Mindful Parenting

by Rachel Barr

Some of us might use mindfulness to cope with the pressures of parenting and our busy lives but what if mindfulness practice became a fundamental part of the way we parented, allowing kindness and compassion to embrace and support us in our role as parents?

I am someone who has taken a number of years to build up to doing formal mindfulness practice every day. Around ten years ago, I completed a Life Coaching certificate; the literature recommended on the course led me to discover spirituality. I developed my spirituality through mindfulness practice. I started off by using CDs and practicing sporadically. The impetus to practice more regularly came when I started to notice the benefits: improvements in my mental health and my ability to manage everyday life. Discovering guided meditations on YouTube and acquiring my first smart phone opened up and widened my practice enormously. Now, almost daily, I do some sort of mindful practice of varying lengths. However, I am still a work in progress when it comes to being mindful in my daily tasks and interactions with others.

When the opportunity arose to attend a Mindful Parenting course for parents of teenagers, I jumped at the chance to expand my mindfulness practice. I imagine that the words ‘parenting’ and ‘teenager’ can make even the greatest master of mindfulness slip their serene witnessing of emotions and thoughts for a second or two.  Having two hormonal children (one pre-teen at eleven and a teenager of fifteen years), the motivation to create space in my busy week for this eight week course was high.

A small group of eight parents attended the course which was facilitated by a social worker who was an experienced mindfulness teacher and a Parent and Carer support worker from the local council. At the beginning of the course, I felt in a relatively good place in terms of parenting, as we had gone through some challenges with our eldest in the last year but things had settled down and felt a bit smoother. Since I had already established an almost daily formal practice and things were calmer in my life, I was looking forward to developing my mindfulness practice further. However, I didn’t anticipate the transformative impact this course would have on me on several different levels.

The course enabled me to take mindfulness of my feelings and the physical responses in my body to another level. The facilitators were supportive and challenged us to connect to our emotional response to the practices rather than responding analytically with our thoughts. When someone was sharing their experiences, the facilitators would ask questions that helped the person connect with their feelings rather than just stay with the description of the situation with their child. For example, when a stressful situation was being described the facilitators would ask, “What was happening in your body while this was happening? What was happening inside you?” Rather than what was happening with their child. This gentle but probing line of inquiry didn’t let any group members off the hook in terms of masking or avoiding sitting with their emotions and there was a well-used handy box of tissues that was passed around.

For me as a parent, the practices we did and the discussions we had in the group helped me sharpen my ability to pause and notice my own emotions. We did a different Mindful Practice each week related to the topic of the session. These were carried out with the use of a Tibetan bell and the facilitators talking us through the practices. These included, a 3 minute breathing space, kindness, self-compassion, body scan, settling the mind, mindful listening and sitting with emotions practices. These practices and discussions also enabled me to recognise that I found it difficult to remain centred when my children experienced strong emotions. This was new terrain for me and I found that the double layer of mindfulness (being mindful of my emotions; and mindful of my emotional response to my children’s emotions) made stressful situations with my children more tolerable. Although not quite at the point of welcoming with open arms the feelings I have in response to my child’s distress, I am more skilled now at noticing, being curious and generally beingmore accepting. Being mindful has reduced how stressful I find these situations as I am no longer fighting and pushing away my own emotions.  I’m able to cope much better in fraught situations such as getting ready for school and, consequently, my daughter’s distress has become more short-lived.

Mindful listening was one of the first sessions of the course and I found this helped me realise how often I wasn’t in the present moment and listening attentively to my younger child. I found the combination of the mindful listening and the ‘beginner’s mind’ helped me review my relationship with her. The ‘beginner’s mind’ is about opening ourselves in order to experience our children more fully. Essentially, it’s about dropping the clutter of preconceptions and approaching a situation with a fresh, open perspective. By doing this, we are able to expand our view of them. I realised that because, I experience our older child as ‘challenging’, I put more effort into my relationship with her. I am hypervigilant about listening to her and responding to her needs in a way I haven’t afforded my youngest who I experience as more easygoing. Since doing the course, when my youngest speaks to me or asks for my attention, I am mindful of pausing and checking in with myself to ensure that I am present and actively and mindfully listening to her. Unsurprisingly, I have noticed a difference in how she responds already!

