Have you thrown a parenting book across the room?

Have you ever *actually* thrown a parenting book against the wall? 📚💣

Although I am not usually a reactive person, I have actually hurled a parenting book across the room. 

Expertise ranging from sleep training, to discipline, to making a child eat.

All of it seemed to be written about a different species of children. Certainly not the child who was living under my roof.

Repeatedly, I applied the approaches in these books and my PDA son simply went in the opposite direction. He reacted in a way that none of the examples covered. And I was left feeling like a failure.

What was it about me as a mom that wasn’t clicking? 

Was I truly not consistent enough like the pediatricians had suggested?

Now years later, and with more perspective, I realize that the problem wasn’t the books or even the ideas in them.

The problem was the cultural idea that there was a one-size-fits all approach to parenting or a “right” way to do things with all children and teens. 

It now seems preposterous to me that there could even be a parenting approach that applied to all children, or even most children.

And finally I realized, I was allowed to have a different belief about the very nature of parenting.

A belief that, instead of a set of rules to follow, parenting is a creative act. 

It is a practice that cannot be homogenized, because humans are not a homogenous bunch.

Parenting is about connection and creation – something magical and intangible that emerges in the space between unique human beings.

Here are 10 fun examples of the creative acts I have witnessed in my work with parents or PDA children and teens. 

1. Creating a ropes course on the side of a staircase to provide enough novelty and dopamine for their transition-resistant PDA child to go up the stairs. 🧗
2. Using an “electronic music festival” in their bathroom (strobe lights, loud music, and dance moves) to support their PDA child to get in the bath.🎶
3. A mom creating the conditions of safety energetically for her PDA child and him holding her hand for the first time in two years. ✨
4. Covering the furniture with towels and allowing their PDA child who is struggling with toileting to go pants-free without anxiety to stop the vicious cycle of pressure and escalation around toileting. 🧻
5. Sitting outside their child’s classroom for three months and using a buzzer to train the service dog that is helping their PDA child who won't do commands (this is my family 😜).
6. Parents using TikTok for the first time, creating silly content and “strewing” themselves doing it to support connection with their teen (it worked!) 💃
7. Parents exploring unconventional living arrangements – RV unschooling and road-tripping, grandparents moving in, splitting siblings for a season between two houses to get through a hard period, etc. 🚐
8. Parents cutting apples into shapes ranging from stars to noodles (with a Zoodle maker) so that a little hit of novelty brings down the threat response enough to eat. 🍎
9. Parents leaning into a special interest and becoming experts in Minecraft, fishing, horror movies, vampires, makeup, or the soundtrack to Frozen. 🧊
10. A parent sticking marmite up her nose to use humor to help her PDA child in a moment of tension get back to their "thinking brain." 🧠

When parents of PDAers leverage creativity and think outside of the box, solutions to seemingly impossible situations begin to emerge.

I witness it every day with the parents in our Paradigm Shift Program.

And I know it's hard to do. Opening to new possibility is a courageous act.

It means you are leaving behind the territory of parenting scripts, gurus, strict protocols, "tips and tricks," and entering YOUR unique path out of the dark woods.

You are bringing something into existence that didn't exist before.

And this, my friends, is the very definition of a creative act (Rubin, p. 2). 

What might shift in your home if you started to see yourself as the deeply creative human that you are?

You got this.