The Challenge of Parenting

Parenting is one of the most challenging, demanding, and stressful undertakings on the planet. It is also one of the most important, for how it is approached influences in great measure the heart and soul and consciousness of the next generation, their experience of meaning and connection, their repertoire of life skills, and their deepest feelings about themselves and their possible place in a rapidly changing world. Yet those of us who become parents do so virtually without preparation or training, with little or no guidance or support, and in a world that values producing far more than nurturing, doing far more than being.

When we first wrote this book, in the mid-1990s, there were few if any books addressing the inner experience of parenting. In fact, this book launched the term mindful parenting and even a field of research on that subject. The best parenting manuals of that era served as helpful and authoritative references, giving parents new ways of seeing situations and reassuring us, especially in the early years of child rearing or when facing particular challenges, that there were various ways to handle things and that we were not alone. They also offered an understanding of age-appropriate landmarks of child development and thus helped parents to have more realistic expectations of their children.

But for the most part, they did not address the inner experience of parenting. What are we to do, for instance, with our own mind? How do we avoid getting swallowed up and overwhelmed by our doubts, our insecurities and fears? What about the times when we feel carried away and lose touch with our children and ourselves? Nor did they address the critical importance of being present with and for our children, and how we as parents might develop greater understanding and appreciation for the inner experiences of our children.

To parent consciously requires that we engage in an inner work on ourselves as well as in the outer work of nurturing and caring for our children. The how-to advice that we can draw upon from books to help us with the outer work has to be complemented by an inner authority that we can only cultivate within ourselves through our own experience. Such inner authority only develops when we realize that, in spite of all of the things that happen to us that are outside of our control, through our choices in response to such events and through what we initiate ourselves, we are still, in large measure, “authoring” our own lives. In the process, we find our own ways to be in this world, drawing on what is deepest and best and most creative in us. Realizing this, we may come to see the importance for our children and for ourselves of taking responsibility for the ways in which we live our lives and for the consequences of the choices we make.

Inner authority and authenticity are developed through that inner work. Our authenticity and our wisdom grow when we purposely bring awareness to our own experience as it unfolds. Over time, we can learn to see more deeply into who our children are and what they might need, and take the initiative in finding appropriate ways to nourish them and support their growth and development. We can also learn to interpret their many different, sometimes puzzling signals and to trust our ability to find a way to respond appropriately. Attention, inquiry, and thoughtfulness are essential to this process.

Parenting is above all uniquely personal. Ultimately, it has to come from deep inside ourselves. Someone else’s way of doing things may not be appropriate or useful. We each need to find a way that is our own, certainly consulting other perspectives as we go along, but above all, learning to trust our own instincts while continuing to examine and question them.

Still, in parenting, what we thought and did yesterday that “worked out well” is not necessarily going to help today. We have to stay very much in the present moment to sense what might be required. And when our inner resources are depleted, it is helpful to have healthy ways to replenish them and restore ourselves.

Becoming a parent may happen on purpose or by accident, but however it comes about, parenting itself is a calling. It calls us to re-create our world every day, to meet it freshly in every moment. Such a calling is in actuality nothing less than a rigorous spiritual discipline, a quest to realize our truest, deepest nature as human beings. The very fact that we are parents impels us to continually seek and express what is most nurturing, wise, and caring within ourselves, to be, as much as we can be, our best selves.

As with any spiritual discipline, the call to parent mindfully is filled with enormous promise and potential. At the same time, it also challenges us to approach our parenting with consistent intentionality, so that we can be fully engaged in this fundamentally human enterprise, this remarkable and decades-long unfolding passage of life and learning from one generation to the next.

People who choose to become parents take on this hardest of jobs for no salary, often unexpectedly, at a relatively young and inexperienced age, or under conditions of economic strain and insecurity. Typically, the journey of parenting is embarked upon without a clear strategy or overarching view of the terrain, in much the same intuitive and optimistic way we approach many other aspects of life. We learn on the job, as we go. There is, in fact, no other way.

