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No, Mom, I just don’t want to!” my independent daughter argued. “I shouldn’t have to go to your friend’s boring event.” I knew Maia had no interest in what I had planned for our afternoon, but I wanted her to come anyway to keep me company. Besides, I reasoned, attending such events was “good for her.”
She reacted as only preteens can, with just the right mix of indignation, insistence, and cheekiness. She turned her back on me, walked into her room, and shut her door.
I stood there with my mouth wide open. Having raised her to be independent, a part of me had to admire her assertiveness. But then there was that other part of me that felt upset that she would talk to me in such a way. “She should, just once in a while, do as she was told,” I could hear a voice in my head say.
You can guess which side of this argument won out, and before I knew it, I stormed into her room. “You will not speak to me in that tone of voice,” I announced loudly. “You will not disrespect me. You will apologize and you will attend the event.” With this, I turned my back on her, in much the way she had done to me only moments before, slamming the door behind me as I hurried out of her room.
“Ha,” I told myself proudly, “that will show her! No way am I going to have a disrespectful brat growing up in my house. She needs to do as I say, no matter what.”
It wasn’t the first verbal scuffle my daughter and I had gotten into lately. When she turned twelve, she found herself experiencing a maelstrom of emotions that were difficult for her to understand. Like most mothers of girls this age, I frequently forgot to relate to her in a calm and caring manner, which is what preteens need, and became caught up in a tidal wave of emotion myself.
On this occasion, the cause of our squabble clearly lay not with Maia but with me. Later that day, after I had calmed down, I snuggled with her for a postmortem of this blowup. As we discussed how we tended to trigger each other, I confessed apologetically, “I should have known better than to push you in such a way, since I’m your mom and the adult.”
With an uncanny clarity, her eyes looked directly into my own, and she responded, “Why, Mom? I shouldn’t have argued in that rude way. I should’ve known better too! I’m twelve!”
It’s hard to admit, but a part of me was actually relieved to hear that she felt just as bad as I did. This part of me even took secret pleasure that I wasn’t the only one who had lost it, but that she too was guilty.
It was then that I became acutely aware of how there are two contradictory sides of myself—the one side that was in touch with Maia’s inherent power and was deeply connected to her, and the other side that reacted to her in such a blind and unthinking way, creating antipathy and disconnection. One of these, I realized, was how I really felt, whereas the other was my irrational side—or what I often refer to as my “ego.”
Once I realized that the voice in my head telling me that Maia should “do as she was told” was my ego, not my real self, I stopped listening to it. “You’ve had enough time telling me what to do today,” I whispered.
As I quieted down and found myself back in my right mind, I was at last able to admit that the whole ugly episode had been caused by my ego. When I’m being true to myself as a caring parent, I would never compel my daughter to attend an event of the kind I had tried to force on her if she didn’t wish to. I was doing it purely for selfish reasons and to exert control over my daughter.
Over the years, I have come to understand that my ego, which often takes the form of a controlling, demanding, angry voice in my head, isn’t who I really am. It isn’t who any of us actually is. Rather, it’s just a habit of reacting that leaps to life when triggered—an emotionally charged aspect of us that we can tame once we become aware of it.
The better we learn to tame our ego—to quiet its often contradictory and negative self-talk that stirs up so many irrational emotions—the more capable we become of relating to each other from our authentic self. This self is our essence, and who we really are. It is always present deep within us, though much of the time it is drowned out by the ego’s constant chatter and emotional reactions. A client of mine once asked, “Are you saying that the ego, our blindly reactive side, this voice in the head, isn’t actually who we are?” Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. As I explained in my first book, The Conscious Parent :
I see the ego as more like a picture of ourselves we carry around in our head—a picture we hold of ourselves that may be far from who we are in our essential being. All of us grow up with such an image of ourselves. This self-image begins to form when we are young, based largely on our interactions with others.
“Ego” as I’m using the term is an artificial sense of ourselves. It’s an idea we have about ourselves based mostly on other people’s opinions. It’s the person we have come to believe we are and think of ourselves as. This self-image is layered over who we truly are in our essence. Once our self-image has formed in childhood, we tend to hold on to it for dear life.
