Janet Lansbury’s Gospel of Less Anxious Parenting

Should we treat infants more like adults?
person releasing a hot air balloon
Lansbury has advice for parents fretting over how to raise their kids: do less.Illustration by Linda Merad

In the nineteen-thirties in Budapest, a young mother struggled. “I was amazed at how difficult it was to be a parent. I was angry,” Magda Gerber wrote later. “I thought I was the only one who didn’t know what to do with babies and somehow in my education someone had forgotten to tell me.” Then, one day, she watched in astonishment as a pediatrician treated her four-year-old daughter. The doctor, a Viennese Jew named Emmi Pikler, did something unheard of: she listened to her patient. Gerber was dazzled by Pikler’s insistence that her daughter could speak for herself—that even the youngest children could be enlisted in stunning feats of coöperation. “It made me feel that this was the answer to all my questions and doubts,” Gerber wrote. She devoted the rest of her life to learning from Pikler and disseminating her ideas.

Pikler argued that babies, like seeds growing into plants, did not need any teaching to develop as nature intended; they would learn to walk, speak, sleep, self-soothe, and interact perfectly, if only we would get out of their way. The problem, she wrote in “Peaceful Babies—Contented Mothers,” is that “the child is seen as a toy or as a ‘doll,’ rather than a human being.” Babies are shushed when they try to communicate, clucked at like morons, tickled when they are sad, passed around like objects, and crammed into high chairs in positions their bodies aren’t ready to form. After becoming accustomed to this relentless, invasive attention, a child starts believing that she requires it. “She will, in time, become increasingly whiney and cling to adults,” Pikler cautioned. The result is a kid as desperate for attention as her parents are desperate for peace.

In 1946, the city of Budapest enlisted Pikler to set up an orphanage for children who’d lost their families to the Second World War. Pikler soon fired the nurses, who seemed unable to relinquish their authoritarian focus on efficiency, and replaced them with young women from local villages, whom she trained to treat infants with “ceremonious slowness.” Over time, Pikler codified a philosophy, built around showing babies the same respect that adults reflexively grant one another. Magda Gerber emigrated in 1957, settling in California, where she spread the message in the sunshine, with a program soberly named Resources for Infant Educarers, or RIE.

One breezy recent morning, Janet Lansbury, a sixty-two-year-old protégée of Gerber’s, was leading a class in a back yard in Los Angeles. Seven women and a few of their husbands were sitting by a sandbox, trying not to cave in to their toddlers’ whined demands. “Out!” a pigtailed two-year-old named Jasmine moaned. “Daddy, out!” She was on the second rung of a climbing structure she’d mounted moments earlier.

Her mother and father looked on in concern. “You can tell I’m a hoverer,” the mom said, to general sympathy. Many of the adults were struggling against the urge to parent like helicopters (circling their children, incessantly surveilling) or, worse, bulldozers (plowing aside every obstacle before their kids can encounter a moment’s difficulty). Lansbury and Gerber urge people instead to be a “stable base” that children leave and return to—an idea that many modern parents find intensely difficult to apply.

“My gut is to go to her,” Jasmine’s father said apologetically. “It’s kind of a weird spot.”

“Usually, if they can get there, they can get down from there,” Lansbury told him. She knelt next to Jasmine and said, “You feel like you want your daddy to help? He’s right there. He’s listening to you.” (This is a key element of the RIE approach: you acknowledge everything your child wants, even if you are doing none of it.)

“I’m curious to see what she does,” Jasmine’s father said, with what sounded more like anxiety.

Jasmine said, “Owie.” Then she clambered down.

Lansbury feels a special affinity for toddlers. “There’s something I really get about them,” she says. “I think I have my own personal arrested-development reasons.”Photograph by Annie Tritt for The New Yorker

Her mother looked relieved. “Jazzy, can I get a kiss?”

“Uh, nope,” Jasmine replied, and waddled off.

