We are pleased to feature an insightful conversation with Dr. Riri G. Trivedi, researcher, psychotherapist, and co-founder of Wellness Space. In this exclusive interview, Dr. Trivedi discusses her latest book, This Book Won’t Teach You Parenting (published by Penguin Random House India), exploring how self-regulation, emotional safety, and healing our own childhood wounds can transform the way we raise the next generation.

TLT: You describe parenting as a process of raising oneself alongside raising a child. In a society where parenting advice is often prescriptive, why did you choose a more reflective and psychological approach in This Book Won’t Teach You Parenting?

Dr. Riri G. Trivedi: Parenting can never actually be taught because every parent, every child, every family, and every situation is different. What works in one family may not work in another, and what has worked for one child may completely backfire for another. In our clinical work at Wellness Space, we’ve worked with hundreds of parents through evidence-based psychotherapy, and many of them eventually begin to recognise how their parenting styles may be connected to their own unresolved childhood experiences rather than a lack of love for their child. We wanted parents to first understand their own childhood to give a better childhood to their children. We also believe that all parents do what they do with all good intentions, but that does not mean the methods are right. With all good intentions, parents do end up harming their child unknowingly, but by using wrong methods, making educating parents about the right approaches vital. For this, parents need to be self-regulated, which is why the book also introduces simple, practical self-regulation tools—including breathwork, humming or simple Bhramari, and the SEE Protocol for self-hypnosis—within our broader Trivedi FLIP Model. Parents need to understand that if they are dysregulated, they cannot teach a child regulation, no matter how many rules are in place.

TLT: Your doctoral research explored the long-term effects of adverse childhood experiences in India. From your findings, what emotional wounds are silently shaping today’s generation of parents?

Dr. Riri G. Trivedi: My doctoral research, and our peer-reviewed studies on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in Indian populations, kept surfacing the same quiet wounds: emotional neglect disguised as discipline, constant comparison between siblings and cousins, and the silencing of a child’s feelings in the name of respecting elders. Our work has also highlighted childhood experiences particularly relevant in the Indian sociocultural context, including complex family dynamics, unspoken expectations, and environments where achievement and emotional suffering coexist without the suffering ever being named. Parents who have their own emotional wounds try hard to break these patterns but struggle with guilt, volatile outbursts, and being either too permissive or too strict, while their lack of confidence and self-worth makes them push their children harder into activity classes and curated play dates, passing their anxiety on at a very young age. We explore this in depth in our companion volume, What Happened to Me? vs What’s Wrong with Me?: Indian Perspectives on Childhood Trauma and Recovery, though ACEs are only half the picture, as our published research on Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) in Indian populations reminds us that resilience is also shaped by positive relationships, safety, and support.

TLT: Indian parenting has historically emphasized obedience and achievement. Do you believe the country is now witnessing a shift toward emotional intelligence and mental well-being within families?

Dr. Riri G. Trivedi: Yes, and we see it directly through our psychotherapy training programs, where we increasingly meet parents, teachers, and young professionals actively seeking tools for emotional understanding and self-awareness, not just professional credentials. Urban India, in particular, is slowly moving from asking “what will people say” to “how does my child feel,” though the shift is uneven and seen mostly among the urban, economically stronger segments of society who have the freedom and resources to become aware of these approaches. Obedience and achievement haven’t disappeared, but they now coexist with a growing vocabulary around emotional well-being, therapy, and trauma-informed parenting. Part of that shift involves parents wanting language to understand their own patterns, which is why the book includes a Parenting Style Self-Assessment informed by established research to help parents reflect on dimensions like warmth and control and recognize whether their approach tends to be authoritative, authoritarian, or permissive.

TLT: One of the strongest ideas in your work is that unresolved trauma can unconsciously travel across generations. How can parents recognize that they may be repeating patterns they once suffered from?

Dr. Riri G. Trivedi: The clearest signal is the intensity of the “parent response” that doesn’t match the moment, such as when a small mistake by your child triggers a reaction far bigger than the situation warrants. Another sign is hearing your parent’s exact words come out of your own mouth after promising yourself you would never repeat them, leading parents to either repeat unwanted patterns or swing to the polar opposite, resulting in extreme parenting styles that are either too controlling or too permissive. In our clinical work, we use techniques such as Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories (RTM) and Inner Child Integration to help parents work with these old emotional patterns at a deeper level rather than relying solely on willpower to manage their reactions, because recognizing the pattern is only the first step to interrupting the cycle.

TLT: We live in an age where children are more digitally connected but emotionally isolated. How should parents rethink communication in the era of screens, algorithms, and social media validation?

Dr. Riri G. Trivedi: Children today are starved less for information and more for undivided attention, because while algorithms are designed to hold focus, a parent’s job is to hold connection. That means shifting the conversation beyond simply managing screen time towards modeling emotional presence and warmth, such as asking about feelings rather than just the facts of the day and being emotionally available even in small five-minute windows rather than being physically present but distracted. Communication must become bidirectional and curious again, involving fewer instructions and more genuine curiosity about what your child is experiencing, alongside gadget- and device-free family time, outdoor activities, and human interactions.

