This is a chapter from Deep Impact
“From one perspective, worrying about our children feels so normal it’s hard to imagine that it’s no use whatsoever. But from another it is easy to see that when circumstances appear challenging, who are children really are can never, ever be affected by any of it. The true Self or consciousness can never let them down.” -Ali Scott
Our role as parents is not to turn our children into extensions of ourselves, or use them as a means to boost our feelings. Not to turn them into what we believe they should be, or what we wish we had been. Nor is our role to mould them into what is held in high esteem in our family, community or culture.
No, our role, if it is even possible to define, is to help them to see and know who they already are.
We need courage to take on this role as it goes against what we’ve been told or we’ve witnessed about being a good parent.
It means dropping your ego as chief guide and taking a stand to parent from your true Self. From the deep knowingness within you that’s ready and waiting to guide you if you can be brave enough to let it.
This is our role not just for our child or ourselves, but the world as a whole benefits with each extra person who steps into their true Self. By doing this we all get one step closer to tipping the balance towards a thriving world. I honestly can’t imagine anything more precious for a child, fulfilling for a parent or valuable to the world and our species than that.
When you sign up for parenting this way it means getting to know the true Self of your child and in the process helping them get to know it too.
It means tuning into the voice of your child’s true Self, not what they picked up from school, saw on the TV or heard from you.
It means getting to know the Self beneath the frustration, beneath the bad mood, beneath the tv watching, the device playing and the name calling.
Tuning into the true Self that lies beneath all of it.
It means not forcing them into a box and labelling it and not giving too much weight to the labels they inherit from others or give to themselves. As desperately real as these surface labels may seem, this is not who they are and if we fail to realise that we run the risk of missing who they really are in this loud and externally focused world.
It means not over scheduling their time in fear that they will miss out or fall behind, or that you will be judged a bad parent. It means embracing space so they can hear and trust the spark of their true Self and the nature of who they really are.
It means resisting the temptation to control every ounce of their day, make every decision for them or solve every problem they encounter. How can they ever know themselves and trust themselves when we take over the reigns of their life and lead them to believe that others hold the answers they need?
It means not incentivising their every action, not hustling them through every target and exam and not setting rigid expectations for what they should achieve. With these innocent behaviours we risk turning them into robots fulfilling our desires rather than helping them to locate and be propelled by their inner fuel to achieve their desires.
It means pointing our child towards understanding the nature of how our minds work. Like the blue sky that always exists behind the clouds, our true Self lies beneath this surface level thinking. Our thoughts - including our insecure ones - are transitory and, like the clouds, pass through us if we don’t hold onto them. Our experience comes from our moment to moment thinking not from the world outside of us. We don’t need to be scared of our thinking, we don’t need to believe our thinking or find ways to run from it and we don’t need to be defined by it.
With this understanding, as parents our role is to resist the compelling urge to jump into our child’s thought storms or get carried away with their fears and dramas which create our own thought storms. It means not taking too seriously the fears that circle in your head about your child, nor those of other parents or family members or those you read in the media.
It means letting them experience the fullness of their emotions and observing them blow through when we resist the need to fix them. Letting them know that however they feel right now is not how it will be forever. Saying to them “look how you overcame that, how you were really upset and now you’re not. Did you notice?”. Letting them see this as a normal part of life and nothing to be scared of.
It means trusting that when you resist clogging your head up with so much thinking and analysing you will know what is best to do in each and every moment. You will be connected to your true Self deep within and the next step will appear.
It means connecting to the place of love, compassion and understanding within you and parenting from that place.
It means creating a good feeling in your interactions with your child and resisting the urge to be right, to be the boss and to have the upper hand. Showing them that no matter what, you love them. No matter the names they call you, the tests they fail, the glasses they break, you still love them. Totally unconditional.
It means being a role model for how to live a life connected to your true Self. To take care of yourself and build a deep foundation to support you. To get it wrong time and again and to share the experience with your child. To not know what to do and admit it. To go against the grain of the masses and do what truly makes sense to you.
