Introduction

I would like to share with you one thing I know for sure about parenting. For the vast majority of your child’s life, you don’t get to know, in the moment, whether what you are doing is working. Yes, you may be able to make a behaviour stop, start, or change, but the longer-term implications of these parenting interventions on your child’s happiness and well-being are not quite as predictable. Parenting is not a linear path that, when followed, guarantees success. It is a journey fraught with plot twists and unexpected outcomes of even the best intentions. Recently, after a particularly tough day of parenting, I joked to my husband that I would love to take up calculus again just for the joy of solving a problem with a definite answer. Next to raising a child, calculus seems downright relaxing.

This book is about the opposite of calculus. I can tell you that there is no universal solution to raising a child. Parenting, fraught with complex and divergent problems, requires a great deal of effort, observation, re-strategizing, and beginning again. Each child is different, which means the manual on parenting is extremely complex.

Whether we like it or not, each interaction our children have with us, their peers, and the world builds on the paradigm through which they see their experiences. It tells them a little bit more about what to expect from the world and helps them create an inner narrative that will guide them through their lives. Children take our input as parents and weigh it against everything else they are experiencing. This means that what works for one child may have the opposite effect on another based on the unique experiences they are having.

Too often, when working with families in my practice, I see parents surprised to learn that their child doesn’t have the coping skills necessary to deal with challenges. These moments are some of the toughest as a parent; I know this for sure because I have been that parent too. As my children become teenagers, I am confronted directly with the coping skills they have, the ones I wish I had spent more time building, and the work that lies ahead in their journey to adulthood. I am also a new mom and watching the journey over again with my toddler. I can see more clearly now how even the first year of life shapes what your child depends on to cope with difficulty.

I have to be honest: I am concerned about our kids’ mental health. My concerns have been slowly building over the last two decades of my work with thousands of children, families, and schools. These concerns are now clearly echoed by so many of the teachers who work with us at the Umbrella Project, by parents and caregivers who worriedly bring their children to my practice, by friends who call to talk through their child’s anxieties, and in the mental health research now flourishing. We are failing in giving the next generation of kids the coping skills they require to thrive.

Throughout my career, I have also had the unique privilege of seeing the struggles with childhood mental health from many perspectives. From schools to parenting, medicine to my own research and the research of so many others, I have had a singular opportunity to look at child development from many different lenses. This book is a collection of the knowledge, observations, and wisdom I have gathered through my work. I have distilled everything into the most important lessons I think every parent should know when loving and raising another human.

So how will this book help?

When we really dive into healthy child development, a few key ideas emerge. We can use them as a guide to play the long game when it comes to our children’s health, happiness, and success. I have broken them down into a simple metaphor I call the Umbrella Effect, based on the ten principles I think every parent should know. This metaphor weaves in all the complicated research on mental well-being and provides an easy visual that puts all the pieces together.

Simply explained, stress in life is much like rain. It doesn’t rain every day, but we can guarantee it will sometimes, and we can’t control the weather.

What we can control is our umbrella. Our coping skills work just like one, providing a layer of protection between us and the rain. We all have umbrellas, and the bigger and stronger our umbrellas are, the more protected we are. When our kids are little, they rely on our umbrellas for protection. But as they grow up, they need to develop their own so their well-being isn’t in someone else’s hands.

This umbrella metaphor will make it easy for you to check back regularly on the big ideas in this book and quickly reorient your parenting.

Each chapter is broken down into four sections:

• To start, you will walk through the research-based Umbrella Effect principle that will help you think clearly about the big picture of your child’s well-being. These are the must-know truths about how a child develops within the context of their environment and what it takes to navigate that reality.
• Next, you will find a few easy-to-implement parenting shifts you can make to support that principle. As you read each one, take a moment to gut-check if you are already doing this or if this is something you could tweak to improve how you are relating to your child.
• At the end of each chapter, you will find the big ideas that are worth repeating regularly in your home.
• Finally, for each principle, you will find an important conversation starter you can use with your child to support that idea. Conversations are an important parenting tool. These conversation starters will help you talk less and ask better questions so you can truly understand how your child is doing.

After learning the Umbrella Effect, you will feel confident that what you are doing is helping your child grow up to be the kind of person who can take on life with self-confidence and isn’t just watching it pass them by through the window. I hope you find this book extremely valuable for the great work you are already doing and a way to clearly answer, “What’s next?”

Most importantly, you will learn where to best invest your precious and limited parenting energy. Let’s find a way to embrace the “do less” philosophy and instead be more intentional about parenting to ensure that you have the energy necessary for the long-term effort involved in raising children.

Now, here is what this book is not:

This book is not a reactive approach to the frustrating behaviours our children all go through. In other words, it’s not a Google search on how to stop tantrums or deal with teens’ mood swings. Again, I want you to look beyond the momentary issues you face and see the big picture of how your child is developing, coping with life, and working toward a more stable happiness. We are often so quick to try to get rid of the little issues along the way that we forget to do this. Will this book help you with those acute moments of stress? Absolutely. But first, we need to shift the paradigm of how we are thinking about what matters most. No more waiting for something to go wrong and then trying to fix it. There has never been a more important time to get proactive about our kids’ mental health.

This book is not long. It doesn’t need to be. The principles for good mental health are staring right at us. This book is an easy way to understand them and make adjustments in your parenting that will profoundly affect the long game of raising your child.

This book is not a judgment of your existing parenting. Parenting spans the breadth of the human experience. Let me assure you that if you are a parent, you are a warrior of the highest order. I want you to know that even if you spend most of your days feeling overworked and underappreciated, you are amazing. I have a funny memory from when my first child was a few months old. I remember staring at her one morning around six, tears filling my eyes, thinking, Oh shit! How many years will it be before I can sleep in again? It’s such a small thing, but at the time, wracked by a deep fatigue, it felt overwhelming. Being a parent is a million of these small moments tied together. It’s a 24/7 job multiplied by decades. No other job on the planet demands such commitment.

The intensity of love and struggle, pride and fear, self-care and sacrifice is unlike anything else I can imagine. This year, I turned forty-three and had my third child just as my older two are entering their teens (yes, I started at the beginning again). So despite all of this, it looks like I think the ride is worth it.

Before we get started, I have one request. When you finish reading this book, please share these ideas with the people closest to you and your child.

One of the reasons parenting is so difficult is that we aren’t the only source of information for our children. Their peers have an incredible influence on the way they think about the world. Despite our best efforts, if our children head back to...