The key to conscious parenting is to become aware of our ego, this persistent voice in our head, and its false ways. To parent well, it is imperative that we realize the ego isn’t who we are . Then, as we learn to identify its voice and its antics, we won’t blindly react to our children, which is what the ego wants us to do.
The reason this voice in our head causes us to be reactive is that it is rooted in fear. If you listen to the countless things that voice in your head tells you about your children, you’ll discover that they mostly spring from fear. Whether you have inflated, grandiose ideas of your children and what they will accomplish in life, or whether you are frightened for them or disappointed in them, all of this ultimately is rooted in fear.
For instance, you want your children to be successful in life. But why is this so important to you? If you look closely enough, you’ll see that it’s because you see the world as a rather frightening, dog-eat-dog place and you’re concerned for your children’s future. Or you want your children to be admired and gifted in one or more ways. But what’s behind this desire? Is it simply an appreciation of your children’s gifts? Or is it the fear that they might not fit in, perhaps even turning out to be quite ordinary and, in society’s eyes, not amounting to much?
I propose throughout this book that most of the problems we experience in raising children stem from fear, which is a characteristic of the ego. Our fearfulness is extremely detrimental to our children and ultimately the cause of much of their undesirable behavior. At the same time, I will show that this fear is baseless, and that far from needing to be afraid, we ought to realize that we have every reason to believe in our children and trust in their future because we live in a universe that is intelligent in its purpose, co-creating life’s circumstances with us, each circumstance designed for our growth and expansion. Of course, you might argue that some circumstances and people are just pure evil. Instead of having this unidimensional perspective that breeds only fear and distrust, I prefer to understand these human forces in more psychological nuances, so that instead of just being against another, we are brought to a greater understanding of their true nature and, through this, of our own.
Good and evil have existed through the eons, pushing us to find the strength within ourselves to overcome tragedy. There is no logical explanation for why violence exists, except that it emerges from a childhood brutally brainwashed out of its connection to the heart. Such blind ignorance has existed throughout time, which is all the more reason why we need to parent consciously. Children learn about blind reactivity in their homes, which causes them to unleash this in society. It is therefore the task of a parent to tame the reactive elements in a home, paving the path for a more conscious relationship with oneself and the world.
Only when we divorce the blind reactivity of our parental ego can we teach our children to create harmony wherever they are. The path to a peaceful world begins with a childhood that’s resplendent with a sense of worth and the freedom to be true to ourselves.
How did our ego develop? Although it often represents itself violently—against either the self or others—it really develops out of a quiet desperation of spirit. It develops out of a need to protect ourselves from the unconscious elements in our upbringing. We were all raised with a plethora of “shoulds,” and a host of dogmatic impositions on how to be that we began to mistake for our authentic self. So, for example, if we were teased by our parents or siblings for crying easily when we were young, it’s quite possible that we developed the persona of a stoic, unemotional person. While our feeling self was true to our authentic nature, our stoicism is the ego’s veneer, which we created when still young in order to protect ourselves from the jabs and jeers of our loved ones. Or perhaps we were raised by parents who were simply unable to be there for us as we needed them to, out of their own inner chaos, hurts, and wounds, which led us to develop a persona of compliance or rebellion, where we believed we needed to be perfect or to act out in order to gain our parents’ attention. In my years as a therapist I have witnessed countless instances where children were forced to wear robes of compliance or defiance, not because this was who they inherently were but because they were forced into these roles by their upbringing. Most of us had to develop false ways to cope with our childhood realities, ways that started out as protecting us from the pain of parental rejection but ultimately became the chains that kept us bound to them even more.
Because the ego formed so long ago, back when we were too young to know it was even happening, we’re so accustomed to thinking of this voice in our head as our identity that we don’t stop to realize it isn’t how we really think and feel at all, but instead is a false persona we developed to survive in our world. It’s from this false mind-set, which is fearfully focused on survival, that we do most of our parenting. It is this—our false self—that creates the first seeds of disconnect with our children. It takes us away from what is to the what if or what should be. We veer away from our children’s natural way of being and impose our conditioning, beliefs, and fears on them instead. The further we veer from who it is our children authentically are, the more we disown their true spirit. Our disavowal of who they are is the ultimate act of betrayal toward them, for they wonder, “Why is my mother not able to see me for who I am? Is this because I am bad?” or “Why is my father shaming my natural ways? This must be because I am unworthy!”
