Something happens when your child pushes your buttons. Not the mild irritation of a repeated request or the low hum of daily fatigue. Something deeper. Something that rises from a place you cannot quite name. A fury that does not match the offense. A despair that does not fit the moment. A tightness in your chest that tells you this is not really about the spilled juice or the forgotten backpack or the eye roll at the dinner table.
You know it is not proportional. You know even as the words leave your mouth that you are overreacting. You know that the intensity belongs somewhere else, to some other time, some other relationship, some other version of you that existed long before this child was born. But knowing does not stop it. Knowing does not even slow it down. The reaction fires before awareness can catch it, and by the time you realize what happened, the damage is already done. The child is crying or silent or defiant. You are ashamed. And the pattern resets for tomorrow.
Every parent has this experience. Not once. Regularly. And every parent carries the quiet dread that these moments are doing something permanent. That the child is absorbing something toxic. That the relationship is developing cracks that will eventually become fractures.
Susan Stiffelman wrote “Parenting with Presence” for the parent who is tired of reacting and ready to understand why. Not why the child behaves the way they do. Why the parent responds the way they do. Because that is where the real transformation lives. Not in the child’s behavior. In the parent’s awareness.
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The Book Nobody Thinks They Need Until They Do
Most parents looking for help reach for books about children. How to handle tantrums. How to motivate the unmotivated child. How to deal with defiance, lying, screen addiction, homework resistance. The assumption is always the same. The child is the problem. Fix the child and the family works.
Stiffelman asks a question that stops that assumption cold. What if the child is not the problem. What if the child is the mirror.
This is not a comfortable idea. It is far easier to locate the problem in the child than in yourself. It is far more convenient to seek a technique for managing the child’s behavior than to examine the internal landscape that is producing your response to that behavior. But Stiffelman argues, with the authority of decades as a licensed therapist, educator, and parenting counselor, that the child’s behavior is only half the equation. The other half, the half that almost every parenting book ignores, is what the parent brings to the interaction.
What the parent brings is everything. Their childhood. Their wounds. Their unmet needs. Their inherited patterns. Their fears about the future. Their grief about the past. Their anxiety about being judged. Their desperate need to be seen as a good parent. Their terror of repeating their own parents’ mistakes. Their longing for the child to validate them by turning out well.
All of this sits beneath the surface of every interaction. All of it shapes the parent’s tone, timing, intensity, and choice of words. All of it determines whether the parent responds to the child in front of them or reacts to the ghost standing behind them.
“Parenting with Presence” is the book that makes the invisible visible. It brings the unconscious material into consciousness where it can be examined, understood, and ultimately loosened from its grip on the parent’s behavior.
The Captain of the Ship
Stiffelman uses a metaphor throughout the book that is deceptively simple and extraordinarily useful. The parent is the captain of the ship. The child is a passenger.
A good captain does not yell at the passengers when the seas get rough. A good captain does not panic when the storm arrives. A good captain does not hand the wheel to a seven-year-old because the seven-year-old is screaming loudly enough to seem like they should be in charge. A good captain holds course, remains calm, acknowledges the fear that everyone on board is feeling, and steers through the turbulence with steady hands.
Many parents have abdicated the captain’s role without realizing it. They have handed the emotional wheel of the family to the child. When the child is happy, the parent is happy. When the child is upset, the parent is destabilized. When the child is defiant, the parent either collapses into permissiveness or escalates into authoritarianism, both of which are forms of losing the wheel.
The permissive parent has given the child the authority to determine the family’s emotional climate. If the child wants something, the parent provides it to avoid the storm. If the child resists a boundary, the parent withdraws it. The child is steering. And the child, who is developmentally unprepared to steer anything more complex than a bicycle, is terrified by the responsibility even as they fight for it.
The authoritarian parent has not given the child the wheel. They have overcorrected in the other direction, gripping so tightly that every interaction becomes a battle for control. The child feels no agency, no voice, no influence over their own life. They either submit, which produces a hollow compliance that collapses the moment the authority is removed, or they rebel, which produces the exact power struggle the parent was trying to prevent.
The captain parent occupies the middle ground. They hold the authority with confidence and warmth. They make decisions without needing the child’s approval. They set boundaries without needing the child’s agreement. And they do all of this while maintaining a deep, empathetic connection that communicates to the child: I am in charge and I am on your side. Both. Always. Simultaneously.
Stiffelman shows parents how to step into this role, not through power but through presence. The captain is not the loudest person on the ship. The captain is the most grounded. And groundedness comes not from technique but from the internal work of knowing yourself.