TLT: Across urban India, there is growing awareness about therapy and mental health, yet parenting guilt and stigma remain deeply rooted. Why do so many parents still hesitate to seek psychological support?

Dr. Riri G. Trivedi: Mental health still carries considerable stigma in India, including the belief that needing psychological support somehow means one has failed as a parent. Many parents also fear that seeking therapy means admitting their own childhood or parenting was flawed, which can be a painful admission in a culture that places enormous value on family loyalty, especially since seeking therapy is still incorrectly associated with being mentally ill rather than focusing on emotional regulation

TLT: You combine evidence-based psychotherapy with Inner Child Therapy and Clinical Hypnotherapy. How do these approaches help parents move beyond intellectual understanding to genuine emotional healing?

Dr. Riri G. Trivedi: Insight alone does not always change behavior because most parents already know intellectually that yelling isn’t ideal, meaning we have to work at the level where the emotional reaction is actually being triggered by earlier life experiences and beliefs. Inner Child Therapy allows a parent to connect with and understand younger parts of themselves that still carry unmet emotional needs, while Clinical Hypnotherapy and tools like our Release Reframe Toolkit help explore and reframe deeply held beliefs that may not shift through intellectual insight alone. Together with approaches focused on memory reconsolidation, these techniques help parents move from simply knowing better to experiencing a deeper emotional shift that directly influences how they respond to their children.

TLT: Parenting advice today is everywhere, on Instagram reels, podcasts, and influencers’ pages. In your view, has the commercialisation of parenting created more informed parents or more anxious ones?

Dr. Riri G. Trivedi: It has created both, and that tension itself is part of the problem because parents today have access to more content than any previous generation yet feel more anxious since reels offer techniques stripped of context, research, or nuance. A gentle-parenting phrase that works for one child’s temperament or family context may completely backfire for another, which is the exact depth we tried to close with This Book Won’t Teach You Parenting by grounding practical tools in actual psychotherapy research and clinical case studies rather than a 30-second script. The anxiety also stems from comparison against curated, unrealistic lives on social media and the massive pressure of being the perfect parent to a perfect child, which is why I repeat throughout my book that there is no perfect parenting because it is not a project to be completed to perfection, but a journey to be enjoyed, experienced, and used to grow ourselves.

TLT: In Indian households, academic success is often treated as the ultimate measure of good parenting. How can parents nurture ambition without compromising a child’s emotional resilience?

Dr. Riri G. Trivedi: Ambition and emotional resilience aren’t opposites, as the real conflict lies between conditional worth and unconditional worth, meaning children can absolutely be encouraged to excel as long as they know their value as people isn’t dependent on their results. In practice, this means praising effort and process, allowing a child to experience failure without adding shame, and separating a child’s report card from a parent’s own self-esteem. In our clinical work with Indian families, we have seen many high-achieving children thrive not because pressure was absent, but because their parents remained emotionally available regardless of the outcome.

TLT: Joint family systems can offer support, but they can also intensify conflict around parenting choices. How can young parents establish healthy emotional boundaries without rejecting family structures altogether?

Dr. Riri G. Trivedi: Boundaries in a joint family work best when framed as clarity rather than rejection, meaning they are about the couple aligning as the child’s primary emotional anchor while still honoring grandparents and extended family as valued support. In our sessions, we often coach young parents to have these conversations privately with elders respectfully and specifically rather than contradicting each other in front of the child. It also helps enormously when one generation tries to understand the experiences that shaped the other, recognizing that a grandparent’s strictness often reflects the parenting they experienced, the social norms of their time, or unacknowledged emotional wounds rather than an intentional desire to cause harm, proving that open, honest communication and agreement on the common goal of the child’s well-being always helps.

TLT: Many parents believe love alone is enough. But your work suggests emotional availability and regulation matter just as much. What does emotionally safe parenting actually look like in practice?

Dr. Riri G. Trivedi: Love is necessary but not sufficient, because a child also needs to feel that their parent can stay calm and present when things go wrong, which looks like a parent who can sit with a child’s big feelings without needing to fix, punish, or dismiss them immediately. Emotionally safe parenting also looks like repairing after a rupture, where a parent can say they were wrong to raise their voice without losing authority, which requires developing the capacity to regulate their own nervous system—the exact reason why our psychotherapy training and parenting book both begin with the parent’s inner world before addressing parenting techniques.

TLT: If you could challenge one deeply ingrained belief about parenting in Indian society through This Book Won’t Teach You Parenting, what would it be and why is it important to challenge it now?

Dr. Riri G. Trivedi: It would be the belief that a good parent never makes mistakes, and that admitting fault undermines a parent’s authority, when in reality the exact opposite is true. Children who see a parent acknowledge and repair a mistake learn emotional accountability, resilience, and trust far more deeply than children raised on the illusion of parental perfection. This matters urgently now because we are raising a generation with unprecedented access to language and information about emotional well-being, and if parents cannot model imperfection and repair, the gap between what children are learning about emotional health and what they experience at home will only widen, which is the belief This Book Won’t Teach You Parenting was written to gently dismantle.