1
Preparing to be a Parent
Who wants to listen to the experts?
While sitting in a café one day, I overheard two women talking about an article in a parenting magazine. Indignantly, one said to the other, ‘I’m not going to let some pretentious academic with a whole bunch of letters after his name tell me how to bring up my own child.’ Parenting: there is probably no human task for which people are more put off by the idea of experts.
Some parents do like to seek information about parenting – that’s why you are reading this book. But information is not always welcome. Parents generally don’t like to be told what to do. We resent others intruding into our personal relationships with their comments and their advice. ‘This is my son and I’ll decide how to raise him.’
Most of us probably feel touchy about our parenting style being held up for scrutiny; we fear being judged and found inadequate. We feel we are expected – or rather, we expect ourselves – to know exactly what to do, when to do it, and to get it right for our children.
How did we get the idea that we are automatically supposed to know everything about caring for our children as soon as they are born? This is not the case for any of the other skills we learn through life. Long after learning to drive and obtaining our licence, we keep improving our road skills – hopefully – for the rest of our lives (insurance companies recognise this, which is why our premiums get cheaper as we get older). A gardener, even one with the greenest of thumbs, knows that the more that is learnt, the more joy a garden will give. All good professionals know that learning in their field of work continues forever. People who play sports accept the need for regular practice and coaching. But the secrets of how we care for our children are jealously guarded, and we want the world to think we have got it all handled.
So, why do so many parents feel overcome with embarrassment when they hit a difficult patch in their relationship with their children? Too often when this happens, we either blame the child or we blame ourselves. Either way, blame hurts. It does not help anyone. But it seems hard to do the alternative, to ask for and accept help or advice when to do so would feel like a failure on our part – when to reach out makes us feel ashamed.
When you think about it, the expectations that we place on ourselves as parents (or the expectations that are placed upon us in our society) are unrealistic and unreasonable. In the years that I have worked with parents and families, I have been repeatedly awe-struck by the things that parents imagine they are magically supposed to know, understand and accomplish, with little or no help and support. ‘Kids don’t come with an instruction manual,’ we joke to each other and, as we shake our heads, we invoke the wise old lament: ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ But we carry on regardless, without the help of the village or extended family, and with precious little helpful information. So, if help is so important for parents, why does it sometimes feel like interference? Why does it make us feel disempowered? Why does the idea of ongoing learning seem to hit such a raw nerve?
Parents under a microscope
Information about how children grow and develop, and how we can best address their changing emotional needs, is updated in the parenting literature quite frequently. But this information is greeted with mixed feelings. Some parents receive new information – even if it challenges established beliefs – with great enthusiasm, even relief; they welcome the empowerment that knowledge gives them. Others feel confronted by new information and may react defensively and dismissively.
Why is the possibility of learning new skills so hard to face?
You have probably heard mothers and fathers described as either ‘good parents’ or ‘bad parents’ countless times. The idea of a ‘good parent’ or a ‘bad parent’ is a myth, and a destructive one at that. This kind of comparison places enormous pressure on parents to perform. Not surprisingly, many parents feel as if they are being watched by their community and graded for their skill – or lack of it. There is probably nothing that would more quickly take away the joy, the ease and the spontaneity from parenting. And how can any of us open ourselves to new learning and to receiving help and support if we feel as if we are under a microscope, if we feel like failures for doing so?
Why do we end up feeling ashamed when we admit that we get stuck sometimes? Who told us we are supposed to know what to do all the time? How can we benefit from the help of the village if we have to keep our need for help a secret? Many parents carry a great deal of shame, as if their children’s behaviour will expose their inadequacies as parents. Parent shame and guilt, often the result of unrealistic expectations, gets in the way of learning and growth, and it thwarts opportunities to receive support from others.
The cost of unsupported parenting
Some years ago, Jill came to see me for counselling after having been diagnosed with postnatal depression. She told me she had two children, one 3 years old, the other a 9-month-old baby. She spent most of her day at home alone with her children. Her own parents, her sister and her brother all lived in other towns, hundreds of miles away, and so, apart from her children, her husband was the only family she had with her. Although Jill had two close girlfriends who were very dear to her, each seemed busy with her own life, so they saw each other infrequently. Jill’s husband was the only regular adult relationship she could count on. Each day, endless hours went by in which she faced the joys but also the demands of being a mother alone. Jill’s mood became increasingly gloomy, she was bewildered, could not understand why she was feeling more miserable each day. When Jill finally confided in her family members about her deteriorating emotional state, they were surprised. ‘You have two beautiful children, a loving husband, you live in a nice home. What can you possibly have to be unhappy about?’ Not exactly the most empathic response. People in Jill’s life were telling her to cheer up.