It means helping them to see their own way and feel the power and freedom within it. Helping them see who they really are and orienting them towards it time and again.
Once they see and feel their true Self they get to bring it with them wherever they are, whether you’re there with them or not. This is the key to the door of their wellbeing, confidence, resilience and freedom. By anchoring to this place they are connected to that deeper intelligence that will always be there for them offering a much wiser alternative to being plugged into the outside world.
I used to think I wasn’t a good mum. I felt inadequate, unable to make myself or my child behave the way everyone seemed to be saying we should and constantly looking at other mums with awe and envy.
I had innocently created a very unrealistic vision of what it meant to be a mum and I - and my son - felt the ramifications of this every day.
But over time things started to change as I got a glimpse for the first time of what it really meant to me to be a mum. I dropped all the pressure to control my son to be a particular way and felt a freedom and sense of parenting purpose that I had never felt before.
My role became helping him to find his true Self moment by moment. My relationship with myself as a mum soared as did that with my son, and my husband likewise felt the ripples of impact.
We stopped trying to control and boss. We stopped trying to fix. We stopped trying to push and cajole. We stopped parenting from feeling like a daily battle and started to have fun.
One small and memorable way this played out was our attempts to try to get our young son to stop drinking two hours before bedtime.
It made sense in our minds; less water closer to bed, less chance of needing to get up in the night and disturb his sleep or worse. It’s what we had seen other parents do. Intellectually we got the logic so we adopted it as our own.
But what we forgot is that by doing this we weren’t trusting our son’s ability to know when he needed to drink. In fact. worse still, we were teaching him to override it. To stop listening to what he needed and start listening outside of himself. We were teaching him that we knew better than him. We were teaching him not to trust himself. We were teaching him that he couldn’t handle the situation.
But when we saw this, and so many other things, and let him choose when to drink water, did he manage? Yes, he felt empowered, more grown up and once the initial excitement was over, he proved to be totally capable of managing without being up and down all night.
Apply this to a hundred different things and you can imagine the change in our lives.
My son felt liberated to be himself. To believe in himself. To feel our love and support. To feel he could trust himself. He grew in confidence and opened up more to the suggestions that we made when our inner wisdom told us that something was important. The suggestions felt different. Like they came from a different place and they made sense. And he listened. We listened more to understand his reasons, his perspective, his true Self and you know what, often we learnt a lot in the process. Who says adults always know best?
It didn’t mean to do nothing or let our son do whatever he wanted. It meant to take action when it made sense to take action. Not reacting in situations based on our fears but on responding to what was happening in the moment.
It meant frequently showing up not sure about what to do next and admitting it, no longer needing to be the parent with all the answers. It meant getting lost in my thinking and becoming frustrated and then letting things settle until my son and I were in a good state of mind to discuss it.
What I realised was incessantly worrying for our children doesn’t make us better parents. Worrying for our children doesn’t get better outcomes for them. Worrying for our children clouds our thinking and prevents us from being connected to our true Self.
The best we can ever do for our children is to love them, to lead the way to living life connected to our true Self and to help them to find and nurture their own true Self.
Parenting becomes more enjoyable because there is so much less to think about. There’s less bad feeling. Less needing to jump in and fix or control. Thoughts pass quicker and more naturally and nobody needs to fear them. You get to watch your children trust themselves more and know themselves more. You get to watch them believe in themselves more. There’s a more connected, calmer and loving feeling in the house.
There are of course moments of low mood, of frustration and losing it too but we let them pass and laugh at them after the event no longer reading into them what simply isn’t there. There are moments of forgetting all of this until we remember again.
I can now say I am a good mum. Not because of what anyone else thinks but because of what I think. I am helping my son to understand who he really is and to trust that, to follow that with all his heart and to live that every day. To turn off the voices of others and to trust himself.
I have never felt less need to control him and less exhausted from parenting.
I have never felt more blessed to be a mum and to be the custodian of this little soul.
Find out more about Deep Impact here.