I experience countless moments in my own parenting when what I truly feel toward my daughter is so easily eclipsed by my ego’s reactivity. Instead of relating to her in the way she needs, I find myself engaging in all sorts of mental scripts about her that often have nothing to do with the present moment.
For example, the other day when she asked me to give her privacy, I found myself being pulled by the voice in my head telling me I was being rejected. This turned out to be nothing more than my ego. “Why doesn’t she need me?” the voice in my head demanded. “Doesn’t she want my wisdom and presence?” Instead of seeing my daughter’s plea for privacy as a healthy and natural desire for time alone, I got lost in the story of rejection the voice in my head was telling me.
When we get caught up in the ego like this, we can no longer really be there for our children. Our real self, which is the only part of us that knows how to be present with another person, has been hijacked by our ego. This false sense of ourselves naturally leads us to lose sight of who our children are, forcing them to develop a false sense of themselves just to survive around us. Now they too are plagued with an ego!
This is also where having a child can be immensely helpful for our own growth. A child has the ability to bring to our attention just how unconscious much of our parenting is. This is exactly what my daughter does for me. If we are willing to see it, we begin to recognize the huge difference between the thoughts and emotions we so easily get tangled up in, that basically emanate from our own sense of helplessness and rejection, causing us to react in all sorts of ways—yelling out orders, dishing out time-outs, administering “discipline” we haven’t honestly thought through—and how we truly feel about our child’s behavior or a situation that has arisen.
Becoming aware of this raging mental and emotional activity of the ego enables us to separate it from who we are. This is essential if we are to parent consciously. Once we are aware of how our ego subverts our ability to be present, we are in a position to consider what a truly appropriate response might be to a particular behavior or circumstance, approached not from a place of fear but instead from a place of the greatest attunement to our children’s needs.
Once I recognized that it was my ego talking, I could explain to my daughter how the ego works in language a twelve-year-old could understand.
“When we get upset or afraid we won’t be understood,” I began, “we turn into a ferocious tiger to protect ourselves. This is what was happening to you. You realized I wasn’t taking the time to understand you, and in your desperation you bared your teeth and showed me your claws. Of course, based on the way I was brought up, I thought to myself, ‘How rude!’ I then bared my own tiger mommy teeth right back at you. I should have known you would never go on the attack unless you were somehow feeling scared or trapped.”
Maia listened intently and, letting out a sigh of relief, snuggled deeper into my arms. As she rested contentedly in the knowledge that she was understood and appreciated, I took a moment to reflect on how I had allowed myself to react so blindly to her. I had sermonized, preached, and admonished—all from a pedestal based on ego, which thinks of itself as all-knowing and all-controlling. Quite naturally, my daughter’s self-protective instincts kicked in.
It’s human to want to assert our perceived power. And when it doesn’t come from ego but from our deeper self, to feel empowered is healthy. By “deeper self,” I’m referring to the aspect of us that is unswayed by the constant noise and machinations of the reactive ego within us. For instance, we see ourselves beginning to get angry, yet we are able to stay resolute in a state of calm and ask for our needs to be met with a deep respect for ourselves and our children. Or we recognize that our ego wants to dish out a threat or a punishment, but we resist this urge and instead find another way to enforce our boundaries. If we stop to pay attention, we can all sense when we aren’t acting in alignment with a more evolved consciousness.
When my daughter believed I wasn’t accepting her feelings, her naturally powerful self spoke up. But when I reacted from ego instead of from the calmness of my own empowered essence, this triggered her ego, and so we became locked in a battle of egos. In the heat of the battle, it didn’t occur to me that my daughter wasn’t behaving in a particular manner because she was “bad,” but because of a healthy need to defend herself from my ego. So wrapped up was I in my ego that I had failed to create an appropriate space for her to assert her own voice.
This is so important to understand. When children aren’t given the space to assert their authentic voice, but are drowned out by the roar of our parental agendas, they grow up anxious and depressed. Many of our young people are so deprived of our acceptance—of simply being seen for who they are —that they self-harm in a variety of ways. Getting drunk, taking drugs, engaging in inappropriate sexual relations, even cutting themselves—all of these are cries for our acceptance. They are manifestations of a deep yearning to be seen, validated, and known.