But to begin with, we may have no sense of how much parenting augurs a totally new set of demands and changes in our lives, requiring us to give up so much that is familiar and to take on so much that is unfamiliar. Perhaps this is just as well. Each child is unique and each situation different. We have to rely on our hearts, our deepest human instincts, and our memories of our own childhoods, both positive and negative, to encounter the unknown territory of having and raising children.

And just as in life itself—faced with a range of familial, social, and cultural pressures to conform to frequently unstated and unconscious norms, and with all the inherent stresses of caring for children—as parents we often find ourselves, in spite of all our best intentions and our deep love for our children, running more or less on automatic pilot and plagued by the vagaries of our minds, which are ordinarily exceedingly reactive and usually caught up in unnoticed but incessant thinking.

To the extent that we are chronically preoccupied and invariably pressed for time, we may be significantly out of touch with the richness of what Thoreau called the “bloom” of the present moment. This moment—any moment, actually—may seem far too ordinary, routine, and fleeting to single out for attention. If we are in fact caught up in such habits of mind, the unexamined automaticity of it all can easily spill over into a similar automaticity as far as our parenting is concerned. We might be assuming that whatever we do will be okay as long as the basic love for our children and desire for their well-being is there. We can rationalize such a view by telling ourselves that children are resilient creatures and that the little things that happen to them may be just that, little things that may have no effect on them at all. Children can take a lot, we tell ourselves. And there is some truth in that.

But, as I (jkz) am reminded time and again as people recount their stories in the Stress Reduction Clinic and in mindfulness workshops and retreats around the country, for many people, childhood was a time of either frank or subtle betrayals, of one or both parents out of control to one degree or another, often raining down various combinations of unpredictable terror, violence, scorn, and meanness on their children, much of it coming out of their own experiences of trauma and neglect and the addictions and deep unhappiness that often follow. Sometimes, in the deepest of ironies, accompanying such terrible betrayals, come protestations of parental love, making the situation even crazier and harder for the children to fathom. For others, there is the pain of having been invisible, unknown, neglected, and unappreciated as children. And there is also the sense that what with the rising stress on virtually all fronts in society and an accelerating sense of time urgency and insufficiency, things are strained to, and often beyond, the breaking point in families and getting worse, not better, generation by generation.

A woman who attended a five-day mindfulness retreat said:

I noticed this week as I was doing the meditation that I feel like I have pieces missing, that there are parts of me that I just can’t find when I become still and look underneath the surface of my mind. I’m not sure what it means but it’s kind of made me a little bit anxious. Maybe when I start to practice the meditation a little more regularly, maybe I’ll find out what is stopping me from being whole. But I really feel holes in my body or in my soul that keep me pushing mountains in front of myself everywhere I go. My husband says: “But why did you do that? There was a big opening here.” And I just say: “I don’t know, but if there is a way to block it up, I will.” I feel a little like a Swiss cheese. I have felt this from when I was small. I had some losses when I was small. I think parts of me were removed and taken from [me by] deaths and [by] other people; my sister died when I was young, and my parents went into a sort of depression, I think until they died. I think parts of me just got taken to feed them. I feel that. I was a very lively, young go-getter when I was young, and I felt parts of me just being taken, and I can’t seem to be able to regain those parts now. Why can’t I be that way? What happened to me? Parts of me have gotten lost, and when I’m sitting here today, meditating, I realized that I’m looking for those parts and I don’t know where they are. I don’t know how to become whole until I find those parts that are gone. Now my whole family has died. They’ve taken all the parts and left, and I’m still here with the Swiss cheese.

A chilling image, that parts of this woman were taken to feed her parents. But this happens, and the consequences to the children reverberate throughout their lives.

What is more, some parents cause deep hurt and harm to their children, as when they beat them to teach them lessons, saying things like “This is for your own good,” “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” or “I’m only doing this because I love you,” often the very words that were said to them as children when they were beaten by their parents, as was shown by the Swiss psychiatrist Alice Miller in her seminal work. In the name of “love,” frequently unbridled rage, contempt, hatred, intolerance, neglect, and abuse are inflicted on children from parents who are unaware of or have ceased to care about the full import of their actions. This happens across all social classes in our society.