Not surprisingly, this response compounded Jill’s depression. She had started off feeling lonely and exhausted, now, on top of that, she felt like an ingrate and a failure as a mother for not bursting with joy.
There are so many mothers and fathers who, just like Jill, feel deeply inadequate because they are at home with one, two or more children all day and feel at their wits’ end; they frequently lose their temper. This is not necessarily because they are at home. It is because they are isolated, cut off from their vital support networks. Looking after children is supposed to be a communal, cooperative endeavour. Our species is simply not designed to nurture its young in separate, nuclear family units. No wonder parenting is so stressful for so many people.
Parenting is such a formidable task. Parents need nourishing social contact and practical help on a daily basis. Isolation is an established, major risk factor for depression in parents, yet hardly any prospective parent is told about this; in our culture a parent’s need for support has been very badly underestimated.
So, one of the aims of this book is to help you not only to be free of shame about reaching out for help and support, but also to actually feel good about yourself as you ask others for help. Parenting is the most important job in the world, and you should have all the support you need. Parents deserve a whole range of different kinds of support.
Practical support
Practical support can be found in the form of friends and family helping you to cook, shop, or look after your older children when you have a small baby. They can also take care of your baby while you take a nap. In cooperative parenting groups, friends and family can help each other along these lines on a daily basis.
Emotional support
The parenting journey provokes all kinds of feelings – frustration, anger, tenderness, joy, fear, laughter, grief, sorrow and more. Often, parents need a shoulder to cry on when tired or overwhelmed. We need someone to listen to our feelings and show concern for how we feel. We also need someone to share our joys with.
Informational support
It can make a world of difference to learn more and more about how children grow, key developmental milestones that we can expect at each stage and how to address children’s changing emotional and physical needs.
Parenting can sometimes be difficult, painful and frustrating, but it can also bring us immense joy, and a host of wonderful new feelings that we could not have dreamt of. Provided certain basic conditions are met, parenting can – and should – be full of pleasure and fulfilment. The basic conditions for joyous parenting involve:
strong connections to supportive partner, friends, family and community
a deep sense of connection with yourself (self-love, self-respect, a clear sense of your own feelings and needs)
an empathic and emotionally authentic connection with your child.
Pleasurable parenting is about connection. Throughout this book, I will be clarifying further why each of these connections is so important, and discussing many ways to nurture and deepen these vital connections.
Parents have always been learning
When it comes to parenting, every last one of us is on a learning journey. So what, then, is a parenting expert? Well, there is actually no such thing. No one in the world is a parenting expert, and here’s why.
The way children are reared has always been evolving. We certainly have not been doing it the same way since the beginning – far from it. Parents and teachers have been learning new things about how to relate to children from the dawn of human history. Parenting used to be far harsher and more violent than it is today; history is replete with tales of extreme cruelty towards children. The true history of childhood through the ages is very distressing, but it is also quite encouraging: it shows us how far we have come over the centuries. If you were to read this history of childhood you might be surprised to find that you gain a renewed appreciation of and understanding for your own parents. This feeling creeps up on you as you begin to see what their childhoods would have been like, and what their parents’ childhoods were like. The historical perspective also deepens your respect for yourself, for your own struggles and your successes as a parent, as you discover that humanity as a whole has for a long time been learning about parenting and often making a mess of it. This is very reassuring: it is OK for you to be learning, it is OK to be getting it wrong sometimes.
From this illuminating history of childhood, I would like to share with you some of the most surprising bits.
In early Roman and Greek civilisations, parents – wealthy and poor alike – who did not want their children, killed or abandoned them at a rate of up to 40 per cent. Abandoned children were commonly used as slaves, and the sexual exploitation of children was publicly condoned.
During the Middle Ages and later, children had very little to do with their parents. Most babies were sent away to be reared by paid wet-nurses, many of whom lived in towns far from the parents; most wet-nursed children did not see their parents until they were 3 or 4 years old. Once returned to their parents, most were sent away again soon afterwards to live as apprentices with trade masters; others were fostered out for their labour in lieu of debt repayments, or were indentured to monasteries for lifetime service.
