Sarah Allen finds her parenting style. Here she talks about what The Continuum Concept taught her
I spent a lot of time over the summer reading articles about Jean Liedoff’s book The Continuum Concept. I first heard of the book before I was a parent and then read it once I had children hoping it would give me all the answers to my parenting questions! I have long since realised that no such book exists. How can you have a one-size fits all parenting manual when every family and every child are unique? At the time of reading this book it didn’t make the impact I was hoping for (I really did want an instruction manual!) but recently I have realised that a lot of my interest in attachment parenting and the reading I have done around this parenting style, have their origins in Liedoff’s work.
These are the 3 important aspects of Continuum Parenting
1. Children deserve respect; they are just small human-beings like you and me. It’s not that I didn’t think this before, I just think I had a tendency, at times, to treat a child in a way I would never treat an adult. By this I mean, I might laugh at a child’s comment that I found humorous which inadvertently offended the child who was very serious about what they were saying.
I would speak to children in a different way than I did to adults e.g. shout “Door!” when they had forgotten to shut the door for the umpteenth time. Whereas, if speaking to an adult I would have said “Please can you shut the door?” My thinking on respectful parenting has also been influenced by Lucy Aitkenread who runs Disco Unschooling.
