Hello and Welcome

Negotiating the treacherous waters of parenting can be anxiety provoking and discouraging.

This results from both internal insecurity and external unpredictability.

Three steps will keep you in the flow and having fun as you reclaim the role of mama/papa/leader.

Step 1.  Strengthen your connection to your personal sensory guidance system.  This is the connection to the information freeway  from your five senses and your intuition.  This is information about your environment, your child, and others that assists you in making thoughtful decisions. Step 2. Trust your knowing of your child. Listen to him or her – listen with your ears, your heart, and your sensory guidance system. Step 3. Guide with strength and lovingkindness. Be self-confident and go with the flow. Be patient, kind, and firm.  Say I am sorry, and make efforts to shift your responses to best meet you child’s needs.  Model respect and trust by being respectful and trustworthy.  In all your disciplinary responses focus on learning and loving; be loving and sensitive to the multi-level issues involved, respond quickly and clearly, and use the opportunity to teach joy and strength in being a responsible person; an individual connected to a community.

To help you embrace the three steps, understanding the nature of the parenting is key.

• Parenting is modeled.
• This means that you learn how to parent from your interpretation of your own parenting.  This concept of learning social interactions through your group associations is a function of how the human brain develops over the first 24 years of life; and a part of what happens whenever you enter a new social group, environment.
• What you see done is what you incorporate into doing to others and to yourself; as you age the internalized reflection of yourself becomes solidified.  Once you are into middle age the malleability of your reflection, your internalized sel-persona/picture requires a release of the accepted self and a reevaluation of ‘who you are’… due to the solidified nature of your introjected self, often this requires a traumatic event to shift your internal accepted picture of self.
• There is a strong desire to be accepted and approved of by your significant others (beginning with moms and dads, and then moving on to peers).
• You know who you are and how you should be treated, what you perceive as your role in relationship, from what is reflected to you by your parents, your primary caregivers, and your first social groups –> your siblings and cousins, and then your peers, friends.
• So, if there is dysfunction or trauma or damage in those early relationships you have deficits in your ability to navigate the waters of parenting your children.

Cognitive/behavioral therapy, meditation, yoga, and mindfulness development uplevel your consciousness so that you can shift and rebalance your inner self perception and your outer actions.

Trust, be trustworthy, act with strength and kindness, be forgiving and persevering.

As you guide, be willing to incorporate new information about your child or your beliefs and make adjustments to your course to align your actions, beliefs/values, and your parenting.

Parenting is a dynamic, organic (as in living and responsive to environmental changes) process.

• Be confident, proactive, reflective, flexible, and trustworthy in your actions and intentions.
• Be willing to adjust your response and be flexible as you see the need to do so and be firm when you perceive this is important.
• Respond with seriousness to serious problems, and playfulness with problems which are not serious; stay responsive and discern the difference.  in love and light, bg