[A very powerful story that Shalini shared in our Awakin Circle yesterday!]

This week's passage on The Power Paradox reminded me about parenting.

We have a four year old. My husband's approach to parenting has been extremely different than the traditional approach. For instance, when you have a kid who is going through terrible twos, the most common parenting style I have seen is fear based -- a lot of yelling, a lot of timeouts. My husband, on the other hand, I have always seen him treat our daughter with a lot of respect and love.

There were a few instances that stand out in my memory.

One of them was when our toddler was two years old, and on this particular day, she just refused to sit in the car seat. No matter where we were going, she will just not sit. She would rebel every time we put her in the car seat. My husband's approach was, "Let her take own time to adjust. She'll come around and sit."

As you might imagine, there were many frustrating moments because we had to get somewhere and she just won't sit in the car seat.

Once I remember we had gone to Stanford for a hike. The night before, we hardly got any sleep. And after the hike, our daughter just won't sit in the car seat. After about an hour -- an hour! -- she finally sat. Then, we went to a restaurant, to a Thai place, for lunch. Then again she refused to sit in the car seat. We were both extremely tired, drained from the hike, didn't get any sleep the previous night. I was like, "Come on. Put her inside the car seat. It's time to go. I'm really tired. I need to go home and sleep and so does she. It's her nap time."

My husband responds, "I can't do it. I can't pin her down into the car seat." Then he says, "Okay. I'm going to take the bus. You go home in the car."

And so he actually took the public bus from Palo Alto to Sunnyvale! Every time I think about it, it moves me to tears.

This reading is so powerful, because the power that my husband has given our daughter is going to come back to him as she grows older. It's going to be a very different relationship between her and my husband.