Parenting  – Aspects of mindful parenting

The task of parenting is one of the most challenging,stressful, demanding, and rewarding jobs on the planet. There is no instruction manual on “how to parent,” and all of the popular guidebooks mostly deal with specific behavioral challenges that children present to adults. Parenting is a subjective activity that is influenced by so many internal and external factors that oftentimes we do not have time or extra energy to consciously examine how we respond to children. Day after day our relationship with our children can become an “autopilot relationship,”where we merely react to external circumstances that are out of our control. We need to understand how to be ourselves with clarity and intention before we tackle all of the “doing” of parenting.

Here  key aspects of mindful parenting, which deserve close scrutiny from all people who work or spend time with children. This is only a brief introduction to many important topics that dominate the parenting landscape.

Discipline Begins with Adults, then Children

A few parenting books have recently been advocating a radical notion: Instead of focusing on what particular behavior you want your child to do or not do, you change your focus to your own self control.Parents often react to children habitually as opposed to responding mindfully  “loving yourself first is the only true way to be scream free because it is the only way to truly benefit your children without burdening them with the need to benefit you”

Becky A. Bailey in her book Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline,writes “It is being aware of your own thoughts and feelings. By having this awareness,you become the director of your behavior. Lack of self-control turns your life over to people, events,and things as you careen through life on remote control, either unconscious of yourself or focused solely on what other people are thinking and feeling.

Parents need to realize that you can control how you react or respond to events much more easily than you can try to change how things or events happen to you. You can consciously decide how to be in a particular situation rather than simply repeating habitual actions over and over again.

Parent Talk: Your Words are Important

Language and how we communicate to our children directly impact a child’s self-esteem and also model the values that we act on. Recent research has also found that our language fundamentally affects how a child’s mind develops and grows.Recent research has also found that our language fundamentally affects how a child’s mind develops and grows. Allan Schore’s book Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development demonstrates that when a toddler hears the words “no” or “don’t” (which is on average every nine minutes of waking life!) and sees the corresponding shaming look by parents, it brings “the shock of threat, interrupts the will to explore and learn, and produces a cascade of negative hormonal-neural reactions in the child. Shore then describes at length the child’s depressive state brought about as a result of these episodes of shame stress”

Move Beyond Punishment-and-Reward Systems of Parenting

Punishments and rewards go together as a dubious, naively dualistic approach to parenting skills. People may talk about unconditional love and acceptance,but that is not what children see. Children see our punishments and rewards, our comparisons,judgments and contents . . . so early is our identification with external values that few ever discover or identify their authentic nature, their true self-worth” . Many parents are just lazy and rely on unexamined habits in using such evaluative praise as “Good job. Parents need to exert the extra effort and attention to describe what is being praised, or to make appreciative comments.

Children Need a Showering of Unconditional Loving Guidance

Children need to be loved unconditionally — that is a love beyond whatever mistakes, whatever parental expectations may get in the way. Our kids do not have to earn our love by the various methodologies we employ to seek control of their lives. Often there is confusion among parents that responsibility for children involves various punishment and reward systems of controlling behavior, rather than setting a priority to be responsible to our children by loving them unconditionally