It Takes a Child to Raise a Parent Stories of Evolving Child

and Parent Development

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In memory of Mark Emmett Johnston,
with gratitude for our exciting partnership;

and to our children,

Ryan and Megan, who raised us as parents,
with awe and joy.
 Acknowledgments

The home is the centre and circumference, the start and the finish, of
most of our lives.

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, sociologist

Many people inspired the ideas on these pages. First and foremost, I am
deeply indebted to my passionate parents, Lois Treasure Whitacre Clark
and Robert Dale Clark, for being my first teachers and powerful role
models for the basic values in my life. The public library is one of my poetic
mother’s many homes, as she visits there so frequently. My father turned
into a voracious reader in his retirement years. Their love of learning
started me on a lifelong search for knowledge and meaning. My maternal
grandfather, Joseph E. Whitacre, was a writer of sermons. Both
grandmothers qualify as writers. Bertha Fike Whitacre kept a daily diary for
years. Vera Naragon Clark wrote long letters to family members who
moved away from home. I always felt “rooted” as I read her newsy
narratives when I left home for college and adult life.
My incredible parenting partner, Mark Emmett Johnston, taught me
about being in the present moment. Mark’s present moment enthusiasm
for life touched everything he did, but it especially embraced his parenting
style. My husband and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to our two creative
children, Ryan and Megan, who “raised” us as parents. As adults, they also
helped to raise this book, providing considerable help in their own unique
ways. Ryan saved my fledgling chapter on creativity when my computer
crashed. His wise and patient counsel on computer snafus throughout the
years has been a safety net for this project. Megan gave significant editorial
suggestions through reading many early versions of chapters. Her
perceptive comments and brainstorming led me into new writing terrain
on many occasions.
I owe my grounding in psychology to a Manchester University
psychology professor, Donald Colburn, and my initial excitement in family
psychology to two Boston University graduate school professors, Fran
Grossman and John Gilmore. I gained much of my early expertise in child
psychology during my first professional job as a school psychologist in
Lexington, Massachusetts, under the caring supervision of Celia Schulhoff.
My tutorial in problem-solving theory and practice began during the time I
was a consultant to the Philadelphia public schools, where I taught
Interpersonal Cognitive Problem Solving (now called “I Can Problem
Solve”) to teachers under Myrna Shure’s guidance. Dick Schwartz, creator
of Internal Family Systems, provided valuable mentoring in working with
personality parts. Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, inspired me to
write my own ideas. Mary Pipher modeled how to write; her books, along
with her writing class, provided soul food for me.
Many people supported me through the writing process. My book
group supplied start-to-finish guidance: Cathy Pidek showed support for
this work at its beginning; Liene Sorenson provided reference-librarian
expertise; Nancy Leonard offered ongoing, enthusiastic support; and Carol
Backe’s graphic-design skills enhanced the line art. Writing teachers Julie
Benesh, Brook Bergan, and Lisa Rosenthal suggested changes for clarity.
Elizabeth Zack and Kelly Wilson contributed thoughtful editing. Many
gracious readers read early versions of my work and gave valuable
feedback: Tina Birnbaum, Frieda Brown, Lois Clark, Robert Clark (who said,
“This is deep”), Jean D’Amico, Alice Epstein, James Garbarino, Marnie
Gielo, Mary Rose Lambke, Jordan Rifis, Gretchen Schafft, Annie Tolle, Carol
Wade, Melanie Weller, Lindee Petersen Wilson, and writing-group buddies
at Chicago’s Newberry Library, the Oak Park Public Library, the Palos Park
Public Library, and the University of Nebraska summer writing conference.
Thanks to Deborah Preiser for her promotion advice and Hannah
Jennings for her creative webmaster skills and to Virginia Bridges, Kathryn
Knigge, and Julia Loy, for their behind-the-scenes hours in handling
publication details. Grace Freedson’s agent advice and Amy King’s referral
of the manuscript to her editor colleague are deeply appreciated. Finally,
my heartfelt thanks goes to Suzanne I. Staszak-Silva, senior acquisitions
editor at Rowman and Littlefield, for her understanding of the importance
of this book.
While a book carries some original thoughts from an author, most of a
book’s ideas represent a compilation of learning from everyone who has
touched an author’s life. Just as many of our current roads are built on top
of ancestral byways, theories and books build upon the footpaths forged
by others. However, this book could not have been written without the
ongoing tutoring in life struggles that I received from my children and the
children in many client families. My understanding of human nature draws
upon so many of their life stories. I have been privileged with a precious
opportunity to journey with these children along some of their raising
roads.
 Author’s Note

Nothing is so delicate and fugitive by its very nature as a beginning.