Lansbury is a Californian’s Californian. She has blond hair and blue eyes and was a model and actress in her youth. She practices Transcendental Meditation and jogs on the beach. She wears a little necklace with a starfish on it. But she isn’t wishy-washy with children. Strict boundaries, enforced with confidence, are what enable them to relax, she counsels. It is our ambivalence about rules that compels children to “explore” them. Kids are fascinated by anything that unsettles their overlords, so they will keep acting out as long as we keep getting upset. “They’re asking a question with this behavior,” Lansbury says. “ ‘Am I allowed to do this? What about when you’re really tired?’ ”

In the back yard, a mom told Lansbury that her two-year-old throws tantrums every time he’s told no, bonking his head against the floor. Lansbury looked at the tiny culprit. “Sometimes you go down on the ground because you don’t like it when someone says no?” she asked. Turning to his mother, she suggested putting a blanket under his head, so he wouldn’t hurt himself. “He’s got a right to object,” she continued. “It’s so healthy for them!”

Lansbury has ascended as a parenting guru by delivering slightly startling advice in a reassuring tone. “Try pretending that everything you say to your child, every decision you make, is absolutely perfect, for one day,” she suggests in an episode of her podcast, “Unruffled,” which has nearly a million listeners a month. “Trust your child” is a frequent refrain. The title of her most recent book is “No Bad Kids.” Emmi Pikler put things less soothingly: “If an otherwise healthy infant is ‘bored,’ ‘bad-tempered,’ or ‘high-strung’ (as it is called) these tendencies always are the result of the behavior of the environment—or, to be more precise, of mistakes in upbringing.” The good news is that there are no bad kids. The bad news is that there are plenty of bad parents.

Until relatively recently, “parent” was a noun. Taking care of children was something that you learned from your extended family. But, by the second half of the twentieth century, as more Americans moved to cities and had smaller families, fewer people were absorbing these skills from kin. The famous opening of Benjamin Spock’s “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” speaks to the insecurity that was taking hold of American parents as early as 1946: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” Evidently, we still don’t trust ourselves quite enough: Spock’s book has sold some fifty million copies and spawned a multibillion-dollar industry of books, classes, podcasts, Web sites, and social-media feeds, all teaching people how they ought to deal with their own offspring.

“The rise of parenting is a lot like what happened to food,” the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik writes. People used to raise kids the way they made kugel or meatballs: in accordance with the traditions of their culture, picking and choosing from the slight variations they observed among their cousins, grandmothers, aunts, and uncles. “What was once a matter of experience has become a matter of expertise,” Gopnik continues. The trend, she argues, has been exacerbated by Americans having children later in life: “Most middle-class parents spend years taking classes and pursuing careers before they have children. It’s not surprising, then, that going to school and working are today’s parents’ models for taking care of children.” We have goals to achieve. We study up.

Parents with the inclination—and the time—to contemplate their approach to child rearing have some stark decisions to make. For a generation, the reigning guru has been the pediatrician William Sears, an advocate of “attachment parenting.” Mothers who follow his advice will find themselves sleeping with their babies in their beds, wearing them in a sling or a carrier as much as possible, and breast-feeding whenever they cry. Such a mother, Sears writes, “will feel complete only when she is with her baby.” She has become a kangaroo. Or, perhaps, a caricature of a liberal: no need is too trivial to necessitate her bosomy intervention.

This stands in contrast to the top-down, conservative style of parenting that tells children to cry it out and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Achievement is rewarded (“If you’re good, you can have ice cream”), hierarchy is unquestioned (“Because I said so”), and personal responsibility is enforced with the threat of consequences (“I’ll give you something to cry about”). RIE might be compared to a kind of weirdly loving libertarianism: children are expected to solve their own problems; parents are expected to affirm their kids’ feelings, even the ugly ones. “As completely counterintuitive as this is for most of us, it works,” Lansbury writes. “How can your child continue to fight when you won’t stop agreeing with her?”

