Feature Story
Teacher-turned-entrepreneur builds business on "parenting"

She started out to be a high school English teacher, but instead of teaching kids nouns and verbs, Jan Faull has built a career teaching adults to be better parents.

Well-known as the "potty coach" since the publication of Mommy! I Have to Go Potty!, Faull might soon be called the "power coach" for her new book, Unplugging Power Struggles: Resolving Emotional Battles with Your Kids ($13.95 paper, $21.95 library, October 2000).

Just published by Seattle's Parenting Press, (800) 992-6657, Unplugging Power Struggles helps parents understand that the fight for control isn't always a discipline issue. And it's nothing unusual, either: Faull explains that it's natural for parents to want to teach, to train, to influence—to keep their kids safe and healthy. It's just as natural for children to strive for independence and to resist close supervision.

After three decades working with children and parents, Faull knows what she's talking about. A long-time television commentator and newspaper columnist, she also gets daily feedback from parents in her "real" job as a community college parent educator. Their positive response to her toilet-training book's chapter on power struggles was one of the reasons that Faull spent almost a decade exploring the difference between discipline and control.

First conceived 20 years ago when Faull recognized that she and her then 10-year-old daughter were locked in an emotional battle for control, Unplugging Power Struggles helps parents diagnose both the symptoms and the causes of power struggles. Through dozens of brief real-life stories about other families, she explains how to sidestep arguments and when to negotiate or compromise. Faull also identifies situations (usually involving safety or family values) when parents cannot expect to be able to avoid confrontations.

If you're looking for theory and philosophy, you won't find it in Faull's books and columns. No ivory-tower "expert", she learned about power struggles literally from the ground up—starting as the "nap room" teacher at a child-care center. She had earned a degree in English education at the University of Washington, but there were almost no teaching jobs in 1970, so Faull found herself working at a United Way-affiliated child care center in Portland while her husband attended law school. After years of managing child care centers and working in parenting education, Faull realized she could make a difference in children's lives by working through their parents. Fascinated by the topic, she returned to the University of Washington for a master's degree in early childhood education.

Meanwhile, the families she'd led through toddler and cooperative preschool programs had graduated to elementary school and they began recommending her as a speaker for PTA and other school-based meetings and workshops. The positive reception for her practical, thoughtful advice encouraged Faull to seek a way of getting parenting education into the media. She considered approaching television stations with conventional queries, but it was a gutsy complaint that got her on the air. When KIRO-TV, a Seattle network affiliate, broadcast a comment on explaining death to children, she called up the station and told the noon news producer that she could do a better job than the station's guest parenting expert. Within weeks, she was on the news twice a month as its child development expert.

Not long after, she pursued an assignment as a newspaper columnist—but again, with no letter of application. When a charity auction offered lunch with her local newspaper publisher, Faull made sure hers was the top bid—and long before they'd gotten through the entree, she was querying him on how to get a writing job. By dessert, after she'd outlined how he and his wife could solve their toilet-training struggles, she had a job.

Today Faull continues to research answers to a wide variety of parenting questions. She sees everyday problems—and their solutions—in her full-time appointment at Bellevue Community College, just east of Seattle, where she divides her time between parenting and early childhood education. A frequent speaker in the Puget Sound area, she also hears from the parents who read her weekly columns in the Seattle Times and her monthly "Your Child" articles on Disney Online's family.com. Oh, yes, and Faull still deals with power struggles at her Seattle-area home; the youngest of her three children is a high school student and not hesitant to remind Mom that he needs a little more independence.