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French philosopher

Who am I as a parent? How am I supposed to begin parenting? Lamaze
classes do not cover parenting technique. In fact, my Lamaze classes did
not even mention the possibilities that my husband and I encountered in
the labor and delivery of our first child. It Takes a Child to Raise a Parent
compiles the developmental knowledge I wish I had in 1977, when I first
gave birth. I never experienced parenting coursework in twenty-one years
of schooling. Parent training was a do-it-yourself project. Apparently
psychologists undergoing training in the 1970s were supposed to develop
their own thinking about childrearing. I began my fledgling thoughts on
parenting while I was a graduate student in psychology; I “practiced” on
other people’s children.
My parenting laboratory was housed in a dozen homes; each family
had different rules, and each child had different challenges. My husband
and I took on numerous live-in babysitting roles when the children’s
parents took vacations without their children. As a nanny couple, my
husband and I puzzled over family snafus not covered in my child
development textbooks; most of the dilemmas we faced were not covered.
Fortunately, my husband and I were schmoozers. We swapped stories
about how our friends were raised. We dissected our own childhood
memories. When our children were born, we shared many heart-to-heart
chats about our parenting partnership over our thirty years of marriage.
We might start out with different points of view, but eventually our
runaway thoughts walked together as we debated our doubts in numerous
dialogues with family, friends, and colleagues. We began to tell our own
story about how to raise children who would be capable of reaching their
potential. My husband and I did not agree on technique for every situation,
but we agreed on these key notions of raising children:
 Communicate unconditional love for your children, knowing that
some days this act seems easy and some days it seems impossible.
Expressions of unconditional love, which call for being fully in the
moment with your child, can happen in unexpected, everyday
moments.
Model the moral values that lead to hardy personality roles, knowing
that your children constantly face cultural value systems that differ
from your values. Stand up for your values.
Collaborate with relatives, friends, and teachers in affirming your
children’s unique identities. Every child has special qualities.
Treasure individual interactions with your children. Realize that your
children share their learning with you, just as you share your learning
with them.

One older parent told me, “I stood at the window in the hospital and
just looked at my tiny baby girl. I thought to myself, ‘I don’t want to take
you home, because I have no idea what to do with you.’” Where are classes
to help her interact with her child for the next eighteen years? Another
mother looks at her teenage pregnant daughter and sighs, “I’m too young
to become a grandmother.” In a second sigh, she shares her real worry:
“My daughter is clueless about how to interact with a child.” At the age of
fifteen, her daughter has difficulty interacting with peers. Parents of every
age ponder childrearing. Where are the road maps to guide parents along
the raising road?
This book offers a guide for parent-child interactions for those who
are thinking about becoming parents, for pregnant parents, and for current
parents. I have looked far and wide to connect the dots in raising families
well. An avid reader, I have turned to books for the big picture, to help me
cope with life’s challenges. Now it is my privilege to share one perspective
on one of our most critical topics of the new millennium. My ideas stem
not only from my years as a much-loved child but also from years of loving
and learning as my two children helped raise my parenting potential. They
also come from years of learning from children in both my private practice
as a family psychologist and in public schools as a school psychologist. This
book maps the healthy development of children within a context of
developing parents. We are all parents in training, with not only a mandate
to meet our children’s basic needs but also an equal requirement to
address our own basic needs along the raising road.

Sincerely,
Jan Johnston
 Introduction: Children Raise Parents,
and Parents
Raise Children

Know yourself before you attempt to get to know children. Become

aware of what you yourself are capable of before you attempt to
outline the rights and responsibilities of children. First and foremost
you must realize that you, too, are a child, whom you must first get to
know, bring up, and educate.

