While there may be many books out there on parenting, there really isn’t any definitive guide because every baby and child is unique and all parents come with our own unique baggage from childhood and genetics. Becoming a parent is wonderful for stirring up all of those old memories and connections from our own upbringing for us to deal with. For many, childhood can be a time of betrayal and invalidation where our parents were potentially disconnected from their inner worlds of thoughts, feelings, and emotions. As a result, security and trust wasn’t fostered and this bled into our intimate relationships and we swore that it would be different with our kids. Low and behold, life increasingly becomes stressful and hectic, and it’s all too easy to find ourselves in the past patterns that we had with our own parents where we aren’t attuned with our own children. With this in mind, it is becoming increasingly important for us to learn how to attune to our own thoughts, feelings, and emotions, so we can have the ability to do that with our children.
One of the most important gifts a parent can give a child is their presence, validation, and security. When we’re present with our children it lays the path for attunement and resonance. Attunement is when the parent is aware and present to the child’s inner world of thoughts, feelings, and emotions. When attuned, a state of resonance occurs where the child “feels felt”. Think about anytime you felt completely understood. It breeds a sense of safety and when a person feels safe they cultivate the ability to trust.
Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, MD has a great acronym for this:
PART (Presence, Attunement, Resonance, Trust)
He notes that this attunement and resonance builds regulatory circuits in the brain that supports the child’s ability to foster empathic relationships and be resilient in the future.
This is an invaluable gift to give a child.
Easy enough, right?
Um…no. It can enormously challenging at times to be a parent. Author and professional blog writer, Therese Borchard often writes about her struggles being a mom and suffering with depression. As a parent, we are now responsible for a whole host of new responsibilities, trying to do the best we can while feeling guilty that we’re not doing enough. Mindful parenting informs us to first begin to practice PART within ourselves. Sometimes just taking a moment or two to let the dust settle and tune into how we are feeling physically, emotionally, and mentally can be a wonderful gift in helping to cultivate self-attunement and resonance. Through this process we can begin to come down from the chaos in our minds and trust ourselves.
When practicing with yourself, you can begin to do this with your children. If you find that all day you have been frantic running around and not paying attention to your children, rather than riddling yourself with guilt, see if you can recognize that you are now present, let that be, and invite yourself to be present to your child now. If the little one is crying because he skinned his knee, notice your urge to make a happy face or give him a lollipop to ease his woes. See if you can instead validate his feelings, letting him know that his response is appropriate and allow it to come and go. This teaches the child that it’s ok to feel hurt and it’s ok to cry when you get hurt. This earns the child a sense of security within him or herself. This could be more difficult if you have many children and the crying becomes contagious. So when the voices arise that you’re not fit to be a parent, see if you can be aware of that trap, become present and remind yourself that you’re good enough.
We will never be the perfect parents so let go of the burden of that fantasy. However, we can be good enough as the well-known Psychologist Donald Winnicott pointed out. Mindful Parenting is the process of being aware of how you were parented affects your style of parenting and also to make it a practice to be present and attuned to your child’s inner world. If you stray from this, that is perfectly fine, just let it be, and invite yourself now to be with your child.
As soon as you notice yourself drifting, you are present and can shift to tuning into to your child’s inner world. It is that close. Be compassionate to yourself knowing this is a practice.
As always, please share your stories, thoughts, and questions. Your interaction here provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.
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From Psych Central's Dr. Elisha Goldstein:
Mindfulness and Psychotherapy: An Interview with Jack Kornfield | Mindfulness and Psychotherapy (December 4, 2009)
So much is written for parents providing good information that will help them in raising their children. In my book, “The IKE Disease,” I encourge teenagers to do something for themselves. The problems teenagers face are actually symptoms of the real problem which is disobedience to parents. As a high school guidance counselor I can say of all the students I have known, who made it their busniness to disobey their parents, suffered great hardship. For your information, IKE, is initials for the words, “I Know Everything.” Thank you for your interest in my comments.
God Bless!!!
Roger D. Casterline
Dear Dr. Elisha, I stumbled upon this website only a few days ago, and I am impressed. I am still catching up. Curiously, I have found myself avoiding this article even if I have children…I wonder why? Interesting, because obviously my parenting has not been great, or better, it has not met my own expectations, or what and how i want to be as a parent.
I somehow think that all at least mothers tend to know when they are not getting it right. Do you agree?
I was a wonderful other when my kids were babies and very young. Now I have problems for mostly two reasons, I think.
The first one is that I only had sisters and my father was mostly absent, and now I have boys and I am learning about boys along with them. Then, my sisters and I were largely raised on guilt and not with discipline. We were expected to know everything, and although I was a well behaved child and teenager who did not sneak out of the house at night and get pregnant, it felt like a great burden to always having to be sensitive at all times to …anyway. So, I am not good at setting limits and discipline.
The other is, that for the past many years, I have had either trauma and/or physical illness one after another, as well as PTSD.
I actually think that what was more traumatic than most anything to me was watching myself through the eyes of my kids and imagining how they would find me dead one morning…and just, watching myself not being able to feel them as much as I would like, or be in tune with then. The best thing was, or the greatest gift was, that my younger son’s(13) father was such a wonderful father for all this time and even before and still. (We never married and I never pressured him in any way, and the more I appreciate him and the more I thank him, and the more I encourage him to take breaks, the more he does.)
My point to you is, that your articles are really very wonderful and they stick out here on the internet. usually, i am totally bored and disappointed with most of what I read. I also feel with you like you are really there. So, thanks, kat
PS: I also appreciate that you make spelling mistakes! makes you more real.
Thank you Kat for your words…
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