Our home needs to house our entire child, every part of her, even her anger. Her screams, tantrums, rages need a large room of their own. We create space for this out of our own familiarity with distress. We teach her where to find peace again, by knowing how to find our own peace. One […]
Relationship
Ask your child for help to find the time to parent
I was supporting a father the other week, and after an intense, surprising and creative session with some out-of-the-box prescriptions for change, he paused and in a slow voice he said, “I just need to find the time for this.” I immediately asked: “Where will you look?” He paused a long time before conceding that […]
Sometimes your child needs you to be quiet
We’re taught to communicate through words: to speak our minds, to articulate, enounce, voice our feelings. But no matter how good our intentions, all those words can be overwhelming and confusing. Sometimes our child needs us to be quiet. If she’s afraid, in pain, angry, she’s not open to verbosity. She can’t even hear a […]
When praise blocks your child’s joy
Your child cleans her room, plays a beautiful tune on the saxophone, draws an apple tree by a lake. And you praise her for what she’s accomplished, sharing your excitement, gratitude, amazement, pride. Your intention comes from a loving place, but it may land differently than you expect on your child’s ears. She may hear […]
A child’s identity is forged in community
There’s this cartoon from the New Yorker I saw a long time ago. A man at a cocktail party is kneeling in the corner of the living room. Someone asks, What’s Larry doing? And the response, He’s trying to find himself. I laugh at that one every time, out of recognition surely. Spending our adult […]
Am I a good enough parent?
Many of us parents know the gnawing feeling of not being good enough. Am I right to tell my six-year old child to clean his room? Will my habitual impatience cause her lasting pain? Do I erode her trust by making too many promises I don’t keep? Parenthood teeters between right and wrong. It’s a […]
Nothing is good for a child’s growth
Every child needs a healthy dose of nothing to do. Nothing germinates their imagination, cultivates their delight, develops their relationship to self. Nothing gifts them with the discovery that their selves hold an infinity of world’s within worlds. Nothing teaches them something about life that nothing else can do. Too much to do, too many […]
Flood the troubled child with love
Any child gets troublesome when there’s a tear in their most cherished relationships. She may be passive aggresive, anxious, manipulative, or fight with her sibling. There may be nothing you can say to resolve her pain. But there may be something powerful you can do. Flood your child with love. When all else fails, take […]
The tears of futility
Transformation is most likely to happen when we find ourselves in a situation we cannot change. The first step is futility–the sense that no matter what we do, nothing changes. All our strategies to get our way prove useless. Every child knows this feeling, often several times a day. He comes last in a school […]
Raise your child inside a walled garden
Mythology is rich with stories of a walled garden. Inside there are treasured plants, a verdant richness, great beauty and solace. Outside of the walls there is all that is untended, unlimited and beyond our influence. As parents it helps to be mindful of the walls we build around our children. They need us to […]
Restoring harmony through attunement
There’s a story I’ve heard about the Aka pygmes of central Africa and their gift of polyphonic singing. When a person among them is out of tune, tense, disconnected, the community sings him or her back into harmony. Developmental scientists might call this attunement and attachment. Attunement means bringing into harmony. When a mother softly […]
Your child is a person too
The word ‘child’ changes how we look at our children. It’s full of connotations, conditioned beliefs, judgements and expectations. When we meet children we see incomplete human beings, someone less than, in need of guidance, even betterment. A child doesn’t experience himself as a role or as someone half-baked. He sees himself as a person. […]
Want your child to care? Cultivate your empathy.
A mentor of mine once told me we don’t learn how to be more loving or empathetic. We’re naturally loving from birth. The difference is small but significant. We don’t have to strive to feel more or improve ourselves. This perspective is a cultural illness. It affects us when we internalize the industrial ideals of […]
Every child was born two times
There’s an old wisdom that says when a child is born, he arrives from the spirit-world knowing everything. But he soon forgets. The parents’ role was to help the child remember these original teachings. Every child needed to know these codes to lead a good life, respecting all his relatives and being of service to […]
Rules govern every family, even when they’re unspoken
Our family rules guide our conduct, how we are with one another. They’re a vital influence on family health. The rules we live by are often unspoken, unwritten or assumed, which causes a lot of needless grief and strife and confusion. We may feel that our child is unruly. Or our partner! Yet when it […]
Time for yourself
The arrival of a baby changes all relationships, including our relationship with time. Our days, and hearts, reorganize to tend to this new, tender life. One day we feel a tinge of panic, and realize we are losing our autonomy. We have hardly any time for ourselves. Listen to that tinge and take it seriously. […]
Imagination and the art of parenting
Our imagination is vital to our ability to parent joyfully. Imagination dies when our lives become routine. It withers when we too often choose comfort over change. It goes undergound when we become trapped in family roles. It goes stale when we set our up lives to avoid surprises, spontaneity and the unforeseen. It freezes […]
The richest inheritance you can give
It’s not wealth, property or an expensive education. The richest inheritance we can offer our child is our joy. It flows from us when we learn to love ourselves and others. It’s our laughter. Our delight. Our curiosity. Our awe. Our gratitude. Our acceptance. Our passion. Our playfulness. Our vitality. It’s the gift of our […]
Every family needs a gardener
Every family is an ecosystem to itself, a vegetable bed set in a larger landscape of great mosaic beauty. This fertile soil in which our children grow is a complex, wondrous, wobbling weave of ancestry, biology, spirit, life stages, genders, roles, grief and losses, professions, passions, dreams, possibilities. It is so vast even in its […]
Crown a King or Queen to ease sibling rivalry
If you have two children or more, you’ll be familiar with siblings fighting over candy, toys, holding your hand, or most anything. It’s a tug of war that can last till morning come. Or more likely, until you simply can’t take it any longer and you either yell enough, or step in to sort out […]
Finding a groove for family chores
Family chores are sometimes a drag, but they don’t have to be. We often handle our daily dose of necessary tasks in a haphazard and often inefficient way. Yet somehow we get it most of it done–washing clothes, dishes, sweeping, paying bills, shopping, walking the dog, repairing, cooking, recycling. Chances are though that someone is […]
Discipline asks that you’re clear on what you value
Discipline is teaching, and teaching works best when there’s a relationship of trust with your child. We build trustful relationships over time. It requires consistency and clarity and good role modelling. If like many parents you’re unsure how to discipline your child, start by getting clear on what your core values are. Your values are […]
The parental paradox of discipline
We all want to know how to discipline our child. Sometimes this is another way of controlling our child. But discipline at heart means to teach. Our child is our disciple, a follower. To really know something, teach it. Our child is our teacher. How we teach determines what we learn. In other words, when […]
The death of a snake
We were playing, a few fathers and our boys, in the newly cut hay meadow when a child found a dead snake. The adder’s body had been split in half by the angle mower. We soon found more animals strewn across the field–voles, shrew, mice, slow worms, smooth snakes. Death inevitably comes into our children’s […]
Your child is raising you too
To parent is a verb, something we do to or with our child. There’s no single verb that I know of that describes what our child does to us. And yet, they raise us too, for a very simple reason–we love them and they love us. This reciprocal relationship shapes everyone involved, not just our […]
What grows up must grow down
The autumn rains, the growing reach of the night, the early morning mists all say it’s time to harvest now. The seeds I planted in early spring have become cabbages the size of UFOs and onions with leaves like spears. And as I start gently to pull them from the soil, their roots cling firmly […]