Mommies aren't for biting, and other real things I say to my toddler

Parenting advice from the 1960's still reigns

This is a post about parenting. If that topic isn’t for you—skip it! If you are experiencing infertility, this might be a better read.

Illustration by Stephanie Davidson, @asiwillit

When I was home over the holidays, my mom listened for a few days as I riffed on my current hodge-podge collection of parenting ideas, and then she went to her overstuffed cherry bookshelf and pulled out a parenting book from the 1960s. Her aunt, born in the 1920s, had recommended the book to her when I was young. It might be relevant, my mom said, handing me Between Parent & Child by Dr. Haim G. Ginott, a cream-colored book with curly title font and yellowing pages. I was doubtful.

As someone currently parenting a baby and a toddler, I am casually interested in parenting philosophies. I don’t actively seek out parenting advice, I don’t search for it on the internet or follow parenting advice influencers (I can’t believe that’s a real phrase). But when a parenting idea comes my way via a conversation or a book recommendation, I take an interest. I hold the new idea up against my current approach and my own parenting intuitions, and I say, do I like this? And if there’s some element I like, I take it and leave the rest.

I’m describing this because it seems to me that I somehow stumbled on an astoundingly healthy relationship with parenting advice, one that I haven’t achieved in any other domain. I most notably exhibit the opposite behavior when it comes to health advice, a genre where I am prone to late-night stress-searching and massive swings in opinion born out of a misguided quest for the most absolutely correct perfect approach. Of course, in health or in parenting, there is no perfect approach. Of course the things that work best will differ for everyone. But somehow in the parenting domain, I am more easily able to accept this reality and maintain a sort of buffet-style relationship with all the advice on offer.

Skimming the first chapter of the old book from my mom, I expected to find it irrelevant. Instead, I found myself thinking, haven’t I heard this somewhere? Outside of the dated language—in this book all children are boys and all parents are mothers—it read remarkably like a modern parenting article. For example:

A child’s strong feelings do not disappear when he is told “it is not nice to feel that way,” or when the parent tries to convince him that he “has no reason to feel that way.” Strong feelings do not vanish by being banished; they do diminish in intensity and lose their sharp edges when the listener accepts them with sympathy and understanding.

Or this:

The new code of communication with children is based on respect and skill. It requires (a) that messages preserve the child’s as well as the parent’s self-respect; (b) that statements of understanding precede statements of advice or instruction.

I, as an amateur parenting advice peruser, would describe the parenting philosophy in this book from 1965 as a mix of respectful parenting and authoritative parenting, both of which are currently trending in 2024. The idea behind respectful parenting is that children are full people from the moment they arrive, that their thoughts and feelings are valid, and that good parenting takes their world of thoughts and feelings fully into account without dismissing them as silly or unimportant. This approach emphasizes collaboration between parent and child to come up with solutions to problems. Authoritative parenting is about drawing boundaries and holding them. Authoritative parents listen to and accept the child’s viewpoint, but hold firm boundaries even if they are upsetting. It is the middle ground between being authoritarian and being passive.

When I got home from my mom’s house, I fished out my copy of How to Talk so Kids Will Listen & Listen so Kids Will Talk, the national bestseller from the 1980s, which has been repeatedly re-released and still holds sway as a go-to parenting book among parents around me. This is the one single book on parenting that I have personally bought, based on the recommendation of my neighbor, which aptly reflects this book’s centrality in the modern parenting canon. How to Talk so Kids Will Listen is one of those books that I have had in my bedside table for months on a meaning-to-read basis. But having skimmed some of it, I thought I remembered the book echoing themes from Between Parent & Child. So I dug it out of that drawer and cracked it open again to see if there were any similarities.

On the very first page of the introduction, the author describes a moment early in her parenting journey when she attended a session with Dr. Haim Ginott. I did a double take. Is this…? It is. Our very author from the 1960s.

