Parenting from the Inside out with Crystal, The Parenting Coach
I recently chatted with Crystal Haitsma, aka The Parenting Coach, to explore what connection-based parenting is, and how it comes intuitively once we have uncovered what our triggers are and why we have them.
What is conscious parenting?
Conscious parenting is an approach to raising children that emphasizes self-awareness, mindfulness, and intentional decision-making. It involves being present and fully engaged in the parenting journey, with a focus on understanding and meeting the needs of both the child and the parent.
At its core, conscious parenting encourages parents to cultivate a deeper understanding of their own emotions, beliefs, and triggers. By developing self-awareness, parents can recognize and address their own emotional patterns and reactions, allowing them to respond to their children's needs from a place of calm and compassion.
Put your parenting books down!
Instead of spending time scouring pages of parenting books looking for the answers, spend your time inside, with you, your own healing, and your own intuition.
It's just like dieting.
You can read every goddamn keto, Weight Watchers, and Atkins book on what to eat and still not weigh what you want to weigh. Why? Because they’re missing the most integral part. They tell us the end of the story, but ignore how to get there! So if we keep reading all these books, all we have is more and more examples of people that are doing and having what we want so badly, making us feel more like a failure.
It starts with you
If you find yourself slumped in front of Netflix, reaching for the cupcake after another tough day with the kids, you are not bad for doing that.
Society teaches us that it’s a reward for your hard day, and tells you to get the comfort because you’ve earned it. For some of us, it might work. But for most of us, it really doesn’t in the end.
What we’re left with is a bunch of unwanted by-products like the emotional shame and guilt, as well as feeling physically crap.
But before you even try to tackle the emotional eating, stop to ask yourself this:
What emotion are you trying to eat?
What are you trying to feel?
What is happening beneath the surface?
You can still carry on with the sleeve of Oreos, but gain more awareness while you’re doing it.
Then you can begin to uncover what is so overwhelming, why parenting feels so hard, and what is stressing you.
It starts with your relationship with yourself, which is the one relationship we bring into all other relationships. As we change that, everything else changes.
When we do this healing work, we become naturally less inclined to reach for the Oreos.
It’s exactly the same for conscious parenting. You don't need the books, or to have a parenting expert live in your house… going internal is the answer.
The “Green Juice” of parenting
Parenting can seem hard or difficult when you are carrying a lot of weight that was passed down to you, not just in habits, but in self conscious beliefs.
When that weight is lifted, it doesn't feel so hard, and gives us access to our intuition and our own inner wisdom. The problem is that we’re so tapped out of it because we're so used to experts telling us what to do.
The research says to give time out, use rewards, and use punishments, but they’re just focusing on what works in the moment. It’s exactly the same as “green juice cleanses” in the diet world. They’re a quick fix but rarely work longer term.
I value building a long term relationship with my kids, emotional resilience, empathy, and personal responsibility, far more than I want my kids to clean up their room and behave.
Ravenous reasons
We know that we need compelling reasons to be able to lose weight for the last time, and it’s exactly the same for practicing conscious parenting. Here are some examples of the ravenous reasons you might have for conscious parenting:
1. Emotional Regulation
You want your kids to have a secure attachment to you, so that you can be the one to teach them valuable life skills. You don't want your kid to get to 20 and be punching someone when they get mad. Emotional regulation skills are taught by our energy and co-regulation.
2. Emotional Intelligence
This is the greatest indicator of future success.
3. Emotional resilience
You want them to know how to move through the difficult scenarios they will encounter in life in a healthy way.
While you can have these compelling reasons, what's even more compelling is to acknowledge that the reason is actually you. It’s not about them at all.
We yell as a by-product, just like we overeat as a by-product, because something more is happening deep down.
When you feel emotional activation, that is a trigger, and when you’re likely to yell. Triggers are there to help us learn and to grow and to expand. So instead of trying to stop yelling, focus on the triggers. Over time, the triggers will feel less intense, less frequent, and the volume just turns down. It’s exactly the same as urges to eat.
We need to remember that it is so much less about our kids and so much more about us. When we’re yelling, we’re modeling dysregulation. Identifying and understanding triggers is where the work really lies.
Once we uncover the self belief that's causing these triggers, we can start the healing. Hypnotherapy, breath work, emotional processing, and guided meditation are good tools to use to move through that belief so that it's not a trigger any more.
Inner child healing
If you were disciplined through more coercive measures like time-outs, spanking, and grounding, you may think you turned out just ‘fine’. But what does ‘fine’ actually look like?
This acronym helps us to recognize the impact of authoritarian parenting:
F - Fawn response - making everyone else comfortable at the expense of yourself.
I - Internalization - internalizing your mistakes and making that reflect your own self worth.
N - Inauthentic - you know how you want people to perceive you and that affects how you act. You put on a mask to uphold the perception.
E - Emotionally reactive - this is your response to other people’s big emotions. You might use shame in your tone, or yell. If you were yelled at whenever you felt a big emotion, you associated that with being a problem.
Healing comes from going back to those moments when you weren't always perfectly cared for or given everything you needed in that moment. We’re humans, not robots, so your parents could not always give you everything you needed or connect with you all the time. It doesn’t serve us to play the blame game with our parents. Instead, you can accept they did their best but that it maybe wasn't good enough for what you needed.
Connection-based parenting is not a quick fix that’s going to happen overnight. It’s a long term approach, but it’s a beautiful way to live.
If you find yourself triggered, just pause, breathe, and feel.
Perfectionism is not the goal, but the best work we can do for our kids is the work that we do for ourselves.
Have the best week ever,
Laura