You love your child.
And some days, you struggle to parent them.
Maybe you’ve read the books, tried the sticker charts, the warnings, and the counting to three. It works for a few weeks, and then you’re right back in the same fight. You might be wondering whether it’s normal, whether it’s you, and why it looks so much easier for everyone else.
I’m Dr. Jill Thurber, a board-certified clinical child and adolescent psychologist.
Here's what I can tell you after 25 years in the therapy room: I have almost never met a bad kid, and I have never met a parent who didn't care. What I see, over and over again, are two people who are struggling to truly understand each other.
Almost always, there's a story in the way.
She's doing this on purpose. He doesn't respect me. She's just spoiled.
Stories like these are shaped by family, friends, and the internet, and over time they harden into fact.
But the "disrespectful" kid is often an anxious kid. The "willful" daughter may be terrified of disappointing you. When you see what's really influencing their behavior, you respond differently. And when you respond differently, your child begins to change.
That's the work I do with parents. It's also the work I've had to do myself. I know what it's like to be the parent who's supposed to have all the answers and doesn't. Not long ago, I was standing exactly where you are.
Although I felt loved and supported throughout my childhood, I didn’t feel understood, not truly.
I learned to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, and I spent my growing-up years caring for everyone around me: two younger siblings, a long line of younger cousins, and eventually four little girls I nannied through my teens. Like many firstborn daughters, I became an overachiever and a perfectionist. I also became a student of people. I could read a room, a face, a child.
It was my own psychologist, during a hard season in my teens, who helped me see that this sensitivity could become a calling. In college I worked at a child development center where they called me the “child whisperer,” because “teacher Jill” could settle the most difficult toddlers.
I earned my doctorate in clinical child and adolescent psychology at 28 and was licensed before I turned 30, right on the schedule I had set for myself at sixteen: child psychologist and mom by thirty. I knew, both intuitively and scientifically, the “best” information about parenting: attachment, attunement, and the crucial first three years. On paper, I had it all figured out.
My daughter’s weight wasn’t improving, the breastfeeding got wonky, and so did my hormones.
Over the next year, postpartum anxiety and depression stripped my inner life back to the studs. I was thousands of miles from my family, and it took me a long time to ask anyone for help, because I believed I shouldn’t need it. After all, I was the one everyone came to for help.
That year taught me what now shapes all of my work. My baby didn’t need me to be perfect. She was born primed to bond with me, and even on my worst days she found me through her gaze, her grasp, her coos and cuddles. All I had to do was hold her and match her smile.
Just by being present, I was valuable to my child.
Twenty-five months later, my second baby arrived and taught me the other half: two humans can come from the same two people and require two completely different parenting styles.
Those two discoveries became the foundation for The Integrated Parent.
Every parent brings their own history, biology, and temperament to the relationship, just as every child arrives with their own. When those two collide, it can be a seamless dance or a raucous WWE match. My approach doesn’t hand you a list of scripts for every difficult behavior. It is reflective rather than prescriptive, and proactive rather than reactive. It asks you to quiet the outside voices, turn inward, understand who you are first, and remember why you decided to have a child in the first place.
Maybe parenthood hasn’t looked the way you imagined it would. Maybe the child you’re raising is different from the one you pictured, and the parent you’ve been lately feels far from the one you know you could be. I understand that gap. I’ve stood inside of it. And helping parents close it is the work I do every day, and the heart of my upcoming book, The Integrated Parent.
You don’t have to figure this out alone.
It took me a long time to ask for help, because I believed I was supposed to have all the answers. If you believe the same thing, I want it to take you less time than it took me. The Integrated Parent Experience is my six-month, one-on-one coaching program for parents who are ready to move on from quick fixes and finally understand what’s really happening between them and their child. We meet virtually from wherever you live, and we build the kind of relationship with your child that you imagined when you decided to become a parent.