When the Industrial Revolution arrived in Europe, children as young as 4 were forced to work in factories, textile mills, mines and as chimney sweeps. They worked up to sixteen hours a day in appalling conditions. They were cruelly punished if their work was inefficient, and occupational health standards were non-existent. In the UK, child labour was abolished in 1874 through the Factory Act; in the USA it continued until 1938. Today, it is estimated that 218 million children are forced to work, and over 100 million of them do so in hazardous conditions.
For much of the nineteenth century, children were to be seen and not heard. In England, children of middle-class or aristocratic parents were raised by nannies, not by their parents. A study involving hundreds of biographies (Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, 1972) found that the majority of British nannies were cold and strict disciplinarians, and many were physically and sexually abusive.
Until the release of the 1962 article, ‘The Battered Child Syndrome’, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, child abuse was a problem that did not rate as a priority; it was, effectively, ignored. These days, even though it is widely condemned, child abuse continues at an alarming rate, despite the fact that most of us are horrified by child abuse statistics, that there are mandatory reporting regulations for health professionals, and that there are a number of government provisions to protect children.
On the whole, mothers and fathers the world over are learning, largely by trial and error, to have closer bonds with their children. Breastfeeding rates have been increasing steadily around the world in recent decades. (Roughly one in three babies in Australia, the UK and the USA are still breastfed at six months. Although this falls a long way short of recommended targets, it represents a massive improvement since the 1960s and 1970s when virtually no babies of that age were being breastfed.)
Dads are learning to be far more involved with their children. It would have been very unusual to see a dad pushing a stroller or publicly cuddling his baby only one generation ago. Today, the majority of dads witness the miracle of their children being born, but only forty or fifty years ago, most dads remained at work or waited nervously outside the labour ward.
With every new step we take collectively towards a more intimate and hands-on approach to parenting, it is only natural that we would sometimes stumble, make mistakes and feel lost. Most of humanity is learning how to be better parents. So, even though there are still widespread social problems experienced by children – growing numbers of broken families, high rates of youth depression, bullying in schools, childhood obesity and more – we belong to a generation that has, on average, improved on how our forebears raised their children. There is no finality to parenting proficiency, no finish line where we can arrive and feel like we are finally doing it all the right way. As parenting will always continue to evolve, there is no reason to put ourselves down when we get things wrong. As you will see in later chapters, there are plenty of valid reasons why each parent sometimes falls short of understanding and meeting their children’s emotional needs. The more we understand ourselves – how our own childhoods have affected us, and the circumstances that influence our parenting style – the more we tend to view ourselves with compassion and the more we learn to trust ourselves as parents.
This book aims to help parents feel excited about learning new approaches and new things about how children develop, to help you to feel in control of the information you take in as a parent and to weigh it up for yourself. This book intends to help you find and appreciate the parenting expert inside yourself.
Parenting by instinct
Our instincts come to us as raw material. Each of us is born with a powerful self-defence instinct, designed to protect us if we are attacked. Those of us who do not learn one or two martial skills are likely to flail around quite ineffectually if faced with the need to fight.
The sexual instinct is one of our most powerful driving forces, yet as beginners we grope and fumble and sex is more comedy than harmony. Instinctual as it might be, lovemaking is a skill that we learn, and hopefully continue to learn, from our partners. In fact, all acts of love are learnt, not in terms of technique so much as in our abilities to be open, self-expressive, demonstrative, sensitive and empathic.
This applies equally to our parenting instincts.
We all possess a strong, natural parenting instinct to nurture, protect, empower and, eventually, liberate our children – our brains are hardwired for it. But this does not mean we can expect ourselves or each other to know exactly what to do as soon as our children are born.
We learn how to be parents through human contact: we learn it from others. Even breastfeeding, one of the most basic acts of mothering, needs to be learnt and role modelled, and often it fails without careful instruction from lactation consultants, breastfeeding counsellors or experienced mothers. Breastfeeding difficulties that are commonplace in modern societies are very rare in cultures where mothers breastfeed openly and together.
We are all full of wonderful parenting energies, but the way we enact those energies is always learnt from our elders and our peers. That’s why most people tend to parent their children much the same as they were parented themselves. It is also why we should never have to feel ashamed to openly acknowledge our difficulties as parents and our constant need to learn from each other. Parenting is all about learning.
So, why talk about the ‘science’ of parenting?
