Something I talk about with my clients is having an expansive view of time in parenting. Sometimes something needs to change in the parent child dynamic but does it need to be changed with urgency, panic and fear? Or can we attend to it gently, softly with awareness instead of alertness?

Our culture sells us a lot of parenting approaches for short term fixes (Arbitrary Consequences/ Reward charts/ Time Outs) but often these result in long term pain to the relationship. There is also a lot in our culture about “fixing children” as if the child is “a problem” and much less about tending to and supporting parents. 

Deep lasting change in parenting takes time. I love the phrase “nudging” and in my coaching I encourage people to do daily nudges towards a change because that’s how lasting change works. That’s why I love working with clients for 12 weeks. Conscious Parenting is subtle tender work and it's not something that can ever be a quick fix by force.

Often things shift dramatically when the parent realises it's not the child who needs to change/ sort out their attitude but instead it's the parent who needs to change so that they can have a better relationship with their child. These changes can happen with gentleness and kindness to ourselves and our children.

3 Questions to think about Parenting For the Long Term

• When my child is 20 what do I want the relationship to be like with my child?

• When my child is 30 what do I want them to say/ remember about their childhood?

• Am I headed there?

Deconditioning ourselves from Urgency Culture

Urgency culture... it's just exhausting but it's everywhere and it's rooted in the idea of not enoughness.

Unfortunately it also breeds not enoughness too. This idea we need to be constantly doing in order to be worthy.

But the truth is you were born worthy and good enough without having to do a thing. To feel this is to lean into trust and from trust we can start to slow down.

In order to start to move away from urgency culture we need to lean into trust. Urgency culture is all about scarcity "not enough, not good enough, not fast enough, not impressive enought". An abundant mindset starts from the point of "already enough" but as most of us haven't been brought up this way it's going to take some practice. In my coaching that's what we work a lot on: moving from survival and scarcity to abundance and trust.

Being Stuck In High Alert

In my early parenting I was definitely stuck in high alert. I had full on "Nap high alert", I was so sleep deprived that my sons naps took on this overblown significance..." if he didn't nap in the right window I wouldn't get sleep later" etc... and whilst there may have been some truth to this, my hyper alertness to his naps was hardly conducive to creating a relaxing environment for him to sleep.

What I've learnt is that High Alert came to keep me safe but... high alert came at a high cost to my nervous system.

Just notice the difference in these two sentences

"I need to be alert all the time to make sure my child is safe"
Vs
"I can be aware and take action when it is necessary"

For me "Alert" is my child like part that doesn't feel safe, it feels manic and fixing whereas the word "Aware" feels much older, slower and wiser.

The fear is that if we are not on high alert we will mess up, perhaps catastrophically... but that word aware can come in as a buffer, a helping friend to soften our high alert.