The Books That Shaped How I Parent

Chapter two

Connection before control

One of the hardest things about parenting is realizing how often you aren’t only responding to the child standing in front of you.

You’re also responding through your own triggers — the ones you may not even realize you have yet — built from years of internalized shame, trauma, fear, expectations, and whatever you learned about which emotions were acceptable.

I remember struggling especially hard with this almost ragey feeling when one of my kids would cry and I couldn’t make them feel better.

It wasn’t that I was angry at them for being upset. It was more like their distress set off an alarm inside me that I didn’t know how to shut off. I felt this desperate need to fix it, and when I couldn’t, my own nervous system would start climbing right alongside theirs.

That was one of the first places I started asking a much more uncomfortable question: Why does this feel so threatening to me?

Parenting From the Inside Out helped me understand that parenting doesn’t just reveal who your children are. It has a way of uncovering the parts of yourself you adapted around so thoroughly that you forgot they were adaptations.

Once I started looking, I began noticing more and more of myself in my kids. As they were evaluated and diagnosed with things like ADHD and autism, there were moments where I realized with almost comical clarity that some of the behaviors I was trying so hard to understand in them were… me.

They weren’t behaving like some mysterious category of child I needed to decode. They were acting like I had acted.

That process eventually led me toward my own diagnoses too, and suddenly a lot of my life had a different context.

Raising Good Humans and The Conscious Parent kept pulling me back toward the same uncomfortable but useful place: noticing what was happening inside me before turning my reaction into the child’s problem.

How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk was the more practical side of that shift. It gave me concrete ways to listen, reflect, offer choices, and communicate without every hard moment becoming a tiny contest of wills.

The Peaceful Parent books reinforced the importance of regulation and repair. Families conflict. Siblings fight. Parents lose patience. Someone eventually becomes emotionally devastated because another family member breathed incorrectly in their direction.

I’m not trying to eliminate conflict from my kids’ childhoods. I care far more about what happens afterward.

Chapter four

Trauma changed how I think about behavior

Once I understood myself as someone who had spent most of her life undiagnosed AuDHD, a lot of experiences I had previously filed under too sensitive, too much, lazy, dramatic, bad at coping, or why can’t I just do this like everyone else? started looking very different.

There was grief in that.

Not because there was anything inherently tragic about being ADHD or autistic, but because I could finally see how much damage can accumulate when a child repeatedly gets the message that their nervous system, needs, emotions, executive functioning, or way of moving through the world are character flaws.

That gave books about trauma, regulation, resilience, and executive function a completely different weight for me. They weren’t just helping me understand myself. They were helping me recognize the outcomes I wanted to protect my kids from.

I didn’t want them spending decades believing overwhelm was a moral failure. I didn’t want sensitivity translated into weakness. I didn’t want executive dysfunction mistaken for laziness. I didn’t want them learning to ignore their bodies until they became extremely good at functioning while miserable.

And I especially didn’t want them to have to unlearn shame before they could even begin understanding themselves.

The Body Keeps the Score made it harder to think of behavior as something happening only at the level of conscious choice. Bodies learn. Nervous systems protect. Responses that look irrational from the outside can make perfect sense to the system producing them.

Resilient helped separate resilience from simply enduring more. And Order from Chaos reinforced another idea I needed badly: functioning is not a moral trait.

Chapter six

The books that had to change me first

This may actually be the most important category.

Because children don’t experience our parenting philosophies. They experience us.

Our shame. Our defensiveness. Our boundaries. Our anxiety. Our communication habits. Our ability to tolerate disagreement. The way we talk about ourselves. The way we recover from mistakes.

The Art of Communicating reinforced something incredibly simple and incredibly difficult: listen. Not wait politely for your turn. Not formulate the rebuttal. Not immediately correct someone’s interpretation of what happened. Listen.

The Gifts of Imperfection helped loosen another impossible standard: the idea that good motherhood requires getting everything right. My kids don’t need a flawless mother. They need one who can say I was wrong. I’m sorry. I changed my mind. I don’t know.

The Four Agreements gave me another surprisingly practical parenting skill: not taking every reaction personally. Children have opinions about us. Strong ones. Frequently delivered with the diplomacy of a medieval siege.

And books like Women Who Run With the Wolves, Untame Yourself and The Holy Wild fed my suspicion of the ways women are taught to become quieter, more agreeable, easier, smaller.

I don’t want my children to learn that being a good mother means disappearing.

You Are Here and Living Beautifully reinforced something I’m still trying to learn: stop waiting for life to become calm enough before you participate in it.

I don’t want to spend my children’s entire childhood waiting for things to settle down.