by Shonnie | Nov 30, 2012 | Common Challenges, Mindfulness, Parenting Practice
Welcome to the November 2012 Authentic Parenting Blog Carnival: Gratitude and Traditions This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Authentic Parenting Blog Carnival hosted by Authentic Parenting and Living Peacefully with Children. This month our participants have written about gratitude and traditions by sharing what they are grateful for, how they share gratitude with their children, or about traditions they have with their families. The Authentic Parenting Blog Carnival will be taking a break in December, but we hope you will join us for the great line up of themes we have for 2013! *** “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” ~ Meister Eckhart Religious or not, all parents pray in some way or another. We yearn for our children to be happy and healthy. We hope that the ills they bear in life will be minor and easy to recover from. We envision their living well and being fulfilled in their lives. We also wish to be parents who help rather than hinder, love rather than limit, and nurture rather than neglect the children we have to care for. And we say “thank you,” countless times for all the richness and blessings we and our children experience in the course of our lives. What we may find hard or confusing to do is to give thanks for the pain, trials, and tribulations of parenting (for ourselves and for our children). We want to praise the light and celebrate the victories. We find it natural to curse the darkness and regret the losses. But what if we...
by Shonnie | Oct 9, 2012 | Mindfulness, Parenting Practice, Self-mastery, The Needs of Children
Welcome to the October 2012 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Instilling a Healthy Self-Image This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month our participants have shared confessions, wisdom, and goals for helping children love who they are. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants. *** “Can you do something so her upper lip will cover more of her gums when she smiles?” my mom asked the orthodontist, not realizing how this question would stick with me for decades. As I sit for a professional photographer my stepdad laughed while calling, “Don’t blink!,” making me even more nervous than I already was in the brightly lit studio. My parents were good people who loved me and were proud of me, yet they unconsciously did things that chipped away at my self-esteem. Like most parents of their era and many parents even today, I think they didn’t realize how great their impact was on how I felt about myself. Instead of feeling comfortable in my own skin, I often looked outside myself for acceptance, relying on others’ praise to feel worthy, loveable, and even normal. Conversely, when others didn’t compliment me or made critical remarks, I withered and doubted myself because I gave their viewpoints so much weight. And I worked diligently to be flawless (at least by the standards my family valued) so that even when I believed myself flawed inside, the outside world would see only a smart, talented, composed, popular, and “in” girl. My parents...
by Shonnie | Oct 5, 2012 | Common Challenges, Mindfulness, The Needs of Children
Our families are sacred. While the relationships among us may get sticky or even occasionally sour, there is still a sacred sweetness among us whether our bonds be of blood or of choice. Part of our duty as parents is to help protect the sacredness within our immediate family, sheltering it from the outside winds that have no reverence for what we’ve created. I write this as an entreaty to all parents — mothers and fathers everywhere — to get serious about giving your family a place of honor in this world and to not let family become just one other part of your lives like work, hobbies, or volunteering. Our culture doesn’t want you to do this. If family is held as sacred like the Sabbath once was, then what happens to work, to commerce, to productivity, to consumption, to profit? American society has no love of family despite plenty who will claim “family values” are important. The law allows parents to take 12-weeks of unpaid job-protected leave upon the birth/adoption of a child which, while better than no leave, basically says that children are worth 3 months of devoted attention and no more. Our employers, our government, our culture places no importance on family so that is up to us. More specifically it’s up to us as parents with sufficient financial means to reclaim the sacredness of family. What does it mean to hold family as sacred? Do an internet search on “family as sacred” and though google can find 141 million results, the first five pages are mostly about religious institutions or rituals or are from...
by Shonnie | Sep 21, 2012 | Mindfulness, Self-mastery, The Needs of Children
Recently a client mentioned being able to see herself taking baby steps towards her goals, the implication being that these would be small actions. Hearing her words I saw my newly walking baby in my mind’s eye. Her “baby steps” were bold, trusting, joyful, and graceful (for someone completely new to bipedal locomotion) — gigantic from a spiritual perspective if relatively small when viewed on a physical scale. It was the first time I’d ever considered that the way we use the term “baby steps” was completely wrong — baby steps are HUGE and BOLD and we most of us could use more of this baby step energy in our lives. How babies make bold steps (and how we can emulate them) They trust themselves and the universe. Sure they are new to walking (or feeding themselves, or tying their shoes) but they don’t fear failure because they don’t know what failure is. They fall and use that experience to refine their walking (they don’t judge themselves as clumsy or curse the floor). They are guided by passion, curiosity, and interest. They don’t do something with baby steps because they “have to,” they do it because they can’t not do it. Their excitement to explore the world around them compels them to act. They pay attention. Our little ones don’t sleep walk though life like we often do. They notice details about the world around them — “Birdie singing, mama.” Or “See this, daddy?” (as she places a piece of gravel in your hand) — and thus are sparked to investigate or examine further what they’ve discovered. They crave...
by Shonnie | Aug 20, 2012 | Mindfulness, Parenting Practice, The Needs of Children
“Your children are genius creators who have just arrived from Nonphysical, who are feeling empowered. And if they would be left to their own devices, they would not go astray. They would maintain worthiness; they would maintain their feeling of Well-Being. They would thrive, unless it was taught otherwise to them. In other words, if others don’t do something to change their vibration, they are in a vibration of thriving.” ~ Abraham One of our most profound opportunities as parents is to support our children in becoming themselves. Not merely the son or daughter mom or dad thinks they should be or the person grandma/uncle/teacher/preacher would like to have them become, but who they were meant to be. The seed is there from conception, ready to become its full embodiment. It needs not our instructions on how to grow, nor our judgement of its form. In fact, like the quote from Abraham above notes, these inputs will restrict our child’s flowering rather than fostering this unfolding. How to help a child blossom If your desire is to support your son or daughter to become the fullest expression of him/herself, here are some ways to succeed. Pay attention to what they are naturally drawn to and encourage their exploration and passion. The video below from human development specialist, Peter L. Benson, has some practical ideas for encouraging children’s spark (Sparks: How Parents Can Help Ignite the Hidden Strengths of Teenagers. One powerful tool to use in knowing our children is listening fully to them, seeking simply to hear them and care about what they’re saying. Give them plenty of free...
by Shonnie | Jul 20, 2012 | Common Challenges, Mindfulness, Self-mastery
Parents truthfully have no knowledge of what our kids should or shouldn’t do. I’m quite certain that most parents would ardently disagree with this statement. And even though I wrote this and wholeheartedly agree with it, I sometimes act as if I do think I know what my daughter should/shouldn’t do. So why, if we parents truly don’t know what our children should do, do we keep up the charade? We believe that parenting is about teaching our children what to do Whether you call it “teaching,” “training,” “guiding,” or “parenting,” most of us see ourselves in the capacity of “wise elder” to our child’s “beginner” status. Unconsciously or consciously we see our children as lacking knowledge of how to behave and we feel compelled to build that knowledge base. There are two problems with this perspective: It casts our children as “less than” rather than whole, worthy, and enough exactly as they are; and it casts us as “better than” rather than simply a child with more enculturation. It ascribes to us a false sense of authority which can shut down our child’s openness to alternative ideas and also put us on a very shaky pedestal of omniscience. What I believe that most parents know is how our culture tells us to behave and how we actually do behave. We’ve assimilated the beliefs of our culture and made up other beliefs out of our own growing up experience. We call it by many names — the “rules,” the “way life works,” the “facts” — but the truth is that our shoulds/shouldn’ts are merely beliefs. “Forgive him, for he...
