Respectful Parenting: Janet Lansbury Unruffled

Respectful Parenting: Janet Lansbury Unruffled

In the 25+ years Janet Lansbury has worked with children and parents, she's learned a lot. She's here to share it with you. Each episode of Unruffled addresses a reader's parenting issue through the lens of Janet's respectful parenting approach, consistently offering a perspective shift that ultimately frees parents of the need for scripts, strategies, tricks, and tactics. Janet is a parenting author and consultant whose website (JanetLansbury.com) is visited by millions of readers annually. Her work informs, inspires, and supports caregivers of infants and toddlers across the globe, helping to create authentic relationships of respect, trust, and love. Janet's "No Bad Kids Master Course" is available at NoBadKidsCourse and JanetLansbury. Her best-selling books “No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline without Shame” and "Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting" are available in all formats at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you buy your books. Featured in The New Yorker, recommended 'Best Parenting Podcast' by The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, The Cut, Fatherly, Today's Parent, and many, many more. Please note: This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views and advice presented on this podcast by Janet Lansbury and her guests are based on their training and experience. Opinions are offered in good faith but do not constitute professional, psychiatric, or medical advice, neither are they intended to be. You do not have to use this information, and it should not be substituted for qualified medical expertise. Copyright JLML Press (2026) All Rights Reserved

Episodes

Lost in Transition - How Changes Affect Our Kids' Behavior

January 13, 2026 • 26 mins
Toddler twins are suddenly melting down at bedtime. A 5-year-old is struggling to manage his unruly friend. Janet explains how parents in both these cases can help to resolve these issues by better understanding their children's sensitivity to change.  Janet's "No Bad Kids Master Course" is available at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠NoBadKidsCourse.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠JanetLansbury.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Please support our sponsors! Learn more about your ad c...
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The Year to Stop Doubting Yourself

January 6, 2026 • 36 mins
Janet believes that one of the biggest hurdles for us as parents is our own self-doubt and hopes that 2026 will be the year we stop second-guessing ourselves.  With this in mind, she offers suggestions to 3 families who've written to her about their current struggles. The first is a mom whose 2.75-year-old seems to be stalling during transitions and melting down when the mom doesn't comply with her demands. This parent says, "... m...
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Can We Be Sad or Angry And Still Be Unruffled?

December 30, 2025 • 24 mins
A parent struggles to control emotions like anger, frustration, and disappointment when they’re triggered by her toddler. While she strives to be a confident leader by appearing calm and unruffled, she also wants to model her emotions authentically for her child. In this encore episode, Janet clarifies what it really means to be "unruffled" and how parents can approach this goal without faking or stuffing their emotions. Janet's "...
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Threats and Bribes Aren't Very Helpful (What to Do Instead)

December 23, 2025 • 23 mins
A parent wants to get out of a cycle of bribing her 3.5-year old and writes to Janet for help. “It seems that in order to get him to do anything, I have to offer a reward, treat, or special outing.” If these strategies don’t work, she says, she will threaten to take something away. This mom admits that she is a people pleaser, so when she does set a boundary, she feels guilty about it. She worries that she’s teaching this to her so...
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Finally! A One-Size-Fits-All Approach to Our Kids' Behavior

December 16, 2025 • 29 mins
Every child is certainly unique, but when it comes to their behavior, we can sometimes complicate a situation that might really be quite simple to address. This week Janet shares an email from a parent who says her nearly 4-year-old has lately been argumentative and having meltdowns over the smallest things. "She seems to want to self-sabotage and create problems where there are none." This parent has tried to be consistent in her ...
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3 Secrets to Raising Grateful Kids

December 9, 2025 • 29 mins
As parents, we do our best to raise kind, thoughtful, appreciative kids. But despite our efforts, our children can sometimes seem downright ungrateful. In this episode, a mom writes to Janet about her frustrations with her sons, aged six and four. Rather than appreciate the gifts and special outings she treats them to, they inevitably ask for more, more, more and then complain when she won't give it to them. "It feels like nonstop ...
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The Best Response to Our Children's Turbulent Emotions

December 2, 2025 • 31 mins
Janet responds to emails from parents who describe struggling with their children’s strong emotions. One writes that her 2-year-old rejects her comfort when he has a meltdown. “It breaks my heart, and I feel like I must be doing something wrong.” Another writes that her 7-year-old says he doesn’t feel love from his mother. Another email describes how a 3-year-old’s tantrums last all afternoon and into the evening, disrupting the ...
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How to Boost Your Child's Self-Confidence

November 25, 2025 • 29 mins
We all aspire for our children to grow up with a positive self-image and an abundance of self-confidence. When life throws our child a dilemma, it’s our natural instinct to want to fix it, or at least work them through the uncomfortable feelings with a pep talk. In this encore episode, Janet answers questions from three listeners and offers a more helpful – albeit counterintuitive – perspective that can help children learn resilien...
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Don't Play Along With Annoying Behavior

November 18, 2025 • 25 mins
A parent describes her 5.5-year old as the love of her life. Lately, though, her daughter has been dissolving into silly, immature behavior at inappropriate moments, melting down over nonsensical things, and demanding her mother's attention.  "It goes on and on, and I get tired and annoyed." On the other hand, this parent says she feels guilty for not playing along with her daughter's spontaneous games (like joining her in a crab-w...
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The Kindness of Consequences

November 11, 2025 • 34 mins
In this episode: Janet receives a follow-up message from the mom she helped last week in the episode "Demanding, Stressed, and Aggressive—What's Happened to My Gentle Child?" The parent candidly shares aspects of Janet's advice that did and didn't work. She then reveals a transformative discovery: "We were getting boundaries and discipline all wrong. We were not being confident leaders or using honest consequences." This mom shares...
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Demanding, Stressed, and Aggressive - What's Happened to My Gentle Child?

