A few nights ago I hit my son. Yes this is a big thing for me, cause I practice and preach Conscious Parenting. And for every time that I shout at him, I spend a lot of time processing it. The one thing that triggers me the most is when my son hits me. In that moment I automatically go into an amygdala hijack mode. My thinking brain shuts off completely and I have no control over my reaction. I have been working on this, ever since I first reacted at him that way and it gets better.
One question that I get a lot as a Parent Coach, specially from my family and friends, is that why do we need coaching in the first place. “Doesn’t parenting come to us naturally”?
Donald Winnicott was Britians first medically-trained child psychoanalyst. He believed that the happiness of the human race, depended not so much on external issues, but the way parents bring up their children.
We have evolved a lot as parents with each passing generation, but the real proof is in front of our eyes, the human race, as we see it.
We don’t have to be perfect parents, but even to be ‘good enough’ parents, requires a lot of work
Through my journey of becoming a coach and starting to work with parents, I had to do a lot of this work. In fact I continue to do so. I have realised that we are made to rely a lot on our instincts when it comes to parenting. Actually not a lot. We have been taught to rely completely on our instincts and experience, cause thats what we have seen our parents doing, and almost every parent around us doing. And if you are a new parent, with no older members of the family living with you, then you are relying a 100% on just instincts ( and probably what you read on the internet or insta blogs)
There are so many phases that a developing child goes through, which I have been studying for the last decade now but it still isn’t enough. I can’t even begin to imagine a parent having to understand all of this, while doing everything else and raising a child, but this information is so important to be aware of, before we even attempt to raise a child.
The irony is even if we don’t equip ourselves with this information, that child will still be raised. Just like most of us were raised, and some of us even believe we were raised perfectly. At least I believed that for most of my life, until I had my own child. That is when I started realizing all my shortcomings, my fears, my projections, triggers, and generational traumas that I have been expressing not just with my child, but all my life in all relationships, but was unaware of.
Majority of us continue to live with this ignorance all our lives, even while we raise our children. We find solace in “Ignorance is Bliss”, and the fact that “since I am a good person, I will be a good parent”, and “My kids will turn out just fine. Well I turned out fine!” and once again we repeat the process of raising a new generation that will be projecting their triggers, wounds and generational traumas onto all relationships in their life and further projecting it onto their children’s (i.e your grandchildren’s) lives and this may go on and on for generations to come, until someone decides to get out of that ‘Ignorance is Bliss’ attitude and change things.
Somewhere during my journey of research and studying, I dawned on this fact and I took it upon myself to become not just a conscious parent but also a conscious human being. I further trained under mentors to become a certified coach and start the process of guiding other parents through the same and / or similar journey.
Parenting is actually one of the most important tasks of the human race, cause we are raising the next generation and in many ways deciding how they will react to the world around them.
The truth is we need guidance and information, besides just experience and intuition, whether we would like to believe it or not.
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.png "Dr Bijaya Mishara")
.png "Niladri Sekhar Parial")
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