We’ve been working with parents online for over two years now via our Parenting Beyond Punishment Facebook page. We understand the struggles facing parents intimately. And in the face of so many stories of struggle and disconnect we had to learn to take breaks ourselves in order to replenish ourselves so we could continue to give to our growing community.
We’ve reach out to parents who desperately want to parent with love, respect and connection in a number of ways: blog posts, pictures with quotes, individual messaging, book recommendations, status updates, educational articles, etc. And our community continually request online workshops, mp3 recordings, online chat sessions, and many other wonderful ideas that we continue to consider. We’ve discovered that when it comes down to it, parents face a number of obstacles on their parenting journey which we simply can’t help them address through articles, quotes, blog posts and online learning sessions that only address the behaviors of children. Sure, those things help, but there’s more to what’s going on with parents and families than the behavior of children. It really goes so much deeper.
Here are the basic principles parents need to better understand the specific behaviors of their children:
- Children communicate to us through their behavior
- Children’s behavior reflects their needs – when they “mis-behave” it is because they are behaving in ways they “mis-takenly” believe will get those needs met.
- Children are communicating their needs in the only ways they know how.
- Once we meet the needs behind a child’s behavior we can then guide them toward more pro-social ways to communicate with us, and we can help them learn to meet those needs themselves.
The thing is, children aren’t the only ones whose needs aren’t being met
and who are communicating those unmet needs through their behavior.
Many parents feel…
…overwhelmed, unfulfilled and disappointed
…guilty for needing a moment to themselves
…out of control
…disconnected from their children
…feel a sense of connection with their children
So how do we apply our understanding of needs and behaviors to truly empower you as parents?
But here’s the thing…
The hardest thing we have to learn as parents is
it’s no one else’s job to meet our needs.**
So, we need to figure out what it is you as a parent really needs in order to move from a focus on your children’s behaviors to a focus on the child’s unmet needs.
I believe in order to truly parent from a place of love, respect and connection we need to parent from a place of abundance. And to do this we to nurture ourselves in many of the same ways we nurture our children: empathy, compassion, self-care….
To this endeavor, I’ve been gathering data and working with two amazing colleagues to develop an online program to help people who are looking to approach parenting from a intentional place of love, respect and connection.*
We started with a free introductory course, Healing Anger and Guilt Through the Parent-Child Relationship, where we asked people to join our conversation on navigating the personal struggles we face as parents. In addition to addressing some specific behaviors in our question and discussion sessions, we focused on 3 main points:
- Using anger and guilt as an internal GPS
- Ways to reset ourselves when we’re triggered
- The freedom found in collaborating with ourselves and our children
Then we offered The Conscious Parent Online Program – a 6-part workshop series to help parents learn to bring greater ease, freedom, and fulfillment into their parent-child relationship. We created the program with a couple of things in mind: time and money. Family counseling is expensive, and parents are already busy, stressed, and juggling multiple schedules! So we wanted to provide a convenient and affordable service to help parents create a sense of abundance so they can thrive in life and in their parenting.
