Born wise
Why bad behaviour might actually be a good thing.
“Maya had another toddler tantrum in the grocery store this afternoon.”
“My grandchildren never hear the word ‘no’ – unless they’re with me.”
“Did you hear the one about the Porter Airlines flight from Victoria that was cancelled because a child refused to be buckled up for take-off?”
We live in a world of mommy-bloggers, Instagram influencers and no shortage of parenting advice to validate children’s feelings, yet parents are stressed, youth anxiety levels are at epidemic levels, and the Canadian government has announced a new men’s health initiative because boys and young men are not okay.
In all this chaos, is there a right way to raise children?
Registered psychotherapist and parenting influencer Jessica VanderWier from Ontario’s Niagara Region, believes she has something to offer frazzled parents and teachers: the simple realization that our children are born wise.
“The environments in which we are raising children now are actually not helping them,” VanderWier said. “I am seeing a huge shift, even clinically, from the pandemic to now. I’ve seen six years of the struggles children are facing. Kids are burnt out, they’re exhausted, they’re overscheduled and they have no time for play.
“And we can see in the research that kids’ mental health struggles are really on the rise. So why are kids more anxious than they’ve been in the last 20 years? Something is not working about the way we are raising our kids right now.”
Decoding tantrums
Granted, VanderWier has spent the past 15 years helping children – and their parents – who are struggling enough to need a professional’s help, but from her interactions with everyday parents in her neighbourhood, church and her children’s school, she is seeing a general pattern.
The old ways of “discipline” are gone. Parents and teachers seem at a loss with how to respond to children who act out at home, at school, in the grocery store or on the playground. At the same time, parents and teachers are under intense scrutiny and pressure to get it right. When they fail, there’s a cellphone ready to record in almost every hand.
VanderWier, who has three million Instagram followers and has supported thousands of parents with courses and resources, says she advises parents and teachers to see the thrashing three-year-old, the screaming six-year-old or the troubled teen as children simply trying to tell their parents something important.
“What I found, time and time again in my work, was that the behaviour I saw was so much more than a child acting badly for no reason,” she said. “There was always something else going on underneath, and it was usually some kind of trauma or unmet need.”
For VanderWier, the answer was not a system of rewards or punishments to encourage proper behaviour, but rather “helping the grown-ups around these children learn how to nurture their relationships with this child,” so that the child would trust them, and then through that trust they would begin to listen, and the behaviours would improve.
Although it was not what she learned in university or in her first job, VanderWier’s early success as a clinical therapist and in private practice led her to suggest that parents decode their children’s tantrums and intransigence, and respond with curiosity and connection instead of punishment.
“What fixed it was never actually punishing a child” with time-outs, restrictions or taking away an iPad or cell phone, she said. “These kids were already getting every punishment.”
As the demand for support grew, VanderWier realized she was leaving some children behind. “These kids needed help now, but I was just saying the same thing all the time. I thought, why do I have to do this individually? I can do it in a support group. Parents could talk to each other, and they could get the tools and support now.”
One parent group became two, and then three. She started Jessica Grace Blog. She got married, had a child, and was starting to feel like the workload was not sustainable. A session with a pair of highly educated academics provided her next inspiration.
“They both were accomplished in their fields, and they were saying: ‘Why didn’t we know this? Like it feels so silly that we had to come and pay you to learn that tantrums are developmentally normal and we just need basic skills to respond to them. All our friends would benefit from this.’”
She created an Instagram account, now called Nurtured First, and she simply started telling stories about what she was seeing in her work with children, “and it exploded. I guess people were hungry for it. They asked, ‘where can I get more?’”
By then, pregnant with her second child, VanderWier and her husband, Scott, decided to record her advice as a course, called Parenting Little Kids.
“We did this in the evening, after work, in our spare time, when I was 37 weeks pregnant and our daughter was sleeping. I just wanted to get this recorded before I had this baby. We were both working full-time, but people were asking for it and we thought, if it helps one family, we’re happy.”
The 35-lesson, five-hour course and accompanying workbook (since re-recorded and also available as a 200-page transcript) took off, “way better than we expected. We started selling it in February 2020, during the pandemic, and the demand from parents was way more than we anticipated.”
Eventually, both VanderWier and her husband quit their day jobs, moved to Niagara to be closer to the small-town farming communities where they had both grown up, had another baby and decided to make Nurtured First their passion and their profession.
