By Carmen Myler

I first heard about Maggie Dent when I saw a flyer for a talk on “Teaching Children the Magic of Silence and Stillness” that she was doing at my local café in Uki, Northern NSW, in late 2007.

I was 38, had two little boys, aged five and three, and my neighbour Michelle had three children under nine. We both felt we could definitely use a bit more silence and stillness at home.

Living in the Northern Rivers – where it’s not uncommon to find yourself getting your chakras aligned by someone you run into at the local shop standing beside 20 varieties of chai – we assumed Maggie’s talk based on the title would be, well, a bit ‘woo woo’.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a bit of woo woo (and chai!), but what we encountered at Maggie’s talk was something else entirely.

She wasn’t some ascended being espousing theories about what we should be doing as parents or promoting an idealised, virtuous picture of how calm our homes (and children) could be.

She was relatable, clever and compassionate. She was also hilarious, talking about skidmarks on kids’ undies one minute and their emotional and spiritual development the next. She was so bloody real! And that wasn’t something I’d seen in other parenting presenters at the time.

After the talk, we went up to buy a book and chat to Maggie. That book was Maggie’s first (now out of print), Saving Our Children from Our Chaotic World, which in a Nostrodamus-like-feat she wrote in 2003 before we even had smart phones… she saw the chaos coming!

While we were chatting, Maggie revealed that she had just bought a house in our street. In fact, it was the house right next door to me. “Oh God,” I said to Michelle, “talk about pressure, living next door to a parenting expert.”

It was anything but pressure, living next to Maggie and her hubby Steve for the next seven years. They embraced the noise and chaos of us being their neighbours as they were now empty-nesters after having raised four boys.

They’d cook for us, mind the boys, Maggie would make banana-choc smoothies and muffins for all the kids in the street when they skidded down her driveway on their bikes. Steve always had ginger beers in the fridge for the boys. He even went to school with them for their Father’s Day barbecue when their dad wasn’t able to get time off. They were lighthouses for our lads.

My husband and I had moved to Uki from Brisbane, leaving our family supports a couple of hours up the highway so Maggie and Steve were a godsend – like Maggie says, you have to create your own circle of safe community.

As it turned out, Maggie felt the same serendipity about meeting me because she had come from WA and was trying to make a name for herself over here on the east coast and I was working from home as a PR and communications consultant.

Maggie loves to tell people that when she met me, I was working on a very detailed report about fruit fly research, and she saved me from it (apologies if fruit flies are your jam, they just weren’t mine at the time).

Seventeen years on, my boys are now 20 and 22 (and Maggie gave one of them a job fresh out of school as her video editor) so the bulk of my parenting work is ‘done’. They have grown up with Maggie, not just as an ‘aunty’ but with her philosophies influencing how their father and I have parented them.

So in almost two decades of work and friendship with this firebrand of a woman, here’s what I’ve learnt:

Parenting: it isn’t that hard to give kids what they really need…

I know I’m not alone when I admit that I can tend to overthink decisions I make as a parent. What I learnt from Maggie though is that as my boys were growing up – no matter what else changed around us – they really just needed me to:

• let them play A LOT (with other kids, without a script and as often as possible outside – I got used to dirt and toys left out in their rooms sometimes)
• give them compassionate but firm boundaries, especially around technology, and be ok with saying no (with love – they’ll thank you later)
• allow them to be heard (my boys will tell you I’m still not that good at listening but honestly when it really counts my sons still come to me)
• let them do things for themselves, make mistakes and fail
• when I’m struggling, I’m a better parent when I reach out for help
• work at creating a safe circle of community for them – especially for when the adolescent years arrive
• see them and love them for who they are and respond accordingly. My kids are very different (a rooster and a lamb, if you will) and it has been good to learn to be sensitive to that and to seek extra support for them when they need it.

Friendship means showing up…

We all need at least one good friend and I am lucky to have a beautiful circle of friends. Maggie has helped me see even more than I knew before that friendships need to be tended and it’s important to show up.

Just like she talks about having micro-moments of connection with your kids, the same can work for friendships.

She might send me an encouraging text just checking in, or drop off some muffins if she’s cooked extra (also, she always cooks extra!!), or just call me up because one of us needs a laugh or a cry. We always have a cuppa when she’s in town and we both benefit from either of us reaching out.

Maggie’s also taught me the power of generosity and gestures, and showing up in big ways for your friends when they really need it at times. Like when my niece died unexpectedly and Maggie flew up to Brisbane without telling anyone and just showed up at the funeral , telling me “I’m not going to let you go through this on your own” and standing behind my family like a sentinel throughout the service.

And I’ve seen her make similar gestures for lots of other friends in her life because she knows friendships really matter.

Follow your inner knowing …

Maggie always says that we are the experts when it comes to our own kids, and she’s right.

This doesn’t just apply to parenting though, it’s about ourselves, our own inner guidance. I see Maggie making decisions in her personal life and her work based firmly on her intuition – she takes time to assess not just the practicalities of situations, and the cost/benefit, but on how it feels.  This is something she’s wrote about in that first book I mentioned earlier and she and Steve Biddulph recently talked about in their masterclass on Wild Creature Parenting.

This is something that is getting harder and harder in our increasingly digital lives. What I see Maggie do is tune out when she needs to, take herself off for a walk or swim, and sleep on a lot of her decisions.

(Also she is not afraid to change her mind if something shifts – this can be maddening at times, but Team Maggie has learnt to go with it! It’s all part of going with the flow and being human. And her regular words and acts of gratitude for what we do make up for it).

Loss is hard but it’s important to let your kids feel it

Anyone who’s followed Maggie’s work for a while may be familiar with her guinea pig theory of loss. Firstly, she tells us it’s a great idea to get a pet as it can help kids to learn about being gentle, empathetic and to take responsibility for caring for something.

Also, if you get your kids a pet with a shorter life span, such as a guinea pig, then that pet is reasonably likely to die within your child’s childhood. That way, they can learn about loss more softly than if say their grandparent’s death is the first death they ever experience. They can see what dying looks like, have a little funeral, and learn what it feels like for something they loved to be gone.

Unfortunately, my boys lost both their grandmothers when they were pretty small and the two guinea pigs we got, Peggy Nutmeggy and Millie Vanilli, lived for YEARS. We did lose at least one chook first though (phew!).  And Maggie’s dog Jessie almost killed Peggy, but that’s another story.

Age is just a concept

In two months, Maggie turns 70 and it occurs to me that she was only a couple of years younger than I am now when she really hit her straps in her career. In the time we’ve worked together she’s had several bestselling books published, spoken to tens of thousands of parents at events, hosted two podcasts, become a regular on TV and radio, travelled all around Australia and overseas with her work.

While she’s taking a bit more space these days, Maggie continues to work extensively and has far more energy than I do (to be fair, she is post-menopausal, I’m in the thick of it!). People always ask how she does it… well she walks every day, eats well, takes time out to rebuild her energy, never drinks to excess, loves a bit of crime fiction to wind down and spends as much of her spare time as she can with her grandkids.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s no angel. She can be difficult, stubborn and unpredictable, but so can I (and maybe dear reader, so can you?) – all the best women can!

Above all though, Maggie is fuelled by the knowledge that her work matters and she knows she can’t do it alone. A lot like parenting really…

Image credits: main image – Acast’s Australian Podcast Awards
Other images supplied by the author.