Journalist, consultant, podcaster, blogger, speaker and writer. But, “above all” -he recalls-, mother and wife. Míriam Tirado (Manresa, 1976) is not willing to give up any of those roles; she doesn’t have to either. Her personal life and her professional life run in perfect sync, she assures her: that’s why she helps other parents achieve this long-awaited balance, impossible as it may seem. His is, throughout the interview, a satisfied smile. Míriam Tirado smiles because she has managed to make a living from what she is passionate about. When she left her permanent position at a Barcelona station to start a family, she didn’t think she would do so well. “I left with one hand in front and the other behind, but with a very clear idea in my head.”
Faced with the multiple challenges that motherhood and fatherhood present, Tirado stands as a superheroine capable of solving family problems “from the root” through a consulting process that advocates introspection and, above all, “taking things with humor”. With almost 120,000 followers on Instagram and 45,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel, the Catalan has become the trusted influencer for many Spanish mothers and fathers.
His different professional projects revolve around the concept of “conscious upbringing”, that is, “raising by taking responsibility for what is our fault and not the fault of the children”. The parenting model proposed by Tirado provides a series of keys to improve parent-child relationships, without subverting authority roles or blurring the boundaries between what is permissible and what is intolerable. “We usually complain that our children’s behavior drives us crazy. But we are the ones who bear the burden of their education, and many times we transmit our expectations, frustrations, shortcomings and childhood traumas to them,” he explains. He says that when they don’t know how to act, parents adopt childish attitudes, “as if they were four years old too, instead of behaving like adults.”
Tirado began the path of writing with her mother in 2005, and is already the author of 14 illustrated stories -among them, the successful Sensibles and The Invisible Thread- and five books aimed at adults, such as Limits and Tantrums. Peeking into the world of adolescents was a pending task that she can now cross off her list: she has just published her first novel for young audiences, My name is Goa (B de Blok), a portrait of the self of she 12 years old.
Using fiction as an excuse, he seeks to make young readers empathize with the characters and thus be able to “understand them and their environment a little better”, without having to resort to self-help books, “which cause them tremendous repulsiveness”. In its pages, he talks about divorce and anxiety, as well as the identity crisis that emerges in that stage of life, full of ups and downs: “It is the book that I would like my daughter to have read at the time, so that she would feel that I wasn’t alone and that behind all the chaos is a perfectly normal explanation.”
He says that accompanying families is one of the “most complicated, although rewarding” tasks of his work. In her consulting sessions she acts as a mediator between parents and pre-adolescent children. She herself deals at home with two girls aged nine and 14. “There’s not enough talk about the emotional change of leaving childhood behind. We parents sum it up with ‘you’ve become more edge’ or ‘you’re moving away from me’. We seem to have lost our memories.” This lack of understanding, she affirms, translates into an increase in conflict. “It is clear that leaning over the precipice is dizzying, but we cannot ignore the relationship with our children,” she says.
Conciliation is, in many cases, a chimera. “Due to the dizzying rhythms of work and the high levels of stress we suffer, we are less present in our children’s lives,” summarizes Tirado. He does not consider that this reality should be criminalized; In fact, he supports the work of groups such as the Club de Malasmadres: “His work to exonerate and support motherhood outside the traditional canons is very valuable and powerful, a respite from the exhausting demands for perfection that fall on us.” He does believe, however, in the importance of dedicating free time to talking with your children, instead of looking for an escape route for worries on the screens. “We resort to the joker of technology not to argue, we let our children get away with it as long as they leave us alone, and that does not work like that.”
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