In our view, an automatic, unexamined, lowest-common-denominator approach to parenting, whether it manifests in overt violence or not, can cause deep and frequently long-lasting harm to children and their developmental trajectories. Unconscious parenting can arrest our own potential to grow as well. From such unconsciousness can come, all too commonly, sadness, missed opportunities, hurt, resentment, blame, restricted and diminished views of self and the world, and ultimately isolation and alienation on all sides.

If we can remain awake to the challenges and the calling of parenthood, this does not have to happen. On the contrary, we can use all the occasions that arise with our children to break down the barriers in our own minds and hearts, to see more clearly into ourselves, and to be more effectively present for them. These opportunities lie at the heart of cultivating greater mindfulness in our parenting.

We live in a culture that does not uniformly value parenting as valid and important work. It is considered perfectly acceptable for people to give one hundred percent to their careers, or to their “relationships,” or to their passions, but not to their children.

Society at large and its institutions and values, which both create and reflect the microcosms of our individual minds and values, contribute in major ways to the undermining of parenting. Who are the highest-paid workers in our country? Certainly not day-care workers, or teachers, whose work so much supports the work of parents. Where are the role models, the support networks, the paid parental leave for young parents, the job sharing and part-time jobs for mothers and fathers who want to stay home with their children for more than a few weeks after they are born? Where is the support for parenting classes? By their prevalence, such programs would tell us that healthy parenting is of utmost importance and is valued highly in our society. But their prevalence is depressingly low.

Certainly there are bright spots and reasons for hope. Countless parents across the country see parenting as a sacred trust, and manage to find heartful and creative ways to guide and nurture their children, often in the face of great obstacles and odds. There are imaginative efforts by people all across the country involved in programs that teach parenting skills, communication skills, violence prevention, and stress reduction, and that offer counseling services to parents and families. There are also many groups engaged in community building and political lobbying on behalf of children, such as the Children’s Defense Fund. For many years La Leche League International and Attachment Parenting International have given invaluable support to parents for meeting the needs of their children through breast-feeding and other practices that promote secure parent-child attachment. The Searses’ The Baby Book has for decades provided practical information and a framework for honoring the needs of infants and babies. A number of books connect mindful awareness and attunement with parenting (see the Suggested Reading at the end of this book). Laura Kastner’s Wise-Minded Parenting and Susan Stiffelman’s Parenting Without Power Struggles are valuable resources for parents. Dan Hughes’s book Attachment-Focused Parenting: Effective Strategies to Care for Children and Dan Siegel and Mary Hartzell’s book Parenting from the Inside Out connect interpersonal neuroscience, attachment research, and awareness. Nancy Bardacke’s book Mindful Birthing: Training the Mind, Body, and Heart for Childbirth and Beyond is a ground-breaking work on mindfulness-based childbirth and parenting. New research and new books are coming out on these subjects all the time.

Whatever the era in which we are raising our children, we are always subject to large social, cultural, and economic forces that shape our lives and the lives of our children. Nevertheless, we always have at least some latitude as individuals to make conscious and intentional choices about how we are going to relate to the circumstances and the era in which we find ourselves. To one degree or another, usually far more than we think, we have the potential to inquire deeply about the path we are on and how it reflects what we most care about and long for. We always have the option of bringing greater attention and intentionality to our lives, especially where it concerns our children. Charting such a path for ourselves can be made significantly easier and more robust if we have a larger framework within which we can examine what we are doing and develop insight into what else may be needed—a framework that can help keep us on course, even though things may be constantly changing and our next steps unclear. Mindfulness can provide such a framework.

New and important doors in our own minds can open just by entertaining the possibility that there are alternative ways of perceiving situations and that we may have more options open to us in any moment than we may realize.

Bringing mindfulness to the various aspects of our day as it unfolds may be a practical as well as a profoundly positive alternative to the driven, automatic-pilot mode in which we can function much of the time without even knowing it. This is particularly important for us as parents, as we try to juggle all the competing responsibilities and demands that we carry from day to day while at the same time providing for our children and meeting their unique inner and outer needs in an increasingly stressful and complex world.