change in the broader world. Highly recommend to anyone looking for an alternative to "because I said so" parenting!

A fantastic non-behavioralist, social justice parenting book

Parenting Beyond Power is awesome! If you are looking for ways to ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ and ‘treat others the way you would like to be treated’ here is an great parenting manual for finding ways to do just that, starting in your home.

The audiobook brings together the key elements of NVC, collaborative problem solving, unconditional parenting and social justice parenting in a beautifully presented, easy to understand way.

I recommend this audiobook to every parent, it truly has something to offer everyone. If you wish to parent differently to how you were parented, this book will help you tread your own path. If you were parented in a respectful way that aligns with your values this book will provide insight into why it can STILL be hard to let go of 'power over' parenting in times of stress. If you currently parent in an authoritarian way this book provides solid research based reasons to consider the alternatives. Even if you read this book and find it is not for you, it will certainly provide food for thought.

I found the content that spoke directly to healing damaging patriarchal, capitalist and racist systems (insidious in W.E.I.R.D. societies) super beneficial. I will refer back to this book whenever I perceive a potential disconnect between my parenting and my values.

I can’t wait for a book number 2!

Practical, useful, and truly helpful tools for parenting and life

I believe that my parents did the best job that they could with the information and resources they had when it came to raising me. There are some things that I wish had been done differently, though…When I had children of my own I started to see myself following a familiar path, though - one that started with an idea that I knew best and if my children didn’t do the things that I wanted them to do, that it was my job to push them to do those things. It has been an exhausting, somewhat demoralizing, and often ineffective way to parent.

Through reading Ms. Lumanlan’s book (and listening to a fair number of her podcast episodes), I’ve become much more aware of the power dynamic that I have been exploiting with the forceful pushing of my ideas, and how this dynamic was passed on to me and much of the rest of the country and Western world for generations. If we want to see our country and world become a better place for our children to live in, things need to change.

This book helps one to learn and practice a new way of interacting with each other - one that respects all voices, and seeks to teach collaboration and mutual understanding as a foundation to learning and living. She makes very compelling (and well-researched) arguments for how this can help one parent more effectively, and how being raised with this method of parenting can help our children live well, and if we’re lucky, make a better world for everyone at the same time.

I wish I had discovered all of this information at the outset of my parenting journey. Changes are really hard to make once repeated behaviors have worn “ruts” into one’s parenting strategies, but they are so worthwhile, in so many ways. Every time I redirect myself from an “I know what’s best, just do what I told you!” reflex and take the time to practice collaborating with my children I see the fruits of the labor.

It’s going to take a lot of time and practice to make all of the changes that I would like to see in my parenting style, but I have so many more tools in the toolbox after reading this book.

Thank you Jen!

Improve your family life and contribute towards a better world with this practical guide

For those who imagine and desire a more equitable world for their children, there couldn’t be a more effective first step than raising a human that will treat others and the earth with respect. I love how this book outlines simple and effective steps that make a parent and child’s life a little easier and a whole lot more meaningful. Thanks Jen!