Lansbury’s style is inclusive; her podcast’s tagline is “We can do this.” But, as much as we crave expert guidance, many of us still resent any intimation that what we’re doing with our kids is wrong. “Janet is the Martha Stewart of the millennials—she’s ubiquitous, I can’t get away from her,” Tori Barnes, a thirty-four-year-old mother of three in a Denver suburb, told me. “When I was in middle school, my mom loved Martha—watched her on the Home Garden Network all the time, read all her books. Then one day my mom slammed her book shut and said, ‘That’s it. Martha Stewart just told me to go pick dandelions and make dandelion wine. I don’t have time for this shit.’ ” Barnes had her dandelion-wine moment when she heard Lansbury describe diaper changes as an opportunity to connect with her baby. RIE adherents believe that parents should deliver care with undivided attention, so that diapering, nursing, and bathing become times of relationship-building. Lansbury suggests performing diaper changes with exquisite slowness, describing every action, and seeking the child’s participation by asking questions like “Will you lift your legs now, so I can wipe you?”

“It’s, like, There’s poop,” Barnes said. “Get in and get out! This is not the time for a loving, connecting opportunity—do this disgusting task and move on.”

Barnes has not shut the book on Lansbury, however. “I keep going back,” she continued. “But I often read the transcript of her podcast instead of listening to it, because her voice makes me homicidal. I feel like there’s this bar that nobody could ever possibly reach except for Janet, because she’s just so perfect.”

After Lansbury got out of rehab, in 1984, she felt good. She was proud of her sobriety; she was able to sleep now that she was away from cocaine. But it didn’t last. “You start to get the feelings,” she recalled. “Just feeling like such a loser—like this lucky person who had everything, and still managed to blow it. My mom, I remember her saying to me, ‘Well, you know, you lost your looks’—which I did. I looked like shit at the end.”

Lansbury’s beauty had been the basis of her income. She graduated from high school at sixteen, and then attended U.C.L.A. for a year before moving to Manhattan to pursue modelling. “I’d just turned eighteen, and it was fall in New York, and it was amazing,” she said. “I happened to be there for Studio 54. I was there in the middle of it, living at Eileen Ford’s house.” Ford, the infamous modelling agent—“a scary, scary person,” Lansbury said—had only moderate success on her behalf. For a time, Lansbury was the Herbal Essences spokesmodel. But ultimately her appearance was too wholesome for that moment. “I didn’t have the lips and the look,” she told me. “I was always smiling on a trampoline.”

She returned to Los Angeles, where she was cast on a TV series as Nancy Drew. (She is not the only television sleuth in her family: Angela Lansbury is her husband’s aunt.) The show didn’t last, but Universal hired her as a contract player to do guest spots. By the time she was nineteen, Lansbury had made enough money to buy a house.

She had flings with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, who were then in their forties. “It was funny, because Warren said, ‘I really don’t think you should be doing drugs,’ ” Lansbury recalled. “He was weirdly paternal.” (Nicholson she described as a “cruder person.”) “Then I had this English boyfriend, Bruce Robinson,” she went on. “When he lived with me, he was writing ‘The Killing Fields,’ which he got nominated for. He was thirteen years older than me—a total alcoholic, which he was very proud of. He used to say, for him it was ‘red wine before the toothpaste.’ ”

“Don’t mind us—we just love looking at apartments we can’t afford.”
Cartoon by Ellis Rosen

Lansbury started using cocaine regularly, then excessively. “I’d see people in the morning when I wasn’t even asleep yet, and it would be like they were on a different planet,” she said. Her social circle became more unsavory. “I had a machine gun in the back of my car once, when I was with a dealer who was going to trade it for drugs.” She fell behind on mortgage payments, and finally she lost her house.

Lansbury entered rehab at twenty-five. After she got out, she moved in with her parents and managed to stay clean. But she couldn’t stop thinking about suicide. What kept her alive was her reluctance to hurt her parents, and the thought that, someday, she wanted to be a mother.

“This must be a special day, because I put on a pair of pants,” Mike Lansbury, Janet’s husband of thirty-one years, said as he began preparing an elaborate dinner at their house in Point Dume, on the Malibu coast. A surfer, he usually wears shorts or the wetsuit that was hanging to dry on a eucalyptus tree in the back yard. “Mike cooks—he does all the gardening and the bills and the stuff I don’t want to do,” Lansbury said, rubbing his shoulder. “So it’s turned out good.”