If all we do is learn to parent from our own parents, or from our own immediate community, we will learn much that is valuable but our learning will be limited to a relatively narrow range of parenting styles. We are limited by what we see and experience.
Child development specialists are called developmental psychologists. There is nothing magical or mysterious about developmental psychology. Developmental psychologists look for what seems to work best for babies and children – what helps them grow to be loving, joyous and playful, warm and affectionate, respectful and considerate, interested in learning and able to focus their attention. They do this by carefully and methodically studying what happens to many thousands of children all over the world.
Such research gives developmental psychologists a tremendous advantage. By collecting information from thousands of studies from around the world, scientists open us up to a far broader range of helpful ideas. With the aid of modern communications, scientists such as paediatricians, immunologists, psychologists, neurologists, geneticists, biologists, anthropologists, psychohistorians and others, help us to reap the benefits of the collective experiences of billions of parents and children from every culture and through history. This can be like asking a million experienced grandparents for their advice and distilling an average answer.
Scientists are a priceless resource for parents. In recent years, advances in brain-imaging technology have helped scientists to gain extraordinary new insights into childhood brain development. The secrets of how children develop emotional intelligence have been unlocked. There has been a veritable explosion of remarkable discoveries, as if someone flicked a switch and illuminated the pathways to healthy emotional development. The conditions that help children to develop emotional intelligence are becoming much clearer. Scientists have located the regions of the brain that produce those qualities, and psychologists are identifying the kinds of experiences that help those particular parts of the brain to grow. Incredible as it may sound, the capacity for love and courage can literally be hardwired into the child’s nervous system.
So at the very least, science can help you to feel more confident about the choices you have already made as a parent. The latest discoveries relating to children’s emotional health have simple applications, many of which will probably resonate with what you intuitively know, if you listen to your feelings. For many people, the new scientific evidence has supported them in doing what their hearts were telling them to do, even when people around them were discouraging.
Why is there so much conflicting information out there?
Have you noticed that sometimes parenting books and health professionals seem to give out contradictory advice? This can be a source of confusion and frustration, causing some parents to feel as if they are caught between opposing factions. Some health professionals will, for example, tell you that it is best to breastfeed babies for over two years, others that one year is enough. Some professionals will advise you against rocking your baby to sleep, warning that this will make your baby too dependent on you; they’ll try to impress upon you that babies should learn to fall asleep all by themselves. Other professionals will tell you the opposite, that it is crucial for babies to feel comforted and to sleep close to those they love.
Confusing? Who to believe? Think of it this way: the fact that there are some contradictory sources of information out there might also be a good thing. This is happening because science is yielding new understandings at a tremendous rate, about what children need in order to thrive. The same happens in every area of human endeavour – engineering, medicine or agriculture – when existing practices need to be replaced as soon as new facts come to light.
The way we raise our children has never advanced as rapidly as it is today. We are in a period of fast-paced transition: old assumptions are being abandoned, new practices are being adopted. There is nothing unusual about this. As our glimpse at the history of childhood has shown, child-rearing customs have been evolving since the dawn of time. Parenting has undergone many critical periods of transformation and, fortunately, this has mostly been for the better. What is different today is that, thanks to modern science and communications, evolution is proceeding at an accelerated pace.
Until the 1990s it was widely believed by doctors and many lay people that newborn babies don’t feel pain; now, medical authorities have come to realise this is not so, and that in fact babies feel pain more intensely than children and adults do. It was also once believed that newborn babies do not have emotional awareness, and we now know that to be false. In both cases, as it often happens, science has confirmed what many parents already felt in their hearts.
Never before in our history has the plight of children been considered enough of an issue to merit so much discussion and controversy as it does today. The heat of modern debates about how we should care for our children shows just how much more we have come to value their emotional wellbeing.
Tapping your inner wisdom (you’re in charge)
There is now an unprecedented abundance of wonderful and empowering information for parents, the kind of leading-edge, evidence-based information that can help you derive much pleasure and joy from your parenting journey while fostering your child’s emotional health.
As parents, we need to strike a balance between absorbing scientific know-how and learning how to trust ourselves. Every parent has a fount of inner wisdom that they can learn to access. There are practical steps that you can take in order to tune in to this inner wisdom, the voice of your heart.
