I’m passionate about parenting philosophy.
But I’m not a parent (yet)!
Now, many parents feel troubled when they hear me express my passion for parenting philosophy, as notions sprout to mind like “well, theory isn’t the same of practice,” or even “you aren’t allowed an opinion on parenting, unless you’re a parent!”
I get it.
But part of me does feel sad in response to these notions, as I have needs for visibility, self-expression, respect, and inclusion. This part of me also knows that it’s a fallacious ad hominem to discount a perspective based on whether or not he has direct experience in a given domain. While experience does impact one’s perspective, from a logic standpoint, what matters are the ideas, not who said them! (“Just pretend you are reading what I am saying on a random piece of paper you found, with no attributed author,” I’m tempted to retort).
And, could it not be the case that a non-parent has an especially helpful viewpoint, a distinct clarity that comes from the purity of philosophical thinking, uninhibited by the messiness of real life situations?
Yet, all-in-all, I’m not really bothered. I feel confident in my perspective, while also holding healthy humility for what I don’t know.
I also recall the saying, “for every 1 hour parenting, a parent needs 2 hours of empathy.”
I know that any objection from a parent to my perspective is coming from a need, usually a need to be seen, and for shared understanding. I absolutely can see how as a non-parent, I don’t yet truly know what it’s like to raise a little person! I’m certain there is tacit knowledge I can never access until that experience unfolds!
So, it makes sense if that parent might be closed to hearing my perspective. She or he may want to relate with only people who “get it” and can relate with the day-to-day challenge of well, being a parent.
I understand.
And yet…., if you’re a parent reading this, I invite you to open your heart and mind to me.
I do care about children and parenting philosophy more than anything in the world. For what it’s worth, I’ve invested thousands of hours reading and listening to podcasts on this precious topic. And above all, I’ve invested thousands of hours into my own personal development, re-parenting the child within me.
So if you’ve made it this far, thanks for your openness. Here are 7 tips for consciously and healthfully raising a child.
1) Heal
The fundamentally highest value action you can take to healthfully raise your child? Take time to heal your own inner child.
The relationship you have with your own inner child will directly and consistently impact the way you interface with the living and breathing small human you see in front of you.
In short, seek to heal your triggers.
To prevent your child from pressing your buttons, deactivate the buttons.
Begin to treat your inner child with the unconditional love, nurturing, acceptance, curiosity and compassion that you truly needed, but didn’t fully get when you were young.
Nearly all parenting frustration stems from win-lose battles and conflicts between parent and child. This is founded on a premise that the parent is “in charge” or even “owns” the child. The unchecked assumption is that it’s the parent’s role to “get” the child to do or not do certain things, and that top-down based tactics of demanding, yelling, punishing, rewarding, threatening, and so forth.
Where did this premise and assumption come from?
Well, from how you (we) were raised as a child!
It’s unconsciously passing on the patterns and principles that you absorbed as a young boy or girl.
Those top-down patterns didn’t meet your needs for respect, choice, empathy, and many other needs.
Win-lose battles need not exist. We can create win-win.
But the first step is to re-parent the child inside of you. Ways to do this include:
IFS Therapy
Belief work
Psychedelic-assisted therapy
Journaling
Sentence completion exercises
Placing a photo of your child self as your wallpaper
Visualizations/meditations
Building a vocabulary of feelings/needs to bring empathy to the child self
However you start on your healing path, what matters is reconnecting to the innocent, innocuous, curious, and wholesome child within you.
That child is worth your attention.
“When parents don’t take responsibility for their own unfinished business, they miss an opportunity not only to become better parents but also to continue their own development. People who remain in the dark about the origins of their behaviors and intense emotional responses are unaware of their unresolved issues and the parental ambivalence they create.”
Dan Siegel
2) Love unconditionally
We grow up in a punishment-reward, carrots-and-sticks model in both conventional parenting practice and conventing schooling practice.
It’s the water in which we swim.
Regardless of whether it “works,” (produce a desired end in short term), it essentially sends the implicit message to the child:
“do/don’t do this, or else”
“do/don’t do this, or else I will withdraw love from you.”
