Give yourself a break and “get back to basics” – that’s the message from respected parenting educator and mother-of-four Maggie Dent.

The renowned author and childhood advocate is gravely concerned about new-age parenting techniques in our busy, consumer-driven and competitive world.

But the answer, she says, is simple – cut yourself some slack, take a deep breath and relax.

“Where’s the wisdom that used to be in our community?” Dent says. “Back then we didn’t

stress so much, we didn’t double guess. We weren’t lying awake at night thinking: ‘Oh my God, we didn’t eat broccoli last night’.

“I think we’re all striving for perfection and that’s really not healthy for anyone because there’s no such thing as a perfect human, let alone a perfect child.”

Dent’s philosophies are frank, common sense and full of passion for this profession we call Parenting.

It’s her blunt honesty and warm, hearty humour that has earned her the title as one of Australia’s foremost go-to-people for parenting know-how, which has led to sell-out workshops across the nation. She’s not reinventing the wheel, just going with the !ow and drawing on old-fashioned, tried-and-true basics.

At the heart of her teachings, she says we need to give permission for our kids to be kids and create childhoods full of “noise, chaos, unpredictability, mess, unbridled excitement, squealing joy and peak moments of mastery”.

Dent, who as a child grew up on a farm in WA’s South-West and is due to become a grandmother for the "rst time in January, now divides her time between Perth and the seaside town of Kiama, 120km south of Sydney.

A high-school teacher for 17 years, she has worked as a youth counsellor including in the realms of suicide prevention and palliative care. But says it was her own childhood, which was marred by low self-esteem that provided the foundation for her work today.

Her new book, 9 Things, focuses on common-sense parenting from birth to the age of eight and is peppered with tips and anecdotes from a "ctional character Dent dubs the wise Aunty Wilma, a metaphor for a wise grandmother or the “sisterhood” to which she often refers.

“It’s about giving suggestions to help us all on this crazy dance that we call parenting,” Dent says.

“I talk a lot about making memories that matter and how we make memories…We remember memories that have a strong emotion, but unfortunately most of them are the negative ones.

“So parents need to be consciously thinking: ‘How are we building memories that children will look back on one day and remember?’

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Parenting guru Maggie Dent advises we as parents need to recreate The Village and

stop putting so much pressure on ourselves as parents.

Wracked with guilt and over-

expectation, Dent says mums and

dads “beat themselves up” more

nowadays than they ever have.

Offspring  | summer 2015  | sydney30 www.o!springmagazine.com.au

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“It’s those rituals around birthdays, Christmases and Easters. It’s food rituals and, at times, it’s: are we letting them sleep on the !oor under a pretend tepee even though you don’t think it’s good for their backs? Those things build memories.

“If we’re too busy doing the parenting stu#, we keep forgetting that we want to build these joyful memories – just the simple things like pyjama days where you stay in your PJs all day or “freaky weeks” just because we want to be stupid. It gives us permission to lighten up around home instead of always worrying.”

Wracked with guilt and over-expectation, Dent says mums and dads “beat themselves up” more nowadays than they ever have. The situation, she says, is further compounded by judgemental, competitive mums rather than the once supportive “sisterhood”.

“The world has kind of changed where we think we can have perfect kids and look like Posh Beckham two days after birth or like the model on the front of a magazine,” Dent says.

“The sisterhood has got a bit nasty – we’re not as supportive to each other. We all think we’re doing "ne but we’re not owning up to the moments when we really need someone to bring us a piece of cake and chocolate and cry with us.

“That’s why post-natal depression is going through the roof

because some mums don’t have that supportive sisterhood that allows them to be honest about how bloody tough it is.”

Dent says by the age of three and a half, children create mindsets including “I’m smart”, “I’m dumb”, “I’m good” and “I’m bad” and parents could be unintentionally fostering negative attitudes in their children through their own actions

and outlooks.“We’re incredibly

opinionated, we’ve got less compassion. When we start building kindness and compassion early in children’s lives, it’s an awareness in our parenting and within our caring for our children, we then build children who are caring adults.

“We need to challenge some of those expectations

and the pressures we put on our kids.“There are so many values that are questioned because I think

we’ve set the bar too high, especially because we want to have our own lives. A lot of us want to work full-time/part-time, but to do that you need to relax around the house.

“You can’t have the perfect house, the perfect sex life, great cooking and a great body and be a perfect mother – you can’t do it all at once. It’s impossible.”

The plethora of parenting information available to families is often a source of confusion, putting added pressure on parents, she says.

“In actual fact, we’ve almost got too much information. There’s Google and then there’s mummy blogs and then there’s websites.

“I think we need to remember some of the common-sense basics, it doesn’t matter how modern the world is, our children still need the same things they needed when they were growing up in the African savannah technically.

“So it’s about changing those basics into a modern concept and addressing some of the concerns that I hear from exhausted, tired mummies who are trying to do too much.”

“That’s why post-natal depression

is going through the roof because

some mums don’t have that

supportive sisterhood that allows

them to be honest about how

bloody tough it is.”

sydney  | summer 2015  | Offspring 31www.o!springmagazine.com.au

Offspring  | summer 2015  | sydney32 www.o!springmagazine.com.au

One skill is to build “love bridges”, or moments of connection, with your children even during hectic, busy times so they are assured that you love them. And remember it takes a village to raise a child, Dent says.

“It’s building ‘micro moments’ and for busy parents, that’s incredibly reassuring that those little things make a huge di#erence to children even if we don’t have as much time as we’d like to.

“We do a million things, and sometimes we forget that children under three, particularly, need to be mothered.

“The more people who have connections to your kids, the better. So, if you do have to put your child in childcare…and they don’t want to go home with you at pick up time – don’t feel wounded. Feel excited and blessed because that means those carers are doing secondary attachment and your child is in an environment where they feel loved and secure.

“If they want to go (to day care) on Saturday, don’t feel wounded. It’s a positive thing. It’s like the extension of the village.”

Dent says parents also needed to focus on creating calm for children by creating “go slow childhoods” – a step away from the hurried or over-scheduled child which she says will to combat the growing phenomenon of stress and anxiety in youngsters.

“I want many more seats at playgrounds so we can linger longer. I want us to turn up just for the fun of it for our kids so the sense of community is really calling us back to the village.

“I want those little villages to come back together. We need to have that open conversation. Let’s be honest and real with love and compassion – then we’ve got a better chance of our kids growing up to be loving and compassionate parents too.

“They’re going to pick our retirement home or old people’s home one day so we need to have some sort of compassion to teach them,” Dent laughs.

Her new book, 9 Things, focuses on common-sense

parenting from birth to the age of eight and is peppered

with tips and anecdotes from a fictional character

Dent dubs the wise Aunty Wilma, a metaphor for a wise

grandmother or the “sisterhood” to which she often refers.

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