Many parents may judge themselves harshly for their past errors as they read this. It’s my hope that my words create awareness in parents, not guilt. One of the typical reactions of parents who start on this path of conscious parenting is to look back at their errors and feel a sense of regret and guilt. I remind parents that this reaction, while understandable, is yet another ruse of the ego to create emotional paralysis and a disconnection from the present moment. I encourage parents to realize that no parent is going to be conscious all the time. All of us experience moments of blind reactivity that cause confusion and leave us feeling helpless. This is an intrinsic part of being a parent. Instead of wallowing in how we “should” have been, we need to use these insights as opportunities for transformation. In this way, we train ourselves to be mindful and respond to our children in the present moment and bring nothing from our past that isn’t relevant. Forgiving ourselves for our unconsciousness allows us to immediately enter the present moment and create the change that needs to happen.
In the situation with my daughter that I described, had I kept on believing that my way was right instead of correcting my wrongdoing, I would have crushed her natural inclination, undermined her budding self-determination, and set her on a path to devaluing herself. In the process, she would have carried within her a growing resentment toward me, which in turn would have put distance between us, marring our ability to connect at the very time she most needs me.
This is why it’s valuable to practice being aware on a daily basis. With a heightened state of awareness, or what’s often referred to as being “conscious” or “mindful,” we become accustomed to identifying the difference between a reactive state that’s coming from ego and the far more calm, centered state of our true being. As we learn to observe our patterns of emotional reactivity and how they lead us to betray ourselves, it becomes easier to break out of a reaction that’s a sort of trance—and, in due course, easier not to get into one in the first place. Whenever we find ourselves beginning to react, we pause and ask ourselves, “How can I approach my child so I am fully aligned with who they are versus who I think they should be?”
To parent consciously doesn’t happen overnight. It takes practice to become aware of how our ego seduces us. Thankfully, even small steps toward increased awareness can result in monumental shifts in the quality of our relationship with our children. Every step we take toward increased consciousness brings us exponentially closer to our child’s heart and spirit.
Because we all passed through childhood, and given that we were raised by parents who were largely unaware of how to navigate the parenting years in a manner that would result in our growing up to be emotionally mature, we are bound to suffer from varying degrees of unconsciousness. Even late into adulthood, many of us still haven’t learned to respond in levelheaded ways rather than reacting immaturely. This is why we have gaps in our emotional development, particularly around our children, since they evoke our own childhood experiences.
One of my clients, Janet, felt the pain caused by the gaps in her emotional development in an especially strong way. A thirty-nine-year-old mother, she was constantly triggered by reverberations from her childhood. “I’m failing as a mom,” she said to me during one counseling session, her voice quavering with emotion. “I just don’t know how to be a grown-up. I feel like I’m still a little girl inside. How can I take care of my seven-year-old daughter when I don’t even know how to be an adult yet? She’s going through so much at school with her friends, I worry about her 24/7. The anxiety I feel affects every aspect of my life.”
I listened as Janet continued, “When my daughter cries, I cry louder than her. When she’s angry, I’m angry alongside her. When her friends are mean to her, it feels like they are being mean to me. I don’t know what to say or how to act. Half the time I check out. The other half I move between panic and rage.”
As we talked, Janet kept repeating, “I feel so anxious, I just don’t think I can do this.” She was echoing what countless clients tell me. Bringing up children is a scary task, because we are always afraid we’re doing it “wrong.”
As parents who are trying our best to do a good job, we don’t realize that it’s precisely our fears for our children, which we think of as concern, that are the problem with most parenting. These fears often take the form of intense anxiety with regard to our children. Whatever its precise manifestation, our fears undermines so many of our good intentions. Fear is the reason our parenting somehow manages to produce results that are the exact opposite of what we were aiming for.
Regarding Janet’s situation, we began exploring her past. Not long into our discussion, she revealed how two major influences affected her life before she turned six. The first was that her father lost his job and the family had to move in with her grandparents in a different city. The second was that her parents began fighting a lot because of the stress generated by the huge change. From this time on, she no longer felt secure. Because she had no voice in the changes imposed on her by the adults in her life, she felt powerless.