Love withdrawal at best pulls back via a covert facial expression and at worst removes loves via overt abuse.
What the child needs, is unconditonal love.
Unconditional love does not mean sacrificing boundaries, or liking a particular behavior (e.g. throwing a toy across the room at the child’s sister). It does mean continually demonstrating, embodying, and communicating that your love is constant and inextinguishable, even if certain conflicts or problems arise.
“How many times do children hear these clichés of parenthood? ‘Don’t be selfish.’ ‘Share.’ ‘Be Nice. ‘Be Polite.’ ‘Be Considerate.’ ‘Think of others.’ ‘Don’t push.’ And so on and so on and so on. All of these injunctions to children are mere orders, empty of meaning, thought or reasoning. The silent expression at the end of all of these orders to children is ‘because I’m telling you to.'”
Stefan Molyneux
3) Create win-win solutions
It’s easy to default to a win-lose approach to solving-problems.
Example, your 12-year old starts to head out of the house for the day to hang with friends, and it’s pretty cold outside. You’re worried she will catch a cold or be super uncomfortable, without her coat.
So you say, “I’m worried you’ll catch a cold, I’d like you to wear a coat.”
A reasonable desire.
But she responds, “I don’t want to wear a coat. My coat is ugly and cumbersome.”
In the traditional win-lose model, you might insist and say, “Well, I won’t let you outside without a coat!”
Then your daughter either obeys, or she rebels.
She gives in, and you win. Or, you back off, and she wins.
An autonomy war ensues.
Resentment is likely built, even if a small amount.
But, what if there is another way? Is win-win possible?
Yes. With feelings and needs communication, and creative problem-solving.
This means actively listening, acknowledging the daughter’s needs for choice, freedom, and ease, then vulnerably sharing your own needs for reassurance that she will be safe and healthy outside. When both parties have their needs on the table and there is a sense of respect for those needs, then you can enter creative problem solving mode.
(Of course, it’s also worth self-reflecting and checking your premise with yourself about whether it’s truly that cold out, and if you are projecting your own fear in any way – e.g. you’re impulsively wanting her to wear a coat because that’s what your parent did when you were a kid. And, it might be an option to allow her to make her own choice, and to experience any negative consequence — feeling cold — so she can learn cause-effect on her own. But for now, let’s assume it’s indeed a reasonable and rational request for your daughter to wear the coat).
You could ask your daughter, “what suggestions/solutions do you have where we can both get our needs met?” The idea here is to brainstorm solutions first, then pick 1 that truly works for everyone. Possible solutions she/you might come up with:
– daughter agrees to carry the coat with her, but she gets to decide if wants to actually wear it
– she wears a light jacket instead of heavy coat
– she goes without the coat but will call you on her phone if she ends up needing it, and you drive to bring it to her
There could be any number of solutions presented, that you wouldn’t have thought of without pausing to get creative. Once you have a list, there is likely to be at least one solution that is a true “win” for each party.
It’s helpful to remember that this solution-oriented tip is more of an “on the go” technique. If there is not a foundation of secure attachment, mutual love and respect, or a resentment-free interpersonal space, then those underlying problems will bubble to the surface in the day-to-day. For long-term healthy relating, those deeper issues will need to be addressed over time.
“It’s not our job to toughen our child up to face a cruel and heartless world. It’s our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.“
L.R. Knost
4) Unschool
The K-12 school experience is 15,000 hour of top-down, coercive learning. It is founded on:
-compulsory attendance laws
-compulsory taxation
-age segregation
-one-size-fits-all curriculum
-punishment and reward
-obedience and conformity
-complete distrust of the child’s ability to learn on his or her own
And a myriad of other problems. See John Taylor Gatto and Rebel Educator for more.
Instead, you can unschool or home-educate your child. There are also more and more emerging options like microschooling, Sudbury Valley, Acton Academy, and more.
Of course what matters most is including the child in the decision making process, so she or he can engage in the learning process from the inside out. The key is to see education not as the filling of a vessel, but as the kindling of a flame.
Children naturally love learning. You can simply get out of the way and let them follow their curiosity.
