Meet Them Where They Are: Cheat Sheet

Meet Them Where They Are

A cheat sheet for every age and stage. What is happening in your child right now, what they need from you, and what to say.

You have read the books. You have knelt down and named the feeling and held the limit kindly, and still your four year old will not put on the shoes, and still you are standing in the hallway wondering what you are doing wrong.

Here is the thing almost nobody tells you. You are most likely not doing anything wrong. You are asking a child to be an age they are not yet.

We ask a two year old to choose. We ask a nine year old to be grateful. We ask a teenager to want our company on our timetable. And when they cannot, we call it defiance, and we go hunting for a technique to fix it.

There is no technique. There is a child at a particular point in a very old sequence, doing exactly what that point requires. The whole of parenting gets easier the moment you can see which point they are standing on.

Meet Them Where They Are is the map of that sequence.

Eight stages, from the first eight months to the far edge of eighteen. For each one, in plain language, five things. What is actually happening inside them. What you will see. What they need from you. What quietly makes it worse. And a single sentence you can say when you cannot think of anything at all.

Every stage ends with a game, because a child is reached through play long before they are reached through words, and there is a page at the front on how to use them.

It is short on purpose. A cheat sheet, not a study. You can read it in one sitting and then open it again at whichever page you happen to be living in, the week your easy nine year old goes suddenly sharp and lonely, or the month your toddler comes apart at the front door every single morning.

It rests on the people who have most shaped how I mother. Joseph Chilton Pearce and the matrix a child grows out of. Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté on the single thread all your influence runs along. Aletha Solter on the play that heals. Years of their work, brought home into one small usable thing you can hold in the chaos of an ordinary Tuesday.

This volume names the stage. If you want the whole method, what to do instead of punishing, what to do with a child on the floor, how to hold a limit without a war and how to repair when you get it wrong, that is Whole Parenting, and this is the door into it.

It is for the mother who has felt, more than once, that she is failing at the thing everyone else seems to find simple.

You are not failing. You have been reading the wrong child. Here is the one in front of you.

The volume is £22. Read it in an afternoon, and keep it for the next sixteen years.

Return to your nature.