“Whenever your children trigger you,” I explained, “you think you’re responding from your adult self. However, you aren’t. Even though you are thirty-nine years old, you go right back into the way you learned to behave as a child, reverting to the six-year-old who had no way to speak up and assert herself. It’s as if, emotionally, you’re frozen in time. This is why you feel out of control on the one hand, yet paralyzed on the other.”
As Janet was able to bring her residual emotions from these events into consciousness, becoming aware of what was really going on inside her, she began to spot when a situation was triggering a pattern established long ago. As she learned to step back from the situation, making a conscious decision instead of being driven by unconscious impulses, her emotional reactivity subsided. Increasingly able to approach situations in a calmer, more mature manner, she found she could embrace her present relationship with her daughter without feeling assaulted by her own past.
Think about a time when you couldn’t sleep because you were so anxious that your child might fail a test at school. Or an occasion when your child was crying inconsolably because she was being bullied, and you found yourself in a state of panic. Anger, anxiety, guilt, or shame—in one form or another, we all experience intense negative emotion in connection with our children, all of it driven by fear. At those moments when our fear takes over, we lose all sense of our mature self and behave in ways that leave us feeling like a failure as a parent.
Experiencing fear in the form of anxiety is just one of the ways in which we can become quite irrational where our children are concerned. Catherine, another client of mine, shared with me how she had a history of blowing up at her daughter. She still felt terrible about the first time she lost her cool with Cindy in a really bad way. The girl, who was four years old at the time, had made a mess in the kitchen after her mother told her not to touch anything. It was really quite a trivial matter, yet it struck a nerve in Catherine and she flew into a rage.
What stuck in this mother’s mind from the incident was Cindy’s shocked expression. The daughter was so aghast at seeing her mother morph into a maniac that her look of horror instantly stopped Catherine’s tantrum. When she realized how badly she had lost it, she was appalled. It was as if she had been taken over by some overwhelming force that descended on her out of nowhere.
I agreed with Catherine’s assessment that an “overwhelming force” had taken over her, but I also explained that it didn’t just come “out of nowhere.” The reason she was triggered paralleled Janet’s experience, in that it had to do with her own childhood. Growing up in a home where her parents controlled her, she had picked up an emotional blueprint that caused her to react in the same way to her own daughter in the present.
When Catherine witnessed her child suffering as she was, she knew it was time to examine herself. As she began to unravel her past, she came to understand how what had happened in her life long ago was now running and ruining her present. Most of all, she opened herself to the precise way her child had entered her life so that she could awaken to her forgotten self. She saw how our children come to us specifically to trigger this awakening within us. Of course, the onus to answer this call to rediscover the true self lies with us.
We all need to be aware that the past influences our present. It is one thing to be stuck in the past, but quite another to become conscious of how it affects us now. Endlessly regurgitating what happened to us long ago only digs the hole we are in deeper. At the same time, to the degree that we are unaware of the hold our past still has on us, it will be difficult to make sense of how we react so strongly to our own children.
The experiences of our childhood create a template upon which we build our life. From this template emerge our current patterns of behavior, which closely resemble our early life. Unless we become aware of this, we keep repeating those patterns. In fact, most of our adult experiences and relationships adhere to those patterns. In this way, the degree of consciousness with which our parents raised us is a key determinant of how well-adjusted we grow up to be.
Perhaps more than anything, becoming a parent offers us the opportunity to become aware of patterns established in childhood. Because of our children’s closeness to us, they offer us a mirror of ourselves. Through them, we are brought face-to-face with what it must have felt like for us to be a child. This can be painful. What are we to do with this pain?
My client Connie expressed this dilemma most beautifully: “I feel so helpless in these moments. When I cannot get through to my ten-year-old daughter and she keeps crying or having a tantrum I feel as if I am right back there with my father, being controlled all over again. I hate it. One part of me wants to cave in like I did as a child, and the other part of me wants to scream and rage at the fact it is happening again. So I either neglect her or I punish her. I hate myself both ways, but I just don’t know what to do when I feel so out of control!”
Our tendency when we feel helpless or anxious is to control these feelings by lashing out at others, in this case at our children. In psychological terms, we refer to this as “projecting” our pain onto another, so that it looks like the other is the cause of our pain. Instead of reacting to our children because of what they are showing us about ourselves, the conscious response is to look into the mirror they are holding up to us, allowing ourselves to become aware of the many ways in which we still behave like children ourselves.