You and your child’s emotional intelligence
Many people around the world are coming to realise that emotional intelligence is more important in our pursuit of happiness than mental or academic intelligence (IQ). Emotional intelligence (EI) is the main ingredient that helps create and maintain loving relationships in our personal lives and workable partnerships in our professional lives. Our abilities to know our own feelings, to express our feelings appropriately, to read other’s feelings and to empathise with others, these are the fundamental skills that enable us to find fulfilment in life and work. Emotional intelligence is what enables us to feel good about ourselves and to love our own company.
Peak emotional health includes our capacity to give and receive love, to derive pleasure from life, and to experience joy, bliss and even ecstasy. However, our emotional health rests on our willingness to keep learning and growing, about ourselves and about relationships.
Humanity has not achieved the potential emotional health that is biologically possible. Unlike IQ, emotional intelligence can quite readily continue to develop through life.
Early childhood is a time when the human brain and central nervous system are growing at the fastest rate, and children’s experiences of human relations have by far the most powerful and long-lasting impact on their emotional make-up. That’s why the way we respond to our children’s feelings has a powerful influence on the way they perceive themselves as they grow up, and the way they will relate to others.
No one has agreed upon a definitive and universal definition of emotional intelligence or emotional health, although there is wide consensus about how important it is for our relationships. Just to get a sense of what EI might be all about, and how it applies to you, do the quiz you will find at www.our-emotional-health.com/ei.html.
Why the early years are so important
You will find that throughout this book, we will talk about the brain a number of times. There is a good reason for this. So much has been learnt about the human brain in recent years, and we have discovered so much about how children’s relationships with their parents redirect the growth of their brain. In a child’s brain, new neural pathways are growing all the time in order to create a personality, and this personality is an attempt to adapt to the kinds of relationships the child is held by.
Here are some simplified examples to illustrate the point. When a child feels lonely and unheard, her brain might grow in a way that causes her to behave in clingy ways as her way to draw more attention to herself to compensate for the deficit. Alternatively, since she felt early in life that relationships let her down, her brain might grow in a way that makes her reserved, withdrawn and aloof, in order to save herself from disappointments in relationships. Here is another example. As a result of considerable punishment and shaming during his earliest years, a boy’s brain grows towards making him defensive and hostile. This makes good sense for his survival. Because he has experienced an unfriendly and aggressive world, he learns to cope by becoming more aggressive.
It is important to understand that these feelings, attitudes and behaviours are literally hardwired into the child’s rapidly growing brain, which is why some of our characteristic traits tend to last and can be difficult to change. Our emotional intelligence begins to be shaped from earliest childhood, through our earliest impressions of human connection. Since brain changes develop far more slowly in adulthood, it is very difficult to change traits that have been formed in early childhood. Early childhood gives us the greatest opportunity to safeguard our children’s emotional health for a lifetime; their ability to pursue their goals and form loving relationships. It serves us well to understand what, exactly, are our babies’ and toddlers’ deepest emotional needs.
The brain grows while the child is in the womb and through early childhood at an incredibly accelerated pace. Brain growth is experience-dependent, which means that the brain senses how relationships feel to the child, and it decides how to grow accordingly. In an unfriendly or emotionally cold environment, the child’s brain will grow quite differently than it would in a home that is full of empathy and affection. That’s how our earliest relationships have helped to write our distinctive personalities – by encoding the key parts of our brains that regulate emotion.
As parents there is much we can do to immunise our children from all kinds of emotional, mental health and social problems. There is much we can do to teach our children to create loving and caring relationships, to have a strong social conscience and a life of deep commitment and fulfilment. Parents have power, and the right information – as well as our commitment to keep developing our own emotional intelligence – can make a considerable difference to how we influence our children.
DID YOU KNOW?
Did you know that we are born with only one-quarter of our adult brain mass, and that by our third birthday it has grown to 90 per cent of its full size? The way the emotional centres in the brain develop is directly shaped by our relationships with our carers. By the sixth month our stress response level is set, based on how our emotional security needs are met by others. This neurological stress response is set much like a thermostat, and it influences the way we face stressful situations throughout our lives.
The foundations of your child’s emotional make-up are shaped over the first five to seven years, when the brain is growing at its fastest. Your child’s time in the womb, through birth, babyhood, the toddler years and young childhood are of the most profound developmental importance. Their experiences throughout these early years will be the most formative of their lives.