When the Lansburys met, Mike was working in television. (Janet later appeared in a series that he oversaw, “Swamp Thing.”) Since 2017, he has worked full time to support his wife’s career; he helped her self-publish her first two books, and he records her podcast, sitting on an exercise ball in a room off the kitchen. “I was tired of the grind,” he said. “And I realized Janet could accomplish so much more than I ever could. So I’ve just done everything I can to keep her at her computer, to keep her being Janet Lansbury.”

The busiest time in Mike’s TV career came when he worked as an executive at Universal—right when the Lansburys had Charlotte, the first of their three children. After the birth, Janet complained of hemorrhaging and dysphoria, but doctors assured her that both her bleeding and her blues were normal. Eleven weeks later, they discovered that a piece of the placenta had remained in her body and needed to be surgically removed. Even after recovering, Lansbury found motherhood harrowing: “I just thought, I’ve looked forward to this experience my whole life, and here I had it and I was a total failure.”

Lansbury tried to keep her baby stimulated. “I’d been putting her in a seat and entertaining her, trying to keep her busy all the time,” she said. But Charlotte never seemed content. Mike was working constantly, and Lansbury felt isolated with this tiny, needy, mute stranger. She started having panic attacks. “I could see why people abused babies,” she said. “I didn’t do it, but I could feel how that was possible.”

Lansbury happened to read a quote from Gerber: “She said, Take the mobile off their bed, take care of their needs, and leave them alone.” Lansbury was intrigued. She brought her daughter to a RIE class in Santa Monica, taught by a woman named Hari Grebler, who told her to put the baby down on her back and observe. “Charlotte was perfectly fine for two hours,” Lansbury recalled. “She was awake, sucked her thumb a little, kind of looking out the window. It was fascinating to see her, because I don’t think I’d understood there was anything to see.” After Lansbury finished Grebler’s class, she began training with Magda Gerber, who was then in her eighties. (She died in 2007.) “I just thought, I want to soak up everything from Magda,” Lansbury said. “She was kind of like a movie star to me—larger than life.”

The intensity of Lansbury’s devotion was not unusual in Los Angeles. A 2013 book called “Baby Knows Best,” by “RIE Associate” Deborah Carlisle Solomon, was blurbed by Jason Alexander, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Hank Azaria, who compared RIE to the Holy Grail. “The people who were into it were really fucking into it,” the novelist and television writer Maria Semple—who still thinks of her seventeen-year-old as a “RIE baby”—recalled. “The RIE parents were this strange tranche of people who were true believers. You don’t sleep with your kid. You don’t constantly praise your kid. Tummy time is basically child abuse.”

Unlike Spock, RIE tells parents that they know less than they think they do. Most people share some basic assumptions about child rearing. Babies eat in high chairs. “Good job!” is a nice thing to say when your kid achieves a little something. If your infant starts to sob, redirect his attention. (Heidi Murkoff’s “What to Expect the First Year,” which has sold more than ten million copies, assures parents, “With distraction, everyone wins.”)

None of this flies in RIE. Reflexive praise is discouraged, because it impedes “inner-directed” decision-making. Swaddling is out, because freedom of movement encourages gross-motor development. Pacifiers are proscribed. “Magda would always say, ‘Babies have a right to cry,’ ” Lansbury told me. High chairs are frowned upon: instead, feed your kid at a little table as he sits on the floor or a stool. That way, it becomes obvious when he’s hungry (he crawls over to the table) and when he’s full (he crawls away, or starts playing with his food). There are YouTube videos of toddlers at RIE class, waiting around tables for snack with the aplomb of tiny diplomats.

In 2009, at the suggestion of another parent, Lansbury started a blog explaining RIE techniques and ideas. By then, she had a son and a second daughter. Between school drop-off and pickup, she would sit at the International House of Pancakes in West Hollywood, order a spinach-and-Swiss omelette, and write. “I wanted to work at it twenty-four hours a day,” Lansbury told me. “I was fifty when I started the blog, so that’s when my career kind of started—the one that feels like I earned this. Not like acting or modelling ever felt.”

When Lansbury began, many of her fellow “mommy bloggers” promoted attachment parenting, and she sometimes got into arguments in the comments sections of their Web sites. “I was just trying to understand, Is this really the way you think?” she said. “That a baby would always need to be on your chest following you around all day? They can’t even say, ‘Stop, I was looking at that giraffe in the zoo and you kept moving!’ ” She hoped to give people a fresh perspective. “It was not well received,” she said.

