Partnership Parenting

GTFU is not a parenting book, per se, but it’s clearly related to parenting. You and I wouldn’t need to GTFU if the support we got from our parents and other elders had met 100% of our developmental needs. However, in Chapter 3 (“Our Predicament”) I made it clear that there’s no point in blaming our parents, even though (theoretically) they could have provided better support.

The fact that we weren’t perfectly parented is water under the bridge. That said, learning about high-quality parenting can make a powerful difference retroactively (as described in Chapter 15, “Discipline Do-Over”) and also prospectively (as noted in Chapter 17, “The Nuclear Option”).

My career as a life coach began with a focus on supporting parents, an interest that grew out of my own journey through early parenthood. My first book, The Daily Groove, is a collection of insights I gained during that stage. Now that my children are in their 20s, and I have the benefit of hindsight, I could write a whole other book about the principles and practices of what I now call partnership parenting.

For now, you can peruse the related articles and videos I have already published, linked below, and I will update this page as new material becomes available. (Subscribe below to be notified.)

Resources

• The Power of Partnership — This article summarizes the principles of partnership that can be applied to any relationship, including parent-child relationships.
• Ancient Wisdom for Modern Parents — This Daily Groove post is an ultra-brief introduction to the ideas in a book called The Continuum Concept (TCC) by Jean Liedloff. TCC was probably the most important book I read when I became a parent, even though Liedloff never intended for it to be a parenting book. It moved me to reach out to Jean and volunteer to create a website, ContinuumConcept.org. I also helped to build an online community of parents who, like me and my wife, were figuring out how to apply TCC principles to modern parenting. These principles — along with certain concepts from psychology, sociology, philosophy, and metaphysics — led me to conclude that partnership is the most essential ingredient in all healthy expressions of parenting.
• Partnership Parenting Q&A — I was interviewed in 2018 by Cecilia and Jason Hilkey for their Happily Family program. (49m)
• Parenting Adolescents - The Power of Acceptance — A workshop I presented in 2021 for an online community. See the video description for details. (32m)
• Continuum Parenting Workshop — This is an online workshop I presented in 2021 with Geralyn Gendreau (author of Jean Liedloff’s biography, Jungle Jean) for a group of TCC readers. Although the workshop was not about “partnership parenting,” per se, I had a lot to say about the integration of partnership principles with the continuum concept. (2h23m)
• Coaching for Parents — When I coach parents (individually or as a couple), we focus on applying the principles of partnership in their family life, including their parenting practices. Any parent who has read GTFU and is on his or her own “ELDER quest” will find that parenting provides some of the most potent growth opportunities. And working with a life coach can turbocharge any personal growth process. Feel free to call me if you have any questions about working together to accelerate your growth.