The Attachment Patterns You Are Repeating
One of the most powerful chapters in the book examines how the parent’s own attachment history shapes their parenting. This is terrain that many parenting books avoid because it is uncomfortable. Stiffelman walks straight into it.
The way you were parented is living inside you. Not as a memory you can recall and evaluate. As a pattern encoded in your nervous system, in your reflexes, in the automatic responses that fire before your conscious mind has a chance to intervene.
If your own parents were emotionally unavailable, you may find yourself either replicating that distance with your own child or overcompensating with an intensity of involvement that suffocates rather than supports. If your parents were controlling, you may either control your child in the same way or swing so far in the opposite direction that you provide no structure at all. If your parents’ love was conditional, tied to performance, behavior, or compliance, you may be transmitting the same conditionality to your child without any awareness that you are doing so.
These patterns do not require dramatic childhood trauma to form. They form in ordinary families through ordinary interactions repeated thousands of times. The parent who was told to stop crying learned that emotions are unacceptable. The parent who was praised only for achievement learned that worth is contingent on output. The parent who was ignored learned that their needs do not matter. And decades later, those lessons emerge in the way they respond to their own child’s tears, their own child’s report card, their own child’s needs.
Stiffelman does not ask parents to blame their own parents. She asks them to understand the chain. To see how patterns move from generation to generation like heirlooms nobody asked for. And to make a conscious decision about which patterns to keep and which to break.
This is the heart of the book. The awareness that you are not just parenting your child. You are parenting through your entire history. And until you see that history clearly, it will continue to run the show.
The Practice of Presence in Real Moments
Stiffelman does not leave parents stranded in self-analysis. She brings the inner work into the living room, the kitchen, and the carpool line with specific practices designed for real parenting moments.
The Pause
The most fundamental practice in the book is also the simplest. Before you respond to your child, pause. One breath. One second. One moment of awareness between the trigger and the reaction.
In that pause, something extraordinary becomes possible. You can notice what you are feeling. You can ask yourself whether the intensity matches the situation. You can choose a response rather than firing a reaction. You can be the captain rather than the passenger.
Stiffelman acknowledges that this sounds absurdly simple. She also acknowledges that it is absurdly difficult. The reactive pattern is fast. It is automatic. It has been running for decades. Interrupting it requires a willingness to be uncomfortable, because the pause itself is uncomfortable. The surge of emotion wants to be discharged. It wants to become words, volume, action. Holding it for even one second feels like holding your breath underwater. But that one second is everything. It is the difference between reaction and response. Between unconscious repetition and conscious choice.
Sitting with Discomfort
Stiffelman teaches parents to tolerate their own emotional discomfort rather than discharging it onto the child. This is perhaps the most demanding practice in the book and the one with the most transformative potential.
When your child is upset and you feel the pull to fix it, sit with the discomfort of not fixing it. When your child is defiant and you feel the pull to control, sit with the discomfort of not controlling. When your child is struggling and you feel the pull to rescue, sit with the discomfort of not rescuing.
The discomfort is yours. Not the child’s. The child is having their experience. Your discomfort about their experience is a separate event, driven by your own history, your own fears, your own attachment patterns. When you act to relieve your discomfort rather than to serve your child’s actual needs, you are parenting yourself at your child’s expense.
Stiffelman teaches parents to notice the difference. Is this intervention for my child or for me. Am I setting this boundary because my child needs it or because my anxiety demands it. Am I rushing to solve this because my child is suffering or because I cannot stand watching them suffer.
These are not easy questions. Answering them honestly requires the kind of self-awareness that most people spend a lifetime avoiding. But the parent who can sit with their own discomfort without projecting it onto the child is a parent who gives the child the greatest gift available: the space to have their own experience without the burden of managing the parent’s emotions at the same time.
Rewriting the Narrative
Stiffelman helps parents identify the catastrophic narratives they construct around their children’s behavior and replace them with what is actually happening.
The child fails a test. The parent’s mind constructs a story. He does not care about school. He is going to fall behind. He will never get into a good college. His life is going to be a struggle. The story takes thirty seconds to build and produces an emotional response appropriate to a genuine crisis. The parent then responds to the child not with the measured concern the situation warrants but with the panicked intensity the story demands.
Stiffelman asks the parent to catch the story. To notice it as a story rather than a fact. To return to the actual event. A child failed a test. That is what happened. Everything else is projection. And from the actual event, rather than the story about the event, a different response becomes available. A calmer response. A more proportional response. A response that serves the child rather than the parent’s anxiety.
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This is a book that benefits enormously from being heard rather than read. The practices Stiffelman teaches are experiential. Hearing them described while you are in the rhythms of daily life, driving, walking, cooking, lying in bed at the end of a long day, allows them to sink into the places where they are needed most.
