ABOUT HER
Helen Neville was born in British Columbia, Canada, lived on three continents before completing high school, attended the University of California at Berkeley, and graduated with a BS, RN from the University of California in San Francisco.
Even though she started her career as a nurse, she found her niche in parent education. It was, as she says, “The most difficult job I’d ever undertaken!”. She is the author of several parenting books including "Temperament Tools" and her most recent, "Is This a Phase?". She currently works in the Department of Pediatrics at Kaiser Permanente in Richmond.
To learn more about her, visit her site: Helen Neville
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
EMPOWERED MOMMIES (EM): Ms Neville, thank you again for giving us the opportunity to sit down with you. You have such a fascinating background having started your career as a nurse and then diving into the world of parent education and becoming a highly respected published author. Can you share with us how you began your career and what made you decide to focus on parenting education?
MS. HELEN NEVILLE (HN): I’d taken a break from nursing to be a stay-at-home mom and found that raising 2 healthy young children was an amazingly difficult job. At the time, there were NO parenting books on the market written by women—only by men in their offices while we women were at home on the front lines. I decided someone needed to write what we women had learned. (By the time No Fault Parenting was published 8 years later in 1994, there were a couple of other books by mothers.)
I returned to work when my children were 2 and 4—working as a Pediatric Advice nurse at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California. Related to my work, the clinic asked if I wanted to teach baby preparation classes—which I did. My work in parent education expanded from there.
EM: What are the most common questions you receive from parents about infants, toddlers and preschoolers?
HN: Obviously there are many, many different questions. But a common one is “Is my child’s behavior normal?” Most of the time, the answer is “Yes.” But to believe that, parents need to understand development—what to be expect at different ages. One also has to understand inborn temperament because two normal children of the same age may act very differently because of their temperaments. Is this a Phase addresses the fascinating process of development, and touches on temperament. Temperament Tools goes into a lot more detail about temperament traits and how to manage them.
Parents also ask, indirectly, am I doing OK as a parent? And the answer to that question is also usually, “Yes.” Parenting is hard because even when we do a really good job, our kids still get upset with us—and with life. We’d not put up with any other job where we get so much negative feedback even when we are doing the job so well!
EM: As a highly respected author, you have published several books including, “Temperament Tools” and most recently "Is This A Phase?- Child Development & Parent Strategies, Birth to 6 Years. Can you share with us how each book came into being and what motivated you to write the latest one?
HN: Temperament Tools came together by coincidence. I’d been studying inborn temperament differences for several years and was co-teaching classes on this topic. At a parenting conference, my co-instructor found herself in conversation in the hallway with another woman who happened to be the owner of Parenting Press in Seattle. Parenting Press had been looking for someone who could write a book on temperament…..so Diane Johnson and I did.
As for Is this a Phase?--Parenting Press readers had been saying for years that they hadn’t yet found a book on child development that they really liked. I overhead that Parenting Press had asked a pediatrician to write such a book, but that he had backed out. I called a co-worker whose field was child development, and we offered to write the book. After negotiation and the arrival of a book contract, my co-worker realized she was too overloaded to sign the contract. Fortunately, I’d gained enough confidence from our work on the book proposal that I knew I could continue without her. I also had a fabulous editor at Parenting Press--Carolyn Threadgill--who helped immensely with the process. It’s rare these days that editors are able to put in so much time and effort on a book. We wanted to do something really different, to help get across how quickly children change—and to help parents keep up with those changes. The first 1/3rd of Is This a Phase? is like traditional development books—written stage by stage. But the last 2/3rds is by topic so that in just a few pages you get an overview of a topic and how it changes over those crucial first 5 years….how attention span changes, or art work, or how to talk about diversity or death to children of different ages, or how stress shows up at different ages. Both the writing and design were challenging, but the entire 7 year process was fascinating.
EM: As a baby develops into a toddler and then a preschooler, what behavioral changes should parents expect? What changes in their roles and their parenting techniques should they expect to make?
HN: As a matter of fact, there is a chart about this on page 27 of Is This a Phase. Parenting is a hard job because as children grow, we have to keep adding new parent roles 1) Family Manager and Problem-Solver, 2) Nurturing Parent, 3) Bearer of Bad News, i.e. Limit Setter 4) Life Teacher, 5) Problem-Solving Coach.
On page 120 there is a chart titled “Discipline Strategies for Different Ages.”
EM: How can parents distinguish between a serious delay and normal development that's just a little slow?
HN: This is another topic I really wanted to address. There is such a wide range or normal development! Yet it is important for parents to know both when to get help and when they can relax and not worry. Lots of books give general ranges, but aren’t clear about when you should seek help. Pages 149-154 are titled “Help—Is My Child OK?” These charts give specific times at which parents should get an evaluation if their child hasn’t yet reached specific milestones in vision, hearing, language, thinking, social interaction and muscle skills. It doesn’t mean there IS something wrong at that point, but means that it’s important to get further evaluation at this time.
EM: If you had to look forward a decade, how do you hope your work will have influenced parents?
HN: I believe our culture puts far too much pressure on parents--and therefore children--to grow up too fast. I hope this book will help parents relax and enjoy the delightful and amazing children who live in their homes. I hope parents will have a much better appreciation of the wide range of normal variation and have more patience with how many years it takes before children are able to act like grownups.