The more immature we are emotionally, the more our children will present us with complexes, insecurities, and behavior problems. This is their way of saying, “Hey, parents, I’m here to show you that you have some growing up to do. Can you please get on with it so I can move on and be who I’m supposed to be? I’m doing you a huge favor by showing you exactly what you need to do in order to become a mature person. The sooner you do so, the sooner I can free myself from the burden of being your mirror.”
Answering the call to look into the mirror our children provide for us is the hallmark of a conscious parent. Each glance into the mirror presents us with a chance to break free from old patterns so that we don’t transmit them to our children. It takes great courage to change the script from the old to the new, but this is the only way we can awaken to a conscious connection with our children. Only from this mindful place can we help them blossom into their truest self.
Have you ever screamed at your child in anger? I’m betting there’s hardly a parent who hasn’t at some point become furious with their child, then felt horribly embarrassed afterward.
When we exhibit rage with a child, it’s like being knocked off our feet emotionally. We usually think of the child as having behaved in a way that “set us off.” We tell ourselves they were being annoying, testing us, provoking us, or pushing us “to the limit.” We might justify our anger by saying something like, “Now look what you made me do!” Similarly, when we become anxious, worried, or fearful, we blame these feelings on something that’s happening to our child or something our child is doing.
In traditional approaches to parenting, it’s always been considered the child’s fault when we erupt, are riddled with anxiety, or suffer a rush of panic. “Why do you do this to me?” we demand when our children act in ways that catalyze any of these reactions in us.
Equally traditional are the remedies recommended for such behavior. We issue a time-out or punish a child by taking away a privilege or administering a spanking. These autocratic strategies are our default reaction when we feel outwitted or overwhelmed by our children. A client once related how her pediatrician told her, “Your two-year-old is a force of nature. You better rein her in now before she turns into a nightmare. You should start considering time-outs and punishments to control her.” These old-school ways of relating to our children are deeply ingrained in us, causing us to believe we are “bad” parents and will be ineffective if we don’t adopt them in our own parenting.
If we are more contemporary in our approach, we perhaps use a neutral tone of voice and choose words that we hope don’t come across as judgmental. Or, if we feel provoked, we might take a time-out ourselves in order to calm down. Who of us hasn’t used the “count to ten” technique? To prevent a situation from spiraling into a rage-filled fight, one parenting fad recommends wearing an elastic band around our wrist, which we snap to remind ourselves we’re at risk of losing our composure.
The problem with both the traditional punitive approach and the more contemporary methods is that the effect is short-lived. It’s often no time at all before we find ourselves dealing with the same issue—or, worse, a manifestation of the issue that’s gone underground, such as lying, cutting classes, or engaging in a forbidden behavior out of our sight.
The reason neither traditional nor contemporary responses to children’s provocations are effective for long is that they don’t get to the root of the behavior. The focus of the various techniques parents read about or pick up from experts or other parents is on the particular behavior, not on the dynamics that underlie the behavior. These techniques are all about controlling children so their actions don’t trigger us. We tell ourselves that if we could just get the child to “do” or “not do” certain things, we wouldn’t react the way we do. It’s a game in which both parent and child are always trying to stay one step ahead of the other. Needless to say, the game results in anger, anxiety, and frequently disappointment and even sadness.
Conscious parenting is a game changer because it doesn’t try to change the child, just ourselves as parents. It holds that once the parent creates the right conditions, the child will naturally change and evolve toward higher consciousness. The question, of course, remains whether the parent knows how to create these conditions. Conscious parenting addresses the fear that lurks behind so many of the ways we parent, all the while imagining we are doing “the right thing,” as well as how we so readily react to our children with intense emotion. Our growing awareness of the ways in which our emotional reactivity obscures our ability to connect with our children allows us to reflect upon new ways we can design mindful responses to them. From this place of conscious awareness, we can tailor responses that allow them to fully express their truest self.
Our children may be small and powerless in terms of living independent lives, but they are mighty in their potential to be our awakeners.
