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 (2025) All Rights Reserved

Episodes

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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Negativity, Pushback, No to EVERYTHING

August 26, 2025 • 24 mins
The parent of a 7-year-old describes writes that her daughter has become relentlessly negative and argumentative. "It feels like everything is a debate, and she says no to almost every request." As one of Janet's longtime followers, she knows not to take the behavior personally, tries to maintain a light attitude, but she often finds herself lecturing and sometimes completely losing her cool. She wonders if Janet can suggest some o...
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Fighting Is Playing (Let the Kids Work It Out)

August 19, 2025 • 32 mins
It's unnerving when our kids engage in conflict with siblings or peers, whether it's over a toy, their perceived 'space', or even our attentions. As emotions escalate, so does grabbing, pushing, and sometimes hitting. No parent wants to witness this, and our instinct tends to be to try to manage the situation by separating the warring factions, comforting hurts and disappointments, figuring out alternative activities our kids can e...
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Making a Successful Transition to Preschool (with Mr. Chazz)

August 12, 2025 • 45 mins
Janet welcomes a timely visit from iconic educator Mr. Chazz who shares how parents and teachers can help kids successfully transition to a new preschool or childcare situation. His focus is on trust and maintaining the sense of connection that supports parents and kids to separate with confidence.  Janet's "No Bad Kids" Master Course is at nobadkidscourse.com. Please support our sponsors. Learn more about your ad choices. ...
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How to Help a Strong-Willed Child (Without Wounding His Spirit)

August 5, 2025 • 23 mins
A parent describes her 4-year-old son as energetic, independent and strong-willed. While she appreciates her son’s enthusiasm and free spirit, she constantly struggles to reign him in and finds herself yelling, "You're not listening!" As an example, she says they often take nature walks with friends, and he inevitably runs ahead at an unsafe distance. She feels overwhelmed, especially when they are out with other parents “that have...
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Validating Feelings Isn't Working

July 29, 2025 • 21 mins
The practice of acknowledging our children's feelings and struggles can provide healing, calming messages of safety and acceptance. With a genuine tone and a few words, our acknowledgments can help children share pent-up emotions, feel seen and heard, and gradually regulate, which in turn eases problematic behaviors. However, parents commonly share with Janet that validating feelings doesn't work for their child and feels more like...
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The Help Toddlers Need With Aggressive Behavior

July 22, 2025 • 32 mins
Janet responds to 3 messages from listeners who say their kids exhibit aggressive or violent behavior towards their peers, in one case "pushing, hitting, or attacking faces, sometimes without warning." While all these parents recognize that fatigue and other discomforts can contribute to this behavior, it often seems that their kids lash out for no reason at all. These parents have come to distrust their kids in social situations a...
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The Bad Advice I Gave About Toilet Training

July 15, 2025 • 34 mins
In a previous "Unruffled" episode, Janet offered advice to a parent who was struggling with potty training. That parent wrote back recently to announce her daughter's 4-year saga had finally come to a successful conclusion... it was NOT the result of the parents following Janet's advice, but going full speed ahead in the opposite direction. In this episode, Janet revisits the guidance she originally offered, and explains why she be...
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Calming Our Reactivity to Children's Irritating, Demanding Behaviors

July 8, 2025 • 21 mins
In this popular encore episode, a parent writes that she’s overwhelmed by her two girls constantly demanding her attention, following her around their home and calling “Mommy! Mommy!” even if they are in the same room. “It’s driving me mad,” she writes. “It’s like a dripping tap. It is getting to the point where I just want to scream.” This mom notices that the girls don’t have this dynamic with their father. In fact, even if he is...
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