The Sweet Spot for Parenting Advice
An interview with Emily Edlynn, PhD, a parenting expert who wants parenting experts to have less influence
Sometimes I think about the modern climate of parenting advice like the picture below.
There is so much of it, but only a small amount actually lands for each unique family. Then, what we are left with is a big mess. This photo is a sweet, colorful rainbow type of mess. But for most parents, there are less delicious repercussions. All that parenting advice can lead to confusion, shame, overwhelm, and anxiety, to name a few possible results. And yet… there may be some helpful sprinkles, too. There are things parents can do to manage all this information, but what about the advice-givers? As someone who writes in the parenting space, I often sit with the intellectual equivalent of this picture in my mind. What is the sweet spot? I know others ask this question too.
Today, I am so happy to invite
, PhD into the mess. Emily is a licensed clinical psychologist passionate about integrating science and common sense in parenting guidance to support healthier and more sustainable lives for parents. She is an award-winning author of the book Autonomy-Supportive Parenting: Reduce Parental Burnout and Raise Competent Confident Children and an international speaker. Emily co-hosts the popular Psychologists Off the Clock podcast, and her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Scary Mommy, Good Housekeeping, Motherly, Psychology Today, and more. She challenges today’s unhealthy and unscientific parenting trends in her speaking and writing, including for her Substack. Emily’s emotions journal for kids ages 8-12, In Your Feels, came out in 2024. Emily is the Director of Pediatric Behavioral Medicine for Oak Park Behavioral Medicine, a private practice specializing in health psychology for children, teens, and adults. When she’s not seeing therapy clients, writing, podcasting, or speaking, she enjoys long walks listening to podcasts, reading multiple books at a time from every genre, and spending time with her two rescue dogs and family, not necessarily in that order.Emily and I share many similar views on the challenges of parenting advice and I am so excited to share this wonderful interview with you all. Thank you, Emily for joining us in the mess.
Note: The interview occurred through email and has been lightly edited.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your family.
Emily: I’ve been married for sixteen years and we have three kids and two rescue dogs (Hazel and Tilly). Our kids are 15 (9th grade), 13 (7th grade), and 10 (5th grade). We live in Oak Park, a suburb on the Chicago border, but our family previously lived in Los Angeles and Denver. My husband is also a child clinical psychologist but his specialty is forensic psychology and juvenile justice so we have wildly different professional lives.
You wrote a wonderful parenting book entitled Autonomy-Supportive Parenting: Reduce Parental Burnout and Raise Competent, Confident Children*, could you give us the elevator pitch of autonomy-supportive parenting?
Emily: Autonomy-supportive parenting is a science-based framework to help parents find that “just-right” balance of freedom and structure for each of their children, while cultivating open communication and a close, healthy relationship. What I love about this approach is it blends everything we know about healthy child development and family relationships into a common-sense structure with specific strategies.
Right in the title of your book, you lay out "Reduce Parental Burnout" right up front even before the outcomes for kids. Many parenting books are focused on the outcomes for the kids as the focus. In your book and other writing, you emphasize how parental stress needs to be attended to and parents need more support. Where do you see as places where parents need more (or different) types of support?
Emily: In the world of parenting guidance, I am a voice for the needs of the parents. Our needs must be met before we can raise the healthiest versions of our children. We don’t need to belabor the Surgeon General’s report, but the advisory released in August 2024 validates what we all know from our lives: parents are more overwhelmed than ever. If as a society, we truly want the best for our children and the next generation, we must better collectively care for the parents raising that generation.
There are so many layers to what needs to change in terms of parental support, but the most important message is that we are not meant to make this change on an individual level. We can’t. By recognizing our parenting stress and challenge as a response to social and cultural forces (e.g., economic uncertainty, rising costs of raising a family, jobs demanding more hours than in the past, poor quality and expensive childcare) we can hopefully feel less self-blame. The trick is that it’s really hard to be an activist changing the world when we barely have energy to give our child a bath at the end of a long day. But if those of us in positions of influence keep up the messaging, maybe that’s a start.