This is not to say that later childhood and adolescence are not formative; a teenager’s peer group and school teachers also wield a lot of influence over who our children become. In fact, there is a second – though lesser – accelerated spurt of brain growth during the teenage years that makes adolescence another vulnerable time of change. But the growth rate of the brain in early childhood is never again paralleled. That’s why the foundations of emotional health can be most effectively set in early childhood. How we nurture our children in early childhood can, to a large degree, prepare them for the challenges of the teenage years, by giving them the self-love and the ability to form trust-based relationships and strong personal boundaries that will protect them from negative influences later.
The deepest fulfilment and the greatest joy are found in parenting when parent and child grow together, in other words, when as parents we are open to our own learning about emotions and about relationships, just as we tend to our children’s emotional development. Just by being themselves, our children are our teachers in some very profound ways, as we are theirs; how parent and child help each other to grow and become more loving individuals is explored throughout the book. We will look at your own unfolding and healing and growth, alongside your child’s step-by-step emotional development. We best help our children to develop emotional health when we are willing to grow at the same time. When you and your child are consciously growing together, parenting can be a transformative and healing journey that transports you to the depths of your own humanity.
What is connection?
Our emotional wellbeing – in other words, our ability to experience joy, love and fulfilment – comes from how closely we are able to connect to one another.
Relationships are about connection. Human happiness is about connection. Your baby’s and young child’s ability to thrive and grow in emotional health begins with how well they feel connected to you. Your own ability to love and be loved comes from how well you can connect to others. Our self-esteem and self-worth come from how well we are able to connect to ourselves, to our innermost feelings and yearnings.
Connection is what we look for in relationships, whether we are conscious of this or not. The deepest connections we make with one another are facilitated through mutual openness, our willingness to be open with each other about our feelings. The quality of our connections also depends on empathy, on our showing each other that we register each other’s feelings, that we are somehow moved by each other’s feelings.
You sense when a deep connection with another has taken place because you feel closer to that person. You feel you have gotten to know them a little more deeply. This automatically brings forth feelings of respect, appreciation, perhaps even love. Every time we truly connect with another individual, we feel suffused with wellbeing, as if some inner thirst for contact has been satisfied. Our human connections enrich our lives and fill them with meaning.
If you pay close attention, you will notice that there is a rhythm to our search for connection. We reach out and make contact with others, we (hopefully) have our fill, then we turn back to ourselves: we seek self-connection or connection with Nature. There are many different kinds of bliss: that which comes from honest connections with each other, with ourselves, in communion with Nature, with music and, if you have a spiritual life, with the Divine. Life is a continual and rhythmic moving towards and away from all these kinds of connection.
Moments of deep connection are what your baby yearns for from you; it is what nourishes a baby at the emotional level. Your baby depends on a deep and consistent connection with you, and on how closely his communications of feeling are attended and responded to. Your baby also depends on how much of you – your essence, your warmth – he feels when you are with him. Making contact with your baby doesn’t simply depend on doing the right thing; it is chiefly about the quality of your presence: your self-awareness and your attention to your child’s feelings.
As a baby evolves into a toddler, and then a child, the meaning of interpersonal connection starts to become much broader: children begin to thrive from knowing you as a person, with all kinds of feelings, limits and needs. Being a real person, rather than playing the role of authority, is what creates authentic connection. Additionally, toddlers and children find their bliss through self-connection, which comes from the freedom to be playful, to explore the world around them and to express their feelings and unique natures. This exhilarating – and sometimes scary – adventure of self-discovery is, with gradually increasing steps, done away from the parents.
As will be discussed later, your ability to make these kinds of connections with your child is helped by how well you are connected to your self, your feelings, your emotional vulnerability, your emotional inner world. Your connection to your child is also helped by how well you feel connected to – and supported by – people who are significant in your life – your partner, family, friends, colleagues and community.
You will find that the better you know yourself and the closer the connection with your child, the more you will be able to trust your own intuitions about parenting decisions. This is what helps you to feel in charge of how you weigh up the advice you receive from books, health professionals, friends and family.
This might seem like a strange concept, but when you are connected to yourself, when you are in your heart and aware of your feelings, your very presence is nourishing – there are some instances when this is true even if all you do is to sit still. By just being yourself and being here you radiate an essence that enables your children to thrive.
Connection heals emotional wounds
One of the most painful things about being a parent is that sometimes something we do – or fail to do – hurts our children. As parents are learning, it is impossible to avoid making mistakes. There are also times when our children are hurt by circumstances that are beyond our control.
You can help your children to heal their emotional wounds. The way you connect with your children – by listening carefully to their feelings and by being authentic with them – can be profoundly healing for them.