This is interesting. Now having dug in further, I think that How to Talk, one of the most influential parenting books of the last thirty years, repackages much of Between Parent & Child, one of the most influential parenting books of the thirty years before that. Despite the fact that it feels like there’s always a hot-off-the press best new parenting approach, there are actually strong strands of American parenting advice that have endured for at least the last six decades. I like this fact. I like it because it gives the advice a little heft, a little weight. I especially like it because certain of these enduring elements resonate with my internal parenting compass.

Offering a morsel from 1965

In case you too find it compelling to hear parenting advice from 1965 that seems to undergird some of the major themes found in modern parenting columns, I wanted to share a specific practice that I personally took from the old Dr. Ginott. I offer this practice like the turkey bacon from a breakfast buffet—please take it or leave it. Turkey bacon just isn’t everyone’s thing.

***

Between Parent & Child starts with a foundational framework: the child’s universe is divided into the world of thoughts and feelings, and the world of action. In the world of thoughts and feelings, according to this book’s approach, parents shouldn’t place any boundaries. All thoughts and feelings are valid and accepted (respectful parenting).

In the world of actions, there are actions that are acceptable and those that aren’t, and parents don’t allow unacceptable actions. The child might dislike the boundary, and we accept those feelings, but we don’t budge on our boundary (authoritative parenting).

In particular, Dr. Ginott suggests a format for phrasing our boundaries:

___ isn’t for ___.

For example, if my son bites me, I could say:

“Mommies aren’t for biting.”

This, according to the book, should be done firmly but without anger. Mommies aren’t for biting. Then, you can give an alternative:

“This toy is for biting.”

And this is what you do every single time. No escalation, no value judgements, just the facts: mommies aren’t for biting, this toy is for biting.

I started testing this out, and after some initial awkwardness, I started to get into it. Because toddlers are often doing things that are outside of the boundaries of what is acceptable or harmonious, it is easy for my interactions with my toddler to slip into a lot of “no’s” and “don’t’s” and “can’t’s” and “stop’s”. Don’t do that, we don’t hit doggies, no hunny, no, don’t eat that leaf, we can’t do that, stop throwing the blocks.

Replacing with phrases like, “toilet water isn’t for splashing” and “daddy’s shoe isn’t for licking” and “couches aren’t for jumping off of” eliminates all the no’s and don’t’s and communicates the information about the world in a clear, specific and blameless way.

According to the Between Parent & Child, we can also combine these statements with acceptance for the feelings that drove the undesirable action:

“It’s ok to feel like you hate your daddy, but daddies aren’t for hitting. Here, you can hit this pillow if you want.”

This, to my ear, sounds ideal. Of course it is sometimes hard to do, it sometimes doesn’t work, it’s oversimplified compared to real life. But I like it as a baseline approach, for me, for my son, for now.

Parenting myself according to Dr. Ginott

There is a common practice used in self-compassion meditation where you imagine yourself as a child. If you imagine yourself as a child, the idea goes, you are more likely to feel a spark of empathy and tenderness, a sense that this you-child is trying their very best, even if they aren’t doing everything right.

After a month of telling my son, “avocado isn’t for putting in hair,” and “plants aren’t for ripping,” I was standing in the kitchen, low afternoon light casting a dim glow on the magnolia tree in the backyard, hunched over my phone, and I had a flash of a thought: email isn’t for scrolling through when you feel bad about not being productive enough today.

Now, it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue in the same way; the things I want myself to stop doing are a bit more complicated than those things for my toddler. But there was something compelling there. This phrasing removes the automatic shame and blame that would usually accompany that thought in my mind: “why the hell are you back on your phone, there is absolutely no reason you should be scrolling like this, you’re so weak and addicted to this thing, it’s a beautiful afternoon, look outside at the magnolia tree for god’s sake, your neck is going to be permanently curved,” and so on.

I like this idea—setting my own boundaries respectfully, artfully, giving as much care and respect to myself as I try to do for my son. It’s just a seed of an idea for now. I am interested to see if I can adopt this internal voice for myself more fully, and how that might look. I will keep you posted.

—Rachel