1KHO 849: A More Settled Existence | Dr. Vanessa Lapointe, Discipline Without Damage

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When you're advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at accenture.com/spotify.
Here we go.

**Ginny Yurich** (0:30)
Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. I have a wonderful author and also psychologist, founder of the Wishing Star LaPointe Developmental Clinic, supporting families and children for well over 15 years, Dr. Vanessa LaPointe. Welcome.

**Vanessa LaPointe** (0:48)
Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

**Ginny Yurich** (0:51)
I'm excited to talk about your books because they're like the foundational things you need to know. I think so often we become parents and then everything is a knee-jerk reaction. You don't know why you're saying what you're saying or why you're doing what you're doing.
These are foundational elements. You have a book at the National Bestseller, it's called Discipline Without Damage. Now, this one's been around for a decade. It's still so applicable, how to get your kids to behave without messing them up.
That's fantastic. Then also parenting right from the start, laying a healthy foundation in the baby and toddler years. So these are fantastic resources for families. Can you talk to us about what you're seeing in the last 15 or so years or a little longer? You talk about people are coming to see you because of behavioral challenges, anxiety, depression, emotional upset about life transitions, and transitions and other things that are making day-to-day life difficult for kids and the adults.

**Vanessa LaPointe** (1:50)
I think it's an interesting time to be raising children because there was a time and era, my parents and their parents era, where we didn't have this industry called the parenting industry. In fact, my grandma who's long since left this lifetime, she would be like, what is your job? I don't understand. Why do the parents need to know how to parent?
It's interesting because now all of the sudden, there's this enormous flood of information available to parents everywhere. I think the experience of parents is that they're at the end of a firehouse with information. They want to do right by their children, but they're uncertain of how to make their way. A lot of the parents that I end up supporting, they come in because there's stuff going on with their kids. The child has developed significant behavior issues, mental health stuff, they're not sleeping, like whatever the case might be.
The parent really feels lost as to which direction to go and also feels largely at odds with a lot of the so-called advice they've been given. So they're just trying to make sense of things in a way that resonates with who it is that they are.

**Ginny Yurich** (3:02)
Yeah. It's quite the time to be a parent. A couple other things that you bring up in your books are the change in pace. This is a really fast paced life and then also in tandem with that, there's this quick fix mentality. What can I do about everything is a sound bite, but obviously parenting is this long-term investment into children.
Then you just talked too about, there's all these blow ups that happen in public. Your kid might have a tantrum and everyone's judging you.
Yet, the things I think that we do with children are antithetical to children. You gave a story in here. One of the stories I thought was an excellent one, was about being at one of those indoor play places.
I'm like, those are in some ways like super overstimulating and overwhelming. Or the grocery store, right? That's another place kids are bored. About 100 years ago, no kid went to a grocery store because there wasn't any of those. You were outside digging up your own potatoes. Now, there were their own hardships. But there are a lot of things today that I think make it hard to be a kid. So can you talk about this statement where you talk about empathy? You say, I ask parents to imagine the world through their child's eyes, like sitting in a grocery cart, seeing all these things that are made to be marketed to children that you want, then you can't have them and you're two and a half, you know, that type of thing, right? And you say, you get a lot of backlash about that, but you wrote, where along the way did we so lose sight of the child's soul?