- Janusz Korczak, Polish pediatrician

Simplicity and complexity coexist within childhood. Many of us lack
appreciation for our childhoods and the complex lessons we gather from
them until we have a child of our own. We may show love for our child. We
may teach our child moral values. We may celebrate our child’s creative
uniqueness. However, when our child experiences a crisis, we can lose our
bearings. Our own internal crises jiggle loose. Just when our child most
needs us, we are needy ourselves.
Our own needs echo so loudly in our head that we barely hear our
child. Suddenly we find ourselves trapped in our personality’s storehouse
of replaying past problems and/or fixing the future. Meanwhile, our child
ends up guiding us by connecting us to an earlier time in our life when we
encountered distress. We dredge up a lesson. We adapt by changing the
story that we tell ourselves about who we are. We find a way to steer our
child in some turning point along the raising road of learning how to meet
basic needs.
Unfortunately, one of the insights many parents lack concerns an
overwhelming preoccupation with possessing all the complex answers that
their children need. Actually, children help us grow up while we help them
grow up. As caretakers, we discover that we are parents in training, having
to learn how to meet both a child’s changing needs and our own changing
needs. But most of us lack parent-training coursework to guide us over the
rough terrain. Instead, we receive our training from our parents or peers
who have their own needs. Many of us parent through trial and error,
finding that each child we have presents us with different challenges.
Happily, each child also presents us with opportunities to learn new skills.
Parents raise children, and children raise parents. As parents, we
renegotiate basic needs that surface from our own childhood memories as
our youngsters pass through each of their developmental phases.
Consequently, all parents come to find that as adults, they still have many
raising issues that they need to address. “Yes, but how can I get my child to
listen to me?” you may ask.

LEARNING TO LISTEN
My thirty-five years of experience as a psychologist confirms many
therapists’ observations. Psychotherapy models, with their varying
techniques, are not as important to the process of change as a therapist’s
responsible or devoted listening is.[1] The same holds true for parenting: a
caretaker’s techniques seldom are as powerful in raising a child well as the
underlying interactions or connections in relating with that child are.
Devoted, responsible listening requires a caretaker to embrace a child’s
perspective in the present moment and address a child’s predicaments one
interaction at a time. We always want our child to listen to us, but
frequently we lack the effort to listen well to our child. Often we do not
find space in our crowded schedules for responsible listening when our
child misbehaves. How can we train ourselves to listen to our child in a
devoted way when we have so much of our own stuff happening? How can
we learn to stop, look, and listen to our child one interaction at a time
when we do not even come to a complete stop at every stop sign?
After experiencing many rolling stops and jerky starts throughout
childhood, many offspring become parents in training, either choosing this
role or happening into parenthood. Do-it-yourself parent training begins in
middle school for some teen parents. Having a baby raises issues most
people cannot comprehend ahead of the event. Also, not being able to
have a baby delivers complicated issues. Some parents adopt children.
Others face challenges in pregnancy, labor, and delivery. However, the
reality of these developmental issues can surprise even those who prepare
for them. Teens and adults discover that conception and pregnancy issues
are more challenging than they ever imagined. And so, parents in training
may not address some of their own unmet needs until a baby forces them
to listen to their own multiple needs.
Pregnancy issues bring our daily needs into sharper focus. Potential
parents reminisce about youthful escapades with a fondness they could
not express earlier. When they were young children, they were concrete or
literal thinkers; they could not grasp the special significance of their
childhood years. As parents in training, they now recall some early times
when their caretakers did not meet their needs and they faced dead ends
along the raising road. However, they usually fixate on the future . . . until
one day the baby arrives. Parenting a child exacts daily responsibilities.
Romantic commitments shift and marital bonds crash in half of all
American marriages today. Sometimes, jobs for parents in training
disappear. An increasing number of dads today stay at home. Parents
swerve along the raising road of learning to meet their basic needs,
realizing that they not only “raise” their child but now have to “raise”
themselves as adults and parents.
Unfortunately, we make many of the same mistakes our own parents
made. Many of our parents did not listen well. We all travel a raising road
of learning how to meet basic needs, and we all have the same basic
needs. We fulfill many needs as time passes—but these needs keep
recycling, and we constantly find that we have more and more needs.
Some of our needs go unmet. The parent-training road consists of a Route
66–like highway that goes on and on, crossing generations and lifetime
stories about meeting basic needs. It Takes a Child to Raise a Parent offers
a raising road map for meeting basic needs.