As for my older child, the beginner’s mind helped me see her through fresh eyes and recognise her strengths and qualities. I suddenly saw how helpful she was when I needed a hand in the house, how good she was at keeping me updated on her whereabouts, how open she was to talking to me about what was going on for her. This revelation hit me with a mixture of sadness, regret, hope and joy. 

Session five of the course affected me the most and in quite a stark way made me conscious of my default modes as a parent. Schema modes were covered which refer to types of thinking, feeling and behaviour in adults which mirror activation of child-like patterns.  These modes help us to understand how our own experiences of being parented come in to play when we are parents, particularly at times of stress or when strong emotions come to the fore during interactions with our child. The facilitators talked about the vulnerable child, angry child, demanding parent and punitive parent modes and got us to use mindfulness practice when we went into them. They also talked about the ‘Healthy Adult’ mode which was the mode we were all aspiring to! Due to my own experiences as a child, I had strived as a parent to be strong and capable, someone my children could lean on, rather than someone they felt they had to look after. Therefore, I was surprised and dismayed to realise how often I did in fact revert to ‘Vulnerable Child’ mode. I could have found this quite devastating and demoralising but the emphasis on kindness and compassion practices during the course helped alleviate this. 

The week following this session did feel a bit surreal.  I continually had to pause mid-sentence during my interactions with my partner and children when I slipped into ’Vulnerable Child’ mode. It felt like I had no control over this until I was at the point where I noticed I had gone into this mode. Then I found I was able to pause and actively choose to be in ‘Healthy Adult’ mode. I have discovered the ‘Vulnerable Child’ mode is about trying to get my needs met and my inability to always recognise my limits and to set boundaries with others. Now, being mindful of these modes, I find I am able to be in ‘Healthy Adult’ mode much more quickly and those times I don’t manage to be, I accept the way it is rather than allowing my inner voice to scold me. The session we did on acceptance and limits helped me recognise that, as a parent, I often feel like I have to keep going or continually respond to my children’s need. The times when I have gone beyond my limits or what I can cope with are more likely to be the times where I respond with anger or lose the plot with my children. I feel less judgmental about what I should be doing as a parent and more accepting of my own limits and needs.

During the course, there were also sessions which I found reaffirming as I realised I was already using some of the approaches.  One of the sessions covered Rupture and Repair. This is when the relationship with your child becomes ruptured through conflict. What’s important is that you take steps to repair the relationship, through apologising and reconnecting. I was able to recognise that I was good at this which I found refreshing as we can be quick to criticise ourselves as parents.

A theme woven throughout the course was extending kindness and compassion to ourselves, something many of us weren’t very practiced at doing. We did several practices around this theme, exploring kindness to our children and the kindness that our children show towards us. As well as formal practice, the facilitators taught us practices we could use in stressful moments. I found this particularly helpful with a period of stress we seemed to be having with our youngest daughter when she was getting ready for her dance class. In this practice you acknowledge, ‘This is a difficult situation’, you recognise ‘Everyone goes through this at times’ and finally you affirm ‘May I respond with kindness’. We were always set homework so I remembered to do this during a particularly stressful moment while my daughter was getting ready.

Embedding kindness and compassion into my daily life, first and foremost to myself, has had a positive impact on my relationships and interaction with my children and, as an unexpected extra, with my partner too!

It can always be challenging as a parent to reflect on your behaviour and realise you could have handled particular situations better. Bringing mindfulness practice into my parenting has enabled me to notice these things without judgement rather than giving myself an emotional battering for getting it wrong. This has been very freeing.

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I can’t help wishing that I had enrolled on this course when my children were younger. But no matter. I’m just glad I discovered mindful parenting when I did. You can find more blogs by Rachel at www.loveyourselfdaily.com or go to twitter for tweets about the daily little steps we can take on the path to loving ourselves @daily_yourself