Empowered Parents

I find it sadly interesting that when preparing for their babies' arrival, most parents take some sort of birthing class to prepare for bringing their little one into the world, and I've never heard of any preparatory class for what to do when the baby arrives. And yet the birth takes a day or two, and the parental life of the child takes about twenty years.

I believe that aside from people who have deep-seeded issues stemming from childhood or trauma, and aside from the "superparents" who read and discuss every parenting book on the market, the majority of new parents enter into the most life-changing and vitally important phase of life and "wing it," working incredibly hard, but mostly reacting and responding to what life and their baby brings them.

The greatest influence over what type of parents we become is how we ourselves were parented. Therefore, the average parent reacts to the demands of parenting in one of two ways: 1) doing what their parents did. (Indeed, most of us find ourselves surprised to hear our parents words streaming out of our mouths when we swore we never would say them!) and 2) adamantly refusing to parent the way their parents did, thereby swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction, taking an approach that is either too lenient, too strict, or too reactive to certain situations.

I am working on a curriculum for a two to three-hour class that will help new parents transcend this adequate-but-not-optimal approach to parenting by raising questions and examing key issues that will help them create their own desired parenting style well before their baby arrives, a style that is aligned with their deepest core values and that responds actively to today's parenting challenges. Once we have co-created this parenting style, I offer scenarios for the parents to discuss, so that before those typical challenges arrive, they have already envisioned how to respond to situations in ways that align with their greatest vision. No challenge seems insurmountable when one has visualized and practiced the scenario many times before.

When parents define their values and consciously choose to make parenting decisions that stem from those values, then rather than reacting, they are consciously, intentionally parenting. This leads to less inner conflict, more self-assuredness, and more peace in the home.