What is conscious parenting?

This word conscious is a little elusive...

 

So what does conscious mean when we refer to parenting?

  • It means making informed, deliberate, intentional and loving responses to our child(ren) in the heat of the moment.

  • It means taking time for ourself to ensure that we are well cared for, nourished and nurtured to best tend for our offspring.

  • It means rejecting instinctive patterns so that we can be the parent we want to be.

Why is conscious parenting relevant to you?

In our 100 miles-per-hour lives, our bodies and minds are stressed and put under constant pressure. This triggers our survival mode in which learning new skills becomes a challenge at best; at worst it is impossible to implement new strategies.

This is true for all elements of our lives, especially those which we find most emotive. Parenting is one of the most emotive of all and so the most difficult area to avoid slipping into fixed and impulsive reactions.

Through calm, considered and intentional responses, which we have deliberately chosen in advance, we can move towards being the best parent we can be.

This is conscious parenting and it is relevant to you because in raising the future, parents have the most influential role in the world WITHOUT A HANDBOOK.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

— Khalil Gibran