Fellow psychologists and Substack writers, Debbie Sorensen and Yael Schonbrun, joined me recently to discuss in more depth what we can do about parental stress on a Psychologists Off the Clock episode if people want to hear more about actionable strategies to reduce daily stress.
As a parent and professional in the parenting space, what do you see as some of the problems with parenting advice?
Emily: When I became a mother more than 15 years ago, I hated parenting books. I think they have gotten better, but the old formula of parenting advice that revolves around meeting a child’s needs with no regard for the parents’ needs – including the reality that parents have more to do in their lives than parent – didn’t’ work for me. In the history of parenting guidance, mothers are treated like selfless vessels living to fulfill their child’s lives rather than their own, and fathers aren’t even really considered.
In many ways, we have come a long way, but I still struggle with features of parenting advice that are still common. These features include absolutist language without a consideration for nuance and messaging that all a parent has in their lives is parenting. With regards to the lack of nuance, this includes not accounting for context, such as a child or parent’s neurodivergence. The tradition of parenting guidance conveying one “right” way of parenting is problematic because each child is different and there’s so much social and cultural context influencing a family’s experience.
What happens as a result is that parents blame themselves when the advice they follow doesn’t “work.” This self-blame spirals into guilt, feelings of failure, and a lack of trust in their own instincts. I’ve seen it happen again and again. My hope for parenting guidance writ large is that we can establish a new norm of nuance, compassion, and flexibility in our messaging.
What do you find challenging as someone who gives advice professionally in the parenting space?
Emily: One big challenge is my existential crisis! I fit the criteria of a parenting “expert,” and I act like one by dispensing guidance, but I also want parenting experts to have less influence and for parents to not feel like they need so much advice. It’s a real head-scratcher for me! How can I act against the unhelpful and sometimes harmful elements of guidance in the parenting space without becoming part of the problem? I do my best but I’m open to suggestions on this one.
My second challenge is that as a therapist, I know how much complexity there can be behind a parent’s seemingly simple request for help. For example, if a parent wants advice to help “get my teen more motivated,” I have so many questions about that child and the family. There’s just not one answer and I need more information to more meaningfully address the problem, yet I’m not their therapist so that’s crossing a boundary. When I give talks, I’ve started the Q&A sessions with the disclaimer that I can’t respond to problems that are specific to individual children.
What have been the most powerful influences on your parenting?
Emily: Honestly, I haven’t found much advice too helpful. But my years of working with children and families in the worst of circumstances – from abuse and addiction in the child protection system to life-threatening and terminal illnesses in pediatric palliative care – have taught me more than any book or expert could teach me.
I’ve learned from working with hundreds of families in these painful conditions what keeps my own parenting in perspective: 1. Children and the parent-child relationship are incredibly resilient in the face of hardship; 2. Even my greatest parenting regrets don’t come close to the harm inflicted by abuse and neglect. We need to keep in perspective what harmful parenting really is. In that same vein, I have deep compassion for those parents who cannot meet their children’s needs due to their own trauma histories and lack of healthy parenting from their own childhoods. Watching families’ lives upended by medical trauma has instilled in me a deep gratitude for each night I go to bed with each of my children healthy in their beds. I know I don’t have control over when that could change, so I’m grateful for the safety and security we are privileged to have as a family. For now.
These perspectives help me not sweat the small stuff and stay connected to all the strengths I see in our family. This in turn opens myself up to really feel the joy that can come with parenting. There’s so much more space for joy when stress and worry take up less room! That’s my hope not just for myself as a parent, for every parent that comes into contact with my voice in the complicated world of parenting guidance. More joy. Less stress.
Thank you so much Emily for your time and thoughtful answers. If you are interested in learning more about Emily’s work, you can visit her website here.
This was fantastic! Validates a lot of what I’ve been thinking and feeling. I’m writing a piece along the same topic and I’ll be sharing this piece!
This is why we need more parenting perspective from people with older kids. No one is more obsessive or anxious than first-time moms whose kids are 0-3. My kids are only 7, 7, and 5, but I still sense a huge decrease in anxiety among my friends. The baby years are so stressful! We need the biiiiig picture perspective to tone that down.