Conscious Parenting 411What is Conscious Parenting?Conscious Parenting, as we use the term, means increasing our range of available tools, so we can make more conscious choices in each moment, particularly with the young people in our lives. When we do this, we feel better about how things go, and experience more flow and harmony both within and outside our domestic spheres. We also contribute to a more peaceful future for our planet. Our approach doesn’t frame things as right or wrong. In any given situation, a wide range of choices may make equal sense. We support parents and caregivers in trusting their own intuition as they become practiced in a range of incredibly useful skills. We also acknowledge the tremendous pressure put on parents, particularly mothers, to “get it right,” in the midst of a culture that offers so little to support families. We think “getting it right,” along with the idea that we have to do this on our own, is a setup that leaves everyone feeling guilty, overwhelmed, isolated and exhausted! Instead, the Conscious Parenting Alliance offers classes, events and consultation that confer useful tools and help reframe perceptions. For example, a “bad” child becomes one whose needs are not met. Or, a child’s quiet compliance may mean its time to check in and see how they are really feeling inside. Along similar lines, a mom or dad who feels badly about how they just treated a young person learns to have compassion for themselves and tune into what needs of their own they were trying to meet. We discover how to see human needs as inherently compatible, never in conflict. A struggle becomes an opportunity to connect and communicate. We find ways to tune into our own and young peoples’ inner worlds. We learn that, more than we may have believed, we can have reciprocal connection and trust with young people rather than a benevolent dictatorship. Our sense of possibility widens and expands, as does our appreciation for the lessons of parenthood, and the wisdom children contain. What are the basics of the Conscious Parenting approach?We have observed that everyone benefits when adults:
What is taught in Conscious Parenting classes?We use a variety of techniques for preventing difficult moments, dealing with difficult moments, and building a lifelong foundation of trust and connection within and among families. In our years of work with children’s environments, and with helping adults connect, we have found that many difficult moments are entirely preventable! Using insights from educational pioneer Maria Montessori, we demonstrate ways to set up one’s home, teach children basic life skills and treat them with the respect all humans need. When we take these basic measures, children encounter fewer upsets and life goes more smoothly in the home. Young people are better able to take care of their own needs and are more willing and able to contribute to the needs of the family. Regardless of our best efforts, difficult moments inevitably occur. Another important foundation of our work is Nonviolent Communication, based in the work of Marshall Rosenberg, author of Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. NVC is a simple and powerful language for helping humans identify, talk about, and meet their universal human needs. NVC helps prevent difficult moments, navigate more smoothly through the challenges we do encounter, and build trust and connection among family members. By bringing forth both our own and young people's feelings and needs in this peaceful way, we find common ground and a clear path to peace in the midst of conflict. To help parents deal with what many consider the most confronting situations, we take a thorough inventory of tears: their source, our response to them, and what crying children need. We teach Holding Space, a way to facilitate a child’s emotional expression, including tears, laughter and rage, to liberate their loving, cooperative nature. Holding Space provides opportunities for children to express big feelings in a safe and loving environment. It also provides a tool for parents to help one another, and a perspective to welcome and relax into, rather than struggle with and stress about, little people’s oh-so-big feelings. We value laughter as much as tears! We explore the various conscious ways we can elicit laughter with young people. We see laughter as a key to creating more fun, joy, and harmony in families, and also as a tool to help young people work through the challenges of childhood. In our classes, we support the work of parents by teaching techniques for parents to get support and feedback from one another. Through sharing information and perspectives from a variety of sources, we teach ways to look at and approach a number of situations through lenses that foster greater connection and harmony. We also help to reduce parental isolation by creating community within class, and helping parents think about how to support their parenting beyond class. How is the Conscious Parenting approach different from other approaches to parenting?The approach of the Conscious Parenting Alliance differs from other schools of thought in two important ways. First, most parent education we’ve seen falls into, or along a continuum between, one of two camps. On the one end are those who believe it’s a parent’s job to get children to behave well, to submit to authority and to control their emotions. Approaches that fall into this camp might be termed “authority-based,” even though some of these approaches may make some attempts to acknowledge children’s feelings. Another characteristic of authority-based schools of thought is that they advocate some form of reward and/or punishment. This approach is consistent with the culture at large, which rewards and punishes as a matter of course. Most people who advocate and practice rewards and punishments point to the fact that they “work” (meaning that rewards and punishments yield at least short-term desired changes in children’s behavior), and that they also prepare children to live by the rules of this culture. Both of these things are true. Rewards and punishments may prove useful as a small part of a large roster of parenting approaches. However, as a staple of adult-child interactions, rewards and punishments do little to strengthen relationships, build trust, or nourish the whole person. On the other end of that continuum are folks like us who want to nourish the whole child, and teach her to pay attention to her own feelings and needs as a way to build trust and connection. We’ve noticed that behavior that’s easiest for us as adults tends to follow from this connection, paradoxically, when we don’t try to force it. It happens as a by-product of building our connection with our children. In other words, when we nourish our connection with young people, the behavior we want follows. This approach, which might be termed “connection-based,” goes against the culture at large. Children raised with this latter approach tend not to accept authority as easily, but also have more tools to connect compassionately to people in all social positions. They may be more likely to take a stand against injustice, work to improve the world around them, and help others to get along and find solutions that work for everyone, since they will have witnessed such behavior in the home. It’s not always easy to go against the grain. Parents who were raised with an authority-based parenting style (most of us) often find that when they embrace a connection-based approach, they get presented with lots of opportunities to do their own healing as well. These opportunities may at first present themselves as uncomfortable moments. In our classes and individual practices, we offer ways to frame and work with these moments as rich sources of growth. When adults have the opportunity to receive deep listening and empathy about the challenges of parenting, we grow ever more able to be exactly the kind of parents we want to be. Many, many teachers, writers and therapists, including the Conscious Parenting Alliance, embrace and advocate connection-based approaches, under many names, including “Attachment Parenting,” and others. What makes the Conscious Parenting Alliance unique among these is the interweaving of three very powerful strands of thought: the Montessori Method, Nonviolent Communication, and Holding Space. Our extensive experience with all three schools of thought has helped us see the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and weave them into a complementary curriculum that gives parents and caregivers an incredibly rich depth and breadth of resources to face the gargantuan task of parenting. The Montessori method reflects years of bringing out the best in children through child-centered and child-honoring education and home environments. Nonviolent Communication provides a solid base for navigating the many twists and turns of daily life, and Holding Space draws on the best of peer counseling traditions that teach people of all ages and from all walks of life the ability to heal from even the deepest, oldest hurts, and prevent new ones from taking hold.
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