Conscious parenting requires adult caregivers to examine all
aspects of themselves--their beliefs, their unconscious motivations, their own
childhood experiences involving unidentified and unhealed developmental
trauma--and understand how these things affect the way they parent and care for
children. In our framework, it also involves understanding of the power of
intergenerational parenting patterns and how they serve as a conduit for
transmitting both helpful and hurtful relational experiences.
Parents are often surprised when they hear themselves
saying the same phrases to their children that were spoken to them by their
parents. Even more surprising to parents are the irrational and illogical
things they do to their children that traumatize them through emotional,
psychological and physically abusive action.
From a consciousness perspective, children are born
with the capacity for experiencing a expansive range of awareness. Rather than
being “lumps of unmolded clay” as once believed, they are acutely sensitive to
the world around them. Their highly tuned sensory systems respond energetically
to everything they encounter, including experiences involving unconditional
love and conflict. Instinctively they open and receive love energy and close when
they encounter conflict or other disharmonies.
This is even true during their prenatal development, as
pre- and perinatal psychologists such as Thomas Verny and David Chamberlain
have discovered and written about. Newborns are completely sentient—able to
feel emotions, to perceive reality, and completely conscious and able to
remember experiences. They arrive with the capacity for experiencing their own
wholeness and soak up all to which they are exposed.
The challenge as a conscious parent is regarding children as “flowers” that are in the process of “unfolding” their innate potential, and avoiding impulses to unduly shape the process of their “blooming” with distorted intergenerational beliefs and dysfunctional behavior patterns. The most effective way we know to do this is by continually asking ourselves “why” we are doing a certain thing, while simultaneously assuming that our motives contain both distorted intergenerational beliefs and dysfunctional behavior patterns.
While this sounds rather simple, we know very well that it is not. It has taken us many years of self-reflection and personal work on ourselves to become self-conscious. Our numerous books, which are available in our Store, contain much of our personal journeys of self-discovery.
We encourage you to read them, as they contain numerous
self-inventories and assessments to help you determine where you are in your
own journey and to show you where to work on yourself.
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