“Wherever I go in the United States these days I hear of something called the crisis of discipline, how children are not motivated, how they resist learning. That is nonsense, of course. Children resist teaching, as they should, but nobody resists learning.”
John Taylor Gatto
5) Be present
Let go of trying to “shape” your child into becoming a certain thing or a certain way. What matters is investing caring time, energy, and attention with your child.
Just be truly present.
(Put the phone away).
You won’t get to your deathbed wishing you had answered more emails. You might wish you had spent more quality time with your child.
So show up and truly be involved. Be playful, have fun, and just be there alongside them (honoring their need for occasional alone time as well, of course).
This goes for children of all ages, including teenagers. Teenager will want to spend time with their friends, yes, but especially if you have invested in a secure and healthy relationship from Day 1 (AND you didn’t force them to go to school) they will want to spend time with you as well.
6) Be curious, actively listen, and ask unending questions
The next time your son or daughter says something that you find alarming, choose to respond rather than react.
That means deep listening and abundant curiosity.
“Tell me more” and “what do you mean?” or two of the most powerful phrases known to mankind.
For example, your 6-year old tells you that his friend Luke is bothering him to borrow his toys. He exclaims, “I never want to see him every again! I don’t like him!”
You could react and say, “don’t be ridiculous, you were just having fun with Luke yesterday!” or even, “it’s good to share!”
Those reactive statements not only don’t validate his experience, it also assumes you know what is actually going on.
Instead, ask unending questions until you get to the bottom of it.
“What do you mean….are you feeling annoyed?”
“So you want to play with your toys by yourself?”
“You’re wanting a sense of freedom and choice right now?”
“What don’t you like about Luke exactly?”
Etc.
The point here of course is not to say prescriptive things in any situation, but rather to lead with curiosity as a default philosophy.
“A person’s a person, no matter how small.”
Dr. Seuss
7) Skip both rewards and punishment
Hot take: the only reason you want to use rewards and punishment with your children is because you received rewards and punishment when you were a child.
So check your impulse and consider, are there better ways to interact with my children?
Even just asking the question is powerful….
Both rewards and punishment are forms of conditional love, fostering potential approval addiction or fear-based psychology.
That’s reason enough to avoid them. Regardless if any reward/punishment “works” in the short term, do you want your child grow up and do things primarily for money, approval, validation, or avoiding ridicule, pain, or disapproval?
What about a new way of being for humans? One based on intrinsic motivation, trust, respect, and freedom?
It’s totally possible, if we give ourselves permission to entertain, integrate, and apply a fresh and healthy philosophy.
“If I offered you a thousand dollars to take off your shoes, you’d very likely accept–and then I could triumphantly announce that ‘rewards work.’ But as with punishments, they can never help someone develop a *commitment* to a task or action, a reason to keep doing it when there’s no longer a payoff.”
Alfie Kohn
Breaking the Cycle and Birthing New Ways of Being
This topic fires me up because the “do this because I said so” psychology is the root of violence and coercion in the world.
It is the major root of war, corruption, police brutality, prison systems, depression/anxiety, and more, all of which traces back to top-down conventional parenting/schooling approaches.
I believe in a new world of wholeness and unconditional love from the bottom up and inside out, in which children blossom to become fully alive, creative, empowered, and collaborative, which for humans births new spontaneous systems of healthy, consensual experience.
All of this entails raising our consciousness to
A) connect with our own inner child and lovingly re-parent him or her and
B) extending the same to our own children.
This means breaking the cycle of conditioning that is passed down generation to generation.
This is a tall order, but an incredible opportunity as well!
Yet we (including myself when I have children) will make errors along the way. So, kindly accepting ourselves and empathizing with ourselves during the journey is also key, recognizing that we are always seeking to get our needs met. Curiosity, compassion, courage, and creativity become our friends as we grow. (And don’t forget making time for self-care).
At the same time, I invite you to be fully honest with how you are showing up as a parent. How can you begin to make 1% shifts each day so you can nurture the healthiest of relationships with your child?
It may take new effort. But when you’re 87-years old and looking back at it all, you’ll thank yourself.
Thanks for reading this. I appreciate you.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Gandhi (attributed)