November 4, 2025 • 24 mins
A stressed parent writes that her 4-year-old has been having a very difficult time for the past year. He's anxious, easily frustrated, "screams and stomps so loud it scares the baby," and is physically aggressive toward his older sister. Prior to this, she describes him as "such a gentle, thoughtful boy." She assumes some of his moods and behavior may be attributed to the arrival of the new baby, and she empathizes, but she wonder...
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Bedtime Battles ("Losing Myself in Motherhood")

October 28, 2025 • 25 mins
A parent writes that the bedtime routine with her 5.5 year old daughter has become an all-consuming marathon, and she feels exhausted, frustrated, and disconnected. "I don't enjoy motherhood right now," she says, "and that's painful to admit because I love my daughter so much." She describes a typical evening that begins calmly enough with snacks, bathing, teeth, and a book, but inevitably her daughter sidetracks the process with d...
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What to Say and Do During a Meltdown

October 21, 2025 • 23 mins
At the heart of Janet's parenting approach is respectful, honest communication between us and our kids beginning in infancy—which means observing and listening to kids at least as much as we talk to them. It also means walking through our own fears to accept our child's most uncomfortable feelings and broach difficult conversations. In this episode, Janet shares a parent's story about their child's 45 minute(!) meltdown, and how th...
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Parenting Is Too Hard? Consider Editing Your Job Description

October 14, 2025 • 29 mins
No matter how we approach raising our children, there are times we'll feel physically, mentally, or emotionally exhausted. Maybe all of the above. We’re only human, of course, but it may also be that we're taking on more than we need to --- depleting our energy with roles and tasks that are better left to our child. In this encore episode, Janet offers ideas for lightening our workload by recognizing and trusting our children's int...
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A Secret to Stop the Hitting and Hurting When All Else Fails

October 7, 2025 • 29 mins
It's common for young children to go through phases of unwarranted aggression, usually directed at the ones they love most. Janet has noted that these phases are as uncomfortable for our children as it they are for us, and probably even more so. In this episode, she responds to two parents of kids who are behaving erratically and lashing out at their siblings. Both families have attempted to address these behaviors with empathy, re...
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Making Independent Play Work for You and Your Child (Brilliant Examples From My Inbox)

September 30, 2025 • 30 mins
You've no doubt heard by now about the countless benefits of our children's self-directed play. Less understood is how to nurture this invaluable instinct in our babies—every child has it. With our good intentions, though, we sometimes get in the way of play. Perhaps we intervene and unnecessarily interrupt our children's process. Or, as our kids get older, we let structured activities and excursions usurp the time they might have ...
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Obedience Is Not a Dirty Word

September 23, 2025 • 21 mins
We all hope to raise polite, well-behaved kids who follow rules and comply with requests, assuming these are fair, just, and appropriate. We want our kids to not only respect us but other authority figures in their lives. Yet, many of us shy away from the term "obedience," because it connotes using discipline methods that are overly strict, harsh, and authoritarian. It doesn't need to be that way. In this episode, Janet responds to...
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Parenting Problems Our Childhoods Create (and How to Fix Them)

September 16, 2025 • 36 mins
The root causes for our children's behaviors—especially the behaviors that most alarm and confuse us—are often confusing and complex. Sometimes, try as we might to understand and even reason with our child, the behavior only gets worse. But these behaviors may be simpler to address than we might imagine. All we need to do is recognize the intense focus that we are bringing to these behaviors and where that might coming from— often ...
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Don’t Raise Your Kids in a Bubble

September 9, 2025 • 27 mins
As parents, we're naturally protective of our kids' feelings and sensibilities, but as they mature and venture out socially, it's also our job to give them the tools they need to thrive in a variety of settings and with people who have differing views and engagement styles. Our kids need to learn to respect and adapt to every person's boundaries—not just ours, but those of their peers, teachers, caregivers, relatives. Then, when ou...
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Helping Your Child Overcome Anxieties, Fears, and Rocky Transitions

September 2, 2025 • 30 mins
Transitions tend to be difficult for young children, and they express their struggles in a variety of concerning ways. They may be focused to distraction on particular random-seeming anxieties and fears. Worse, they take their feelings out on us by being uncooperative or lashing out in violent meltdowns. Two families reach out to Janet with these issues, and she proposes a three-step approach to help resolve them. Janet's "No Bad ...
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