But the readers of Lansbury’s blog sent her so many questions that eventually she launched a podcast, “Unruffled,” to address them. On it, she frames RIE as a set of aspirations, not as unbreakable dogma. “Pacifiers, high chairs—they’re just details,” she told me. She has a gift for making comprehensible every deranged, nightmarish thing that listeners write in about: a toddler who starts off each morning shrieking uncontrollably; a kid who throws a tantrum whenever his mom goes to the bathroom; a white four-year-old who keeps appalling his father by saying he is “afraid of Black people.” (Lansbury explains that the child is investigating his father’s discomfort, rather than just being a racist little shit.)

Lansbury quotes Magda Gerber reverently in practically every episode. But, where Gerber was focussed on infant “educaring,” Lansbury responds to questions about older children, too. “There’s something that really gels for me with toddlers,” she told me. Lansbury is quick to laugh and to cry. In the five days we spent together, I saw her tear up a dozen times—remembering the death of a dog, empathizing with parents in a class, talking about her grown kids. She craves routine. Each morning, after meditating for precisely twenty minutes, she makes an elaborate smoothie of vitamin powders and frozen berries and soy milk; then she pours in little spurts of green tea until it’s the consistency she requires. She has a childlike guilelessness. “Being sexy is a big deal if you want to get acting work,” she told me earnestly as we discussed her first career. “They have to want to have sex with you.”

I witnessed a momentary tantrum one afternoon, when traffic was bad and Lansbury, stuck behind an indecisive driver at a stop sign, burst out, “Turn, you stupid twat!” Almost immediately, she dissolved into laughter, as labile as the toddlers she works with. “There’s something I really get about them,” she told me. “I think I have my own personal arrested-development reasons—I realized that’s something that I had to offer.”

On the way to teach an infant class at a public park in the Valley, Lansbury passed the house where she and her three siblings grew up: white siding, black shutters, just big enough for a family of six. “We rode our bikes everywhere,” she said. “We just had adventures all day that my parents didn’t want to know about.”

Her mother was popular in the community. “She was a housewife, she loved to sew, she loved to garden, president of the PTA, very social,” Lansbury said. Her father was sixteen years older, a native Angeleno who worked at a bank, and then in office equipment. “He would bring home these reams of paper,” Lansbury said. “My older sister Pati made a newspaper for the neighborhood, and I was the model for the fake ads that we had in it—‘the Mod Model J.J.’ I was very vain.”

Pati was an angry child who, Lansbury believes, never recovered from being displaced in her parents’ affections by her younger siblings. These days, Lansbury estimates, eighty-five per cent of the questions she gets are from parents whose children are acting out in response to the arrival of a new baby. Lansbury urges parents to empathize with the older children’s feelings, while resisting the fear that they’ve suddenly become possessed. “It’s devastating for them—their whole world has just collapsed,” she said.

“Let’s plan weekly menus until the end of time.”
Cartoon by Kate Curtis

Her mother, facing the same situation, was unable to handle Pati’s angst. “Any sign we were going to push back on anything or be disagreeable, it was like she couldn’t take it anymore,” Lansbury said. “She would just be gone from you—disappear.” Pati grew up to be a “troubled, unstable person,” Lansbury told me. She left home at fifteen, changed her name, and was still estranged from the family when she died, several years ago.

Lansbury’s father was more demonstrative than her mother was. “He would pick us up from school and yell, ‘I love you, baby!’ ” she recalled. “He drove with Olde English 800 malt liquor between his legs. He was always sipping away. Probably started soon after breakfast.” He took his own life in 1994, while Lansbury was training with Gerber. “As suicide goes, it was an understandable one,” she said. “He was eighty-six, he was in a walker, he had to sleep sitting up because of his prostate.” He was scheduled to have back surgery the day he died. “He was in a separate room from my mom, and then she realized that she had heard something, because he did this,” Lansbury said, pointing a finger gun at her head. “I’ve been there. When I was having my suicidal depression, I was in that same room, thinking, I’m going to shoot myself in the head.”

