The Crazy Wisdom Community Journal • January - April 2014 • Page 81
Conscious Parenting
Exploring the Insights of Mindful Parenting By Chuck Barbieri As an early childhood educator and parent, I am daily challenged to keep my cool and composure and to consciously choose how I want to be before I interact with children. Children need guidance, boundaries, and structure in their lives. They also need parents who can skillfully navigate through the daily situations that often become points of conflict. Leaving the house in the morning for school, getting ready for dinner, and putting away toys in the living room — these situations can leave a frustrated parent wondering, Where is the patience I used to have with children? How can I keep my emotions in check? They also present an opportunity for parents who tend to fall back on old habits to question if they habitually react, perhaps channeling their own parents or relatives when they yell or scream, resent a child, or anger too quickly.
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ou can examine your unconscious reactions to children by silently acknowledging these reactions and simply not speaking them out loud.
Knee-jerk reactions like these reflect the long dominant parenting paradigm of compliance, domination, control, and manipulation of children. It’s a paradigm that is perhaps ingrained in our collective histories but is dying out as a new parenting paradigm emerges that calls on parents to ask how conscious and how mindful their reactions are to their children. Over the past ten years, scientific research on this topic has been documented and explored, resulting in a revolutionary parenting approach in which parents work with children based on mutual respect, understanding needs, and unconditional parenting. I invite parents to take a look at this more conscious, less stressful approach to parenting. In the new paradigm, the focus changes from child to parent and seeks to explore what the parent brings into the relationship with the child. It asks you to create the time and space to be truly conscious and mindful in the present moment as you are in relationship with your child. It also involves developing the ability to truly see the needs of your child that are not tarnished or stained by your unconscious habits, unexamined values, and beliefs. This is more easily said than done!
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n the new paradigm, the focus changes from child to parent and seeks to explore what the parent brings into the relationship with the child.
The new paradigm acknowledges that how you unconsciously react to the wants of children misses a conscious response to their genuine needs. Educator and author Joseph Chilton Pearce raises a profound question to all parents — a question that as a Waldorf School teacher and now parent I ask myself every day — which is, Am I worthy of imitation? Young children pick up and absorb every aspect of our being. They lack the censorship or filtering out that is common to adults. Why then, as parents, do we act surprised when they give it right back to us? What follows briefly outlines some key starting points for parents interested in applying the concepts of the new paradigm. I encourage parents to explore these ideas as they reconsider their parenting practices and consider achieving greater self discipline. To begin, you need be in unconditional presence with your child. Specifically, focus and observe your child without judgment or with suspended judgment. It’s a way of filtering out your own "unfinished" issues of power, control, and parenting histories in order to truly observe the child “as is.” Next, you need to carefully observe the child with a term that educator Kim John Payne calls "soft eyes" in order to truly understand the needs of the child beneath his or her external
behavior. Whisper to yourself the words that you may say to your child, especially during stressful times when your child triggers you. Stop, focus on your breathing, and reflect on where your perceptions and judgments come from. You can examine your unconscious reactions to children by silently acknowledging these reactions and simply not speaking them out loud. It is indeed very rare that you must yell or scream at a child in direct danger, so just live with your own reactions. This is the first step in attempting to change your unconscious reactions: make them conscious and just live with them. Dr. Shefali Tsabary writes in The Conscious Parent (Namaste Publishing, 2010) that "Until we understand exactly how we have been operating in an unconscious mode, we tend to resist opening ourselves to an approach to parenting that rests on entirely different ideals from those we may have relied on until now." At this point, it is vital not to fall into the "blame or shame" game that deflates your self-esteem. Rather, you need to move into self-empathy and reflect on how your unconscious reactions may not line up with your authentic goals of raising children that become happy, emotionally healthy, responsible, ethical, caring, critically thinking, and "decision ally" literate as they mature in life. Therapist and family relationship theorist Hal Edward Runkel starts his book Screamfree Parenting (Harmony, 2008) with the basic premise that children cannot become responsible for themselves as long as we consider ourselves responsible for their lives and their choices. We are only responsible for our own lives and our own choices. He writes that the only way to retain a position of influence with our children is to regain a position of control over ourselves. The greatest gift we can give our children is to focus on our own mind stream. This sounds so narcissistic, yet it functions as a way to carefully examine if our intentions, motivations, and actions actually align with the parent we truly want to be. Children do frustrating, annoying, and sometimes unkind behaviors! The times when they need your unconditional love and presence are the same times that you are responsible to them for your behavior, feelings, and choices.
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he times when they need your unconditional love and presence are the same times that you are responsible to them for your behavior, feelings, and choices.
Alfie Kohn, author of Unconditional Parenting (Atria, 2006) and Punished by Rewards (Mariner, 1999), argues that to be a better parent, just practice these four words: Talk less, ask more. How much can we truly understand what is going on inside a child if we do most of the talking? By asking questions you are opening up the relationship to a "working with" rather than "a doing to" approach. This is a basic form of respect that you need to share with children. Even though children learn through imitation, Kohn argues that they need to practice this learning by having the opportunity to make decisions. In the new mindful parenting paradigm, children do not need to be disciplined with rewards and punishment. Children do not need so called "healthy shame" or any other doggie biscuit approach to discipline, yet most parenting books and articles are still fixated on how to get kids to jump through our hoops of demands and expectations. It’s time to change the focus from child to parent, from enforcing a child’s discipline to evaluating our inner discipline as parents. Chuck Barbieri of Ann Arbor has been joyfully playing with children as a Waldorf Early Childhood Teacher and Mindful Parenting Coach for the past 32 years. Visit his Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/MindfulConsciousParenting, for more information and upcoming events, including a free in-depth presentation on the Conscious/Mindful Parenting Processes at Crazy Wisdom Bookstore on January 11, 2014.