And in May 2027, VanderWier will release her first book, Born Wise: How the forgotten wisdom of childhood can help us raise a new generation.
‘I don’t think kids are bad’
Although she had always loved to write, penning a book was not something she had planned, and she had previously rebuffed some publishers’ offers.
“But through all these years of working with parents and children, I’ve kept journals of observations and the patterns and things I have found interesting, and I had all these stories I wanted to tell,” she said.
“And I was forming this theory that we are looking at kids wrong. I don’t think kids are bad, the way we’ve seen them to be. And I was realizing in my work with parents that we can actually learn a lot from children.
“Children are actually wise, and we are not seeing it. People are blaming it on screens, but I think there is more than that going on.”
Traditional discipline, a system of rewards and punishments, often appears to work in the short term, VanderWier says. “It might work momentarily, because a child’s deepest desire is to be in good relationship with their parent.” The child might stop their difficult behaviour. But every time you punish a child or respond in frustration, “you are creating a rupture in the relationship, and by the time your child hits the teenage years, you are left with no plan for discipline.
“That’s why we need to look long-term. Why is the child acting that way in the first place? There’s always a reason. Behaviour is communication, and my book is helping parents understand and to get curious about why.”
Wisdoms of childhood
VanderWier has distilled her experience into 10 wisdoms of childhood – innate and healthy responses and needs for human beings to flourish. After two introductory chapters explaining her theory and how she came to understand, use and see it succeed, there’s a chapter for each wisdom.
Each chapter describes the wisdom, explains what happens when children can’t rely on it, and offers suggestions for nurturing it. She includes examples of real conversations with parents who try cultivating it with their children and who reap the resulting rewards.
And for parents who are coming to this information late in their parenting journeys, or who didn’t have childhoods where their own wisdoms were recognized or nurtured, VanderWier includes gentle invitations to reconnect with their teenagers or with their childhood selves, recognizing the wisdom that has been there all along.
“It’s never too late. I have seen adults repair their relationships with their adult kids. You will have to deal with the consequences of those ruptured relationships in the early years, but there’s always room to repair.”
It’s the same with adult children as it is with toddlers.
“You make your child feel seen and heard, showing up for them. As you do that, you build the trust back up.”
Still say ‘no’
While her approach to parenting is definitely gentle, VanderWier thinks the term gentle parenting has been misused or misunderstood, often provoking online critique. Grandparents or grocery aisle onlookers are often baffled or downright annoyed by what seems like an abdication of responsibility or inappropriate deference to children.
VanderWier believes in saying “no” to children, and firmly defends parents’ right to be in control. In fact, she says parental authority is essential for children’s well-being.
“I think there needs to be a hierarchical relationship between parents and children,” she said. “Children should not be at the same level; they shouldn’t be your friends. Your job is to lead them and guide them, not by shaming them but by having a relationship where they know you are looking out for their best interests. They need to be able to depend on you and know you are in charge.”
Born ‘very good’
VanderWier, a Christian who grew up in a Christian home and attended Christian schools, realizes that in high-control religious environments or in the context of the doctrine of original sin, her understanding of each person’s inherent goodness might be seen as heretical or dangerous.
She acknowledges that humans are complex, and we all struggle with unhealthy desires, causing harm, or saying and doing bad things. But from the beginning, she said God declared humans to be “very good. And it’s not a parent’s job to say, ‘this is my child who is sinful and bad,’ but to say, ‘this is my child who I love, and I want to raise up well.’”
“And if they have desires in them that are not going to be helpful to them, my job is to teach and to guide them, similar to what Jesus modelled and came to do.” VanderWier says God the Father’s unconditional love should be our model for parenting. “It’s the same role that we are to play for our children, to create environments where they can really thrive.”
The 10 wisdoms of childhood
Authenticity: The ability to show up as your truest self.
Vulnerability: The ability to feel the fullest expression of emotion around safe people.
Play: The ability to imagine, construct, build, create and be curious about the world.
Trying: The ability to keep trying new things, taking on challenges and making mistakes.
Longing: The ability to desire and yearn for something that you don’t have.
Joy: The ability to want to exist, even when life is tough.
Touch: The ability to find comfort in hugs, snuggles or even a back massage.
Body Confidence: The ability to believe that your body is good, as it is, right now.
Care: The ability to take care of and be kind toward oneself and others.
Hope: The ability to believe that there are good things waiting for you.
From Born Wise, by Jessica VanderWier.