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The Relationship as the Foundation
Throughout the book, Stiffelman returns to a central truth that is easy to state and extraordinarily difficult to maintain under pressure. The relationship with your child is more important than any behavioral outcome.
This does not mean boundaries do not matter. They do. This does not mean behavior is irrelevant. It is not. This means that when a parent is faced with a choice between winning the battle and preserving the connection, the connection should win. Every time.
The parent who wins the argument but loses the child’s trust has not won anything. The parent who enforces the rule but destroys the warmth has purchased compliance at the price of the relationship. And the relationship is the only thing that gives the parent influence in the long run. A child who feels connected to the parent will accept guidance. A child who feels alienated from the parent will reject it. Not because they are defiant by nature but because human beings do not take direction from people they do not feel safe with.
Stiffelman teaches parents to prioritize connection in every interaction. Not by abandoning limits. By delivering limits from a place of warmth rather than a place of combat. Not by avoiding conflict. By entering conflict with the intention of emerging with the relationship intact. Not by being permissive. By being present.
A present parent can hold a firm boundary and a warm connection simultaneously. An absent parent, absent emotionally, absent mentally, absent in the ways that matter, cannot.
What Changes When the Parent Changes
Stiffelman describes a pattern she has witnessed repeatedly in her clinical work. The parent begins doing the inner work. They start pausing before reacting. They start examining their triggers. They start catching their narratives. They start sitting with discomfort. And something unexpected happens.
The child changes.
Not because anyone told the child to change. Not because a new reward system was implemented. Not because a new consequence was introduced. The child changes because the parent’s energy has changed. The parent is calmer. The parent is more present. The parent is less reactive. The child’s nervous system, which is exquisitely attuned to the parent’s state, registers the shift and begins to regulate accordingly.
This is not magic. It is co-regulation. It is the documented neurological reality that a child’s emotional state is directly influenced by the emotional state of their primary caregiver. A regulated parent produces a more regulated child. An anxious parent produces a more anxious child. A reactive parent produces a more reactive child.
When you change your state, you change the environment your child is developing in. And when you change the environment, the child’s development shifts. Behaviors that were persistent and intractable begin to soften. Not all of them. Not immediately. But noticeably. And the improvement accelerates as the parent’s practice deepens.
The Honest Limitations
The book demands a level of self-reflection that not all parents are prepared for. Parents who are in active crisis, dealing with severe mental health challenges, or simply surviving from one day to the next may find the reflective practices aspirational rather than achievable. This is not a failure. It is a reality. And some parents may need individual therapy before they can fully engage with this material.
The book does not provide extensive behavioral strategies. Parents looking for specific scripts for specific situations will find less of that here than in books focused primarily on child behavior management. Stiffelman would argue that the inner work renders many of those scripts unnecessary. She may be right. But some parents need both the inner work and the practical tools, and this book provides more of the former than the latter.
The book’s tone and philosophical framework may not resonate with all readers. The influence of mindfulness traditions and consciousness-based teaching is woven throughout. Parents who are oriented toward purely evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral approaches may find some sections less grounded in the kind of empirical research they prefer.
Who Should Read This Book
If you keep reacting to your child in ways you do not understand and cannot seem to stop, this book explains why and shows you how.
If you have tried every behavioral strategy and nothing has produced lasting change, this book addresses the missing piece: you.
If you sense that your own childhood is leaking into your parenting in ways you cannot quite see, this book makes the invisible patterns visible.
If you want to be the kind of parent who responds from calm and clarity rather than reacting from fear and frustration, this book is the manual for that transformation.
If you are willing to be honest with yourself, truly honest, this book will meet you where you are and take you somewhere better.
The Transformation That Starts with You
“Parenting with Presence” is not a book that gives you control over your child. It is a book that gives you awareness of yourself. And that awareness, practiced daily in the thousand small moments of family life, changes everything. It changes how you speak. It changes how you listen. It changes how you set limits and how you express love. It changes the climate of your home. And it changes the person your child is becoming, not through instruction but through the profound influence of being raised by someone who is awake.
Susan Stiffelman did not write a parenting book. She wrote an invitation to grow up alongside your child. To let the experience of raising them finish raising you. To stop performing parenthood and start inhabiting it. Fully. Honestly. Present.
Your child does not need a perfect parent. Your child needs a present one. And presence is not a talent. It is a practice. One breath at a time. One moment at a time. Starting now.
And if you want to start right now, grab the complete audiobook free by signing up for a free 30-day Audible trial. Download it, listen at your own pace, and keep it forever, even if you cancel before the trial ends. No cost. No catch. Just a book that could change the way you see yourself, your child, and every moment between you.
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