I like the term “awakeners.” It transcends the usual clichés we use to reference our children—terms such as “friend,” “ally,” “partner,” “muse.” It speaks directly to our children’s potential to enlighten us and raise our consciousness to new heights. When I began to notice how my daughter accomplished this, I was in awe.
The really surprising aspect of this is that the insights our children offer us aren’t so much epiphanies as they are lessons stumbled upon in the plainest of moments and the most humbling of situations. Actually, more often than not it’s in times of conflict that we get to see the full range of our unconscious theatrics. This is why, instead of shying away from conflict as many parents do, or even denying the existence of disagreements in the home, I encourage parents to accept the inevitability of conflict and use the insights that emerge to awaken themselves to the growth that still needs to take place in them.
To exercise domination over our children is a huge temptation for our ego, which loves to feel powerful and in control. Can we really blame it, when it was raised in an autocratic manner and is now addicted to it? After all, who else allows us near-total control over their life? You cannot do it at work. Or with your parents or siblings or friends. Often, your ego thinks the only relationship you can have complete control over is the one with your child. That’s why it tries so hard to exert it. Only with our children do we get to be all-knowing, controlling, dictatorial. If we only realized how this kind of control is actually indicative of a weak sense of inner power, we might reconsider our ways.
When we ignore the immature ways we sometimes behave toward our children, which they consistently reflect back to us, we turn down one of the most profound opportunities to grow ourselves up. If on the other hand we embrace the mirroring of our immaturity that our children offer us, we have a chance to become profoundly altered. The most ordinary, everyday interactions with them in even the tiniest matters then become a catalyst for change.
Take for example the mother who complains that she loses her temper with her children because they never seem to listen to her in the morning, which means they habitually arrive late at school. The traditional response to such a situation would be to encourage the mother to discipline her children so that they learn to listen. The problem is that parents say repeatedly in such situations, “Are you listening to me?” Then a while later they follow up with, “What did I just tell you?” Before long they are yelling, imagining that if they talk more loudly, the child will finally be attentive. What they don’t realize is that it isn’t attentiveness the child is learning. Far from it. The child is growing resentful and therefore increasingly defiant.
Instead of the traditional approach of giving instructions more forcefully and more often, what if we explore whether the mother is disorganized and frequently tardy? Is she herself unable to function well in the mornings? Ah, now we have shifted the focus away from what the children need to change to what the mother may now need to transform within herself.
Using this quite different approach, the mother may need to look in the mirror and ask herself, “Is my child in some way reflecting the way I tend to operate? Are there ways I need to restructure my life so I can be more organized?” Where before we had children a certain level of disorganization may have seemed acceptable, we now realize that our lack of organization is undermining the healthy patterns of behavior we are seeking to teach. We may have been able to cope with a measure of chaos, but its effect on our children is destructive.
For a mother to be somewhat chaotic in her morning routine may seem a small thing, but it’s precisely these everyday patterns that end up regulating our children’s behavior, not the teaching we do or the commands we issue. Until we come to terms with this issue in ourselves, our children will continue to reflect the fact that we have some growing up to do. Indeed, unless we are willing to take up the challenge of growing and maturing in the way we organize our life, these seemingly small things have a way of seeding many a dysfunctional pattern in a family.
Take a different scenario: a twelve-year-old who, as a result of bullying, was increasingly becoming a social recluse. He refused to go to school or even to play with his friends, despite all the coaxing, enticements, and threats his parents employed as they became increasingly desperate. Experts were called in to “fix” the child’s problem, to no avail. At times such interventions may be necessary, but before seeking such help, what if we shifted the focus to the parents? For instance, how about investigating their history with regard to social situations?
When we explored the mother’s past, she revealed how she too had been bullied and felt ostracized as a child. Consequently, she had been lonely much of her childhood. Thinking it was her fault she was forever being picked on, she experienced considerable shame. The bullying, loneliness, and shame caused her to become extremely anxious. When her son began being bullied, it triggered her own latent anxiety. Worried sick about him, she unwittingly undercut his confidence. Instead of encouraging him to summon his inherent resilience, through her excessive anxiety she caused him to withdraw.