PARENTING CROSSES GENERATIONAL LINES

Family intergenerational stories in parenting range from the simple
(teaching teeth brushing) to the complex (teaching sex education). We
forge through transitions or phases of developmental change. Traveling
story to story, the parenting trip provides parallel opportunities for adult
and child growth. We may not recognize this initially. Our culture primarily
promotes the notion that adults grow up through their career
responsibilities. However, at the end of life, many parents and
grandparents say that they wish they spent more time with their children
and realize that our best lessons in growing up happened with children.
Many kinds of families exist. Some parents do not raise their children,
or they rely heavily upon grandparent help. Now the needs of three
generations intertwine. An often unappreciated portion of the parenting
population, many grandparents participate in parenting the second time
around. Some grandparents pay the bills and house three generations. The
fastest-growing type of U.S. households is one with three or more
generations, growing by 38 percent from 1990 to 2000.[2] Grandparents
who act as parents for their grandchildren entail a long history. President
George Washington and his wife, Martha, became parents to Martha’s
grandchildren from her earlier marriage.[3] More commonly, parent-
grandparent extended families raise the next generation together, with
parents in the lead role. These families share precious childhood
interactions across generations, savoring funny and wise child stories over
many years. Even though many parents and grandparents mostly enjoy the
raising road of each new child in the family, caretakers find certain
parenting dilemmas totally frustrating.

CHAMELEON CHILDREN AND CHAMELEON CARETAKERS

This book introduces a travel guide for self-reflection and self-growth
through parenting. Parents come to understand their own chameleon
personality roles, or how their personality fluctuates in different situations.
Each personality role acts as a leader when it comes to meeting certain
needs. Caretakers can learn to embrace their own personality quirks while
they learn how to dialogue with a quirky child one interaction at a time.
They even learn to detect eccentric nonverbal signals from a needy child.
Most caretakers recall seeing a child react nonverbally one way, and in the
very next moment they see the child do or say something that seems
opposite. Neither parent nor child understands that different needs and
different personality roles of the caretaker-child pair are on a crash course.
To understand parent-child conflict, adults need to revisit their own
childhood memories. As an adult, you have the capacity to think abstractly
about your needs in your personality story-house of stored-up life
memories. You put your childhood memories of meeting certain needs into
context. You fast-forward into ramifications of your child’s current
difficulties in meeting needs, while at the same time you backtrack into the
childhood dilemmas you encountered. You begin to grasp your family’s “big
picture.” You see, when you figure out something about your own
childhood, it serves a double purpose: when you can acknowledge your
unmet needs, you also can appreciate that your child may have similar
unmet needs.
And when you develop a philosophy of parenting that mostly meets
both your child’s basic needs as well as your own, you do not have to buy a
how-to-parent book for every new issue that comes up in your child’s life.
Instead, you notice how life’s journey highlights more similarities than
differences between the generations. You begin practicing unconditional
love for yourself and your child. You rediscover your values. You grasp the
art of problem solving, looking for a number of alternatives for every
conflict. You train yourself to appreciate the present moment.
 PART I. WHAT’S THE STORY?
It Takes a Child to Raise a Parent brings psychology lessons into everyday
language with personality-mapping exercises at the end of each chapter. In
part I, we discover the importance of our shared, daily needs, an
adaptation of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.[4] We
find that our caretaker-child interactions lead us through many switchbacks
in meeting needs along the raising road. Our parenting interactions help us
to recall some unmet needs from our own childhood dilemmas. Perhaps
we recognize, for the first time, our various personality roles. Marriage and
family therapist Richard Schwartz’s model of psychotherapy, Internal
Family Systems, laid the groundwork for my understanding of personality
parts,[5] or roles.
Each of our interaction stories depicts how family members’
personality roles attempt to meet their basic needs. In addition to
instructive stories regarding who we are and our cycles of meeting needs, a
few overall parenting-trip tips highlight each chapter. For the reader who
studies maps before ever putting the key into the ignition, a quick read of
eight sets of parenting-trip tips provides an overview of where we are
heading along the raising road of learning how to meet basic needs. For
those who hopscotch their way through books, chapters cover these basic
tips in the order in which they are listed. Each basic tip provides practical
parenting steps.
And now, consider a family interaction story from my private practice.
(All the names of the family members in this book have been changed.)