Lansbury said that she was a shy child—“the fragile china doll who everyone wanted to protect.” But, the moment she expressed dissent, her mother’s protectiveness ceased. “She kind of iced me—her whole face towards me would change,” Lansbury said. “I lost trust that my instincts were O.K., that my feelings were O.K., that I wasn’t a bad person.”

Her entire parenting practice is an attempt to equip children to handle their emotions in a way she never learned to. “When the kids were little, I was on the phone with my mother and I told her, ‘I did hot lunch today in the school,’ and my mother was, like, ‘You?’ Because I don’t know how to do anything in the kitchen. I said, ‘Come on, I know how to cook for my kids.’ And my mother hung up the phone. I couldn’t breathe for that whole week. All I wanted was for her to tell me it was O.K. The whole time, I was, like, I’ve felt this before. I believe it was when I was a toddler.”

To Lansbury, RIE presented a release from this kind of muffling: all pain is acknowledged, all the time. “My tendency would be to avoid, just don’t bring it up. But what this approach says is bring it all up,” she said, with tears rimming her eyes. “That whole thing Magda was teaching us is, Conflict is O.K. Kids are O.K. with it. They learn from it! Man, if I would’ve had that?” She shook her head.

I asked Lansbury if she had any regrets about her own parenting. After a very long pause, she said no. “It’s not like I think I’m perfect, but I’m proud of how I am as a parent, and it’s a good feeling to have,” she said. “Magda gave me something to feel really confident about. My whole goal is, I want people to believe in themselves that much.”

My daughter was born just before Thanksgiving, 2020. In the anxious days leading up to her birth—before the election, before the vaccine—I would take walks and listen to “Unruffled.” The sound of Lansbury’s voice did not make me homicidal. She reminded me of a kind teacher I had in nursery school, the only one who didn’t seem to think I was a bossy little brat.

What scared me most about parenthood was the excruciating power struggles I saw between my friends and their children: endless wars, fraught with tension and disappointment. Lansbury was describing a world without those interactions—one in which you can say no, and mean it, without feeling guilty or getting angry. “You can set a limit and at the same time be their ally,” as Hari Grebler put it to me. “People say, ‘Pick your battles.’ But I’m not at war with my kid.”

So does it work? It’s difficult to prove parenting choices right or wrong. Spock told people to put babies down on their bellies, so that they wouldn’t choke on their spit-up. Pikler believed that they should always be on their backs, where they’d have more control. It is estimated that some fifty thousand babies in the U.S., Europe, and Australasia could have been saved from SIDS if Pikler’s guidance had prevailed. But, for the most part, to know what “works” with kids, we’d first have to agree on what that means. Is success a child who is obedient? Or highly motivated? Or just happy?

Whatever your goals, and whatever your style—respectful or authoritarian, bulldozer or kangaroo—it’s not clear that any of it ultimately matters. “From an empirical perspective, parenting is a mug’s game,” Alison Gopnik writes. “It is very difficult to find any reliable empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do—the variations that are the focus of parenting—and the resulting adult traits of their children.” Tiger moms don’t have an edge on producing future world leaders; Francophiles bringing up bébés are no more likely than the rest of us to have their kids win the Légion d’Honneur.

Lansbury, though, does not promise that her approach will lead to the best possible kid; what she’s selling is the best possible relationship. If you just believe in yourself, and believe in the method, then your child will believe in you, too, and everyone can relax. (A mantra of Gerber’s was “Do less, enjoy more.”) This has an element of catechism—but so do Sears, and Spock, and “What to Expect.” All parenting is a faith-based initiative.

And so I narrate my daughter’s diaper changes. I never gave her a pacifier. I tell her before I’m going to pick her up, and I make other people do it, too, which irritates them. (Then I acknowledge, “You don’t like that,” and how can they argue with me when I won’t stop agreeing with their feelings?) Most of the time, I say no with confidence, and most of the time she handles it well. I’ll never know if RIE is effective or if I just got dealt a fundamentally easy kid. But, either way, it doesn’t hurt to believe. ♦