In therapy with me, this mother learned how her son’s withdrawal from life was a reaction against her own anxious reactions that were too much for him to bear, her own reactions being a remnant of events from her childhood that she had never really dealt with. In simple everyday ways, as well as more profound ones, our children are constantly saying to us, “Wake up, look at yourself, transform yourself. Do this for you , so that I may be free of what burdens you.”
Sometimes our children awaken us to our tardiness, at other times to our obsessions and addictions. Similarly, they bring to our attention our anxiety, need for perfection, and desire for control. They show us our inability to say yes or no, and how we don’t really mean either most of the time. They bring to light issues of control, our tendency to dependency, and our marital troubles. They reveal how unable we are to simply be still for very long. They show us how difficult it is for us to engage them with full-on presence, how challenging we find it to be open, how threatening it is for us to be spontaneous and playful. They especially mirror back to us all the ways in which we simply aren’t authentic. It’s in how our children act and react to us, and how we act and react to them, that—if we are willing—we are able to see our unconsciousness. As we learn to embrace this truth, we stop resisting our children when they act in ways we find challenging, and instead awaken to the fact that this challenge has come into our present because of something in our past that is yet to be resolved.
The conscious parenting approach is a true game changer. By shifting the focus away from the child and onto the parent’s inner transformation, it holds the potential to awaken families in deep and fundamental ways. Integrating this shift of focus in our daily lives is far from easy for us as parents. As it turns the mirror on all the ways our reactions to our children are unhealthy, it challenges us to explore our unconscious inner workings and confront aspects of ourselves that lurk in the shadows. By not allowing us to rest on “how things were done in my childhood,” we are forced to discover new ways to relate to our children, moment after moment, handcrafting our responses to match the child before us. This forces us to ask ourselves, “How can I use this moment with my child to learn more about myself?”
My client Jenna, the mother of five-year-old Anna, was having a hard time with her daughter’s meltdowns. Unable to find a way to communicate with Anna, she felt driven to desperation on a daily basis. Things came to a head when, after a particularly harrowing night of Anna being irritable and restless, Jenna lashed out, slapping her across her face.
Jenna was mortified by her lack of control and immediately booked a session to see me. When we went over the incident moment by moment, I was able to see where Jenna had dug herself into a hole. She said to me, “I tried so hard to connect to Anna’s feelings while she was having her tantrum. I kept asking why she was so unhappy and what I could do to help. But instead of telling me, she just kept on crying and flailing her arms at me. I continued trying to calm her down, but she just kept screaming. Finally I just lost it.” Like many parents, Jenna thought she was trying to connect, when in reality she caused a deeper rift with her child.
I pointed out to her that she had missed the most essential piece of the puzzle. “You have forgotten to include the most significant details—your thoughts and feelings,” I said. “Are you able to tell me what thoughts were racing through your mind or what you were feeling in your body?”
Jenna looked at me dumbstruck. “I have no idea at all,” she blurted out after several moments of silence. “I was so focused on Anna that I didn’t pay attention to what I was thinking or how I was feeling.”
Jenna’s response is typical of many parents. Focused on their children’s acting out, they blindly react in the moment, with little thought to the driving force behind their reaction. Quite naturally, they often react unconsciouly, compounding the issue. Only when Jenna began to turn her attention to herself, focusing on her own internal landscape, did she realize how much she contributed to the chaos her child was experiencing. More important, she was empowered to create avenues for change.
“You were experiencing a host of feelings while relating to your child,” I commented. “You were feeling helpless and out of control, frustrated and angry. All of these emotions are really manifestations of fear. You don’t realize it, but the true trigger of your reactions was your own fear, not your child’s behavior.”
Jenna slowly began to understand what it meant to turn the spotlight on herself. In a moment of quiet reflection, she said, “Oh my goodness, I had no idea I was the one who was unraveling more than her. I just wasn’t paying attention! In my desire to fix her, I was blindly reacting to her. You’re right—the whole thing scared me, and that’s why I lost it.”
Because conscious parenting is concerned with the actual roots of our acting out—and I do mean our acting out as parents , not so much our children’s acting out—it avoids quick fixes and Band-Aids. Instead, we undergo transformation as moms and dads. Through the repeated act of self-confrontation, as our children reflect back to us all the ways in which we have yet to grow up, we develop into the truly amazing parents we have the ability to be—the kind of parents every child born into the world deserves.