Jonathan (14)

Jonathan explodes easily. When he cannot work algebra problems, he

breaks his pencil, wads up his paper, and swears. In therapy, we map,
or track, this one interaction. Just before Jonathan’s angry outburst,
he expresses a frustration role: he detects chest tightness and teeth
clenching. Then he divulges a scared role: in the pit of his stomach, he
wonders if he is smart. He detours to send a text message to a friend
to “get some weed.”
 Jonathan has a parent who turns to substance abuse to soothe frayed
nerves after difficult work assignments. Instead of looking for separate
personality roles of parents and children, this developmental approach
considers the similarities of family personality roles. After sixteen years
working as a school psychologist and another nineteen years working as a
family psychologist in private practice, I have met hundreds of wonderful
youth from kindergarten through college, along with their caretakers. Each
family member carries a burdensome backpack filled with the distresses of
life.
From my work in schools, I learned how our educational systems
expect children to be ready to learn when they come to school every
morning. School staff members want students to leave any “outside”
problems at the schoolhouse door when they enter. Somehow, children are
expected to use only school maps from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Certain
personality maps, or a person’s network of emotional roles in their
personality, are not welcome at school. Similarly, the workplace rejects
certain adult personality roles. Parents are challenged in making sense of
their personality roles, often begun in their childhoods, that refuse to part
company at the office doorway. Both child and caretaker traumatic stories
affect the parent-child relationship.
 PART II. MEETING NEEDS, OUR CHILD’S AND OUR OWN
Part II explores how our personality roles attempt to fulfill five basic needs.
Poignant child and parent interactive stories illustrate the common snafus
many families face along the raising road. After we help our child navigate
one treacherous stretch of their raising road, the transition stoplight
changes, and we are challenged by a different topic. We are on a lifelong
raising road of learning how to meet our basic needs as well as our child’s
basic needs.

Carly (11), Molly (44), and Dave (45)

Morning brings another rat race. Dave wakes Carly. Then he walks the
dog and comes back to find Carly still curled up in bed. Molly sleeps
in. She works nights. Dave cajoles Carly out of bed, but she dawdles,
complaining that she has “nothing to wear.” Late again for work, just
like yesterday morning, Dave smashes his “Mr. Nice Guy” role on the
kitchen counter. A cereal box falls over and sprays Raisin Bran onto
dishes that needed washing last night.

Carly, Molly, and Dave struggle with basic needs every morning. We all
negotiate the same set of shared needs on our daily trek. Caretakers share
five basic needs with their children: energy, discipline, creativity,
belonging, and ability. Needs recyle daily. While we all have the same
needs, we travel different paths to meet our needs. Our challenge as
caretakers of children requires that we model how to meet these needs
effectively so that everyone in the family thrives. Children, as well as
parents, mostly fulfill birthright needs on good days. On other, not-so-good
days, people collapse into ennui, fall into disorder, clone others in
conformity, tumble into the “blues,” and end up feeling apathetic. And yet
our needs continue recycling. Parenting exists as a circular process, and this
book reflects circularity. Adults do not recall their childhoods in
chronological sequence, so composite stories of needs are told in varying
ages.
 PART III. MODELING HOW TO RELATE ONE INTERACTION AT
A TIME
In part III, we learn to embrace self-territory, or the unifying foundation of
personality that knows how to be present, in the moment, with both
ourselves and others. We draw maps of our personality roles and their
relationships. We now understand how our various personality roles and
awareness of self-territory form the basis for all of our interactions with a
given child. Hopefully, we gather travel tips for the raising road from each
caretaker-child interaction.

Harriet (67)

A grandparent revels in the birth of each newcomer in the family. She

thinks of a special song for each new grandchild. She sings this song to
the baby the first time she holds him or her. Each time she calls her
daughter on the phone, she asks her to press the phone to a
grandbaby’s ear so she can sing to him or her. At eighteen months old,
a grandson grins broadly, recognizing a connection as Grandma croons
their song.

Harriet models how to relate to a child one interaction at a time. She

prizes her grandparent role, because she discovers meaning within the
present moment. In turn, she sets a powerful example for her daughter
and grandchildren. Her daughter shares the here-and-now delight of her
son and enjoys how her mother travels the grandparent road. Each family
member’s awareness of an inner space for relating in the present moment
has implications for others in the family. If grandparents are not models of
unconditional love in the family, then parents have to make a conscious
effort to surround themselves with positive peers, planting their own roots
for unconditional love.
Each day brings new opportunities for finding our roots. We learn to
differentiate self-territory from our many personality roles. Descriptions of
personality maps depict some journeys taken through both parent and
child familiar personality roles, enhancing readers’ understanding. We