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A PARENT IS BORN

BY THE TIME I finished graduate school I had spent more than half my life dreaming of becoming a psychologist. Finally, after thirteen years of post-secondary study, gruelling written and oral exams, and the completion of three degrees, I landed my first job. I was ecstatic! As my start date approached, I focused on being prepared. I knew I had the book smarts to do this work, but I wanted to show up for that first job like nobody had ever shown up for a job before. I assembled what I thought to be a perfect “capable psychologist” wardrobe. I wrote out lists of questions that parents might ask so I could rehearse potential answers. I reviewed diagnostic texts, ensuring I had the information firmly encoded in my memory. I was ready. And then, three days before the job was to start, I was leaning over my little son when he jumped up unexpectedly. His very solid head hit mine, breaking my nose. I ended up greeting my very first clients with two black eyes and a swollen face. All the preparation in the world, and then—SLAM.

As it turns out, parenting is a bit like this. Most of us prepare for parenting, which is understandable since it’s arguably the most important job we’ll ever have and we want to get it right. We paint the baby’s room, buy a stroller and a crib, and practise changing diapers on other people’s babies. As our own baby’s appearance day draws near, we feel more or less ready for showtime.

Then your child arrives. You feel the earth move underneath you. Your axis tilts. You are in the midst of one of the most incredible psychological and emotional shifts a human being can experience: you are now a parent, responsible for another life in this world. Suddenly, there is a new North Star guiding your big choices and your smaller everyday decisions. And you are keenly aware that those choices and decisions will shape your child, a thought that is both exciting and scary. You thought you were prepared, and then—SLAM.

The hard-to-grasp truth is that parenting right from the start begins much earlier than the weeks and months before your baby is born. In fact, it begins long before you even decide to have a child. The act of parenting is shaped by how you see, interpret, and respond to the world around you. And this world view took shape in your mind long before you became an adult, let alone a parent.

Some people shift into parenthood with more ease than others, though most admit to struggles along the way. Despite all our careful prepping and planning, many of us find it hard to get our bearings. We may worry that we’ll never master this round-the-clock parenting gig, given that the job description changes almost daily. Just as we get the hang of the three-naps-a-day schedule, it’s suddenly time to deal with two naps and more frequent night wakings. Or maybe we’ve made it through the first wave of separation anxiety only to be confronted with the onset of toddler tantrums. Every time we think we’re in a groove, our child’s development changes, and we must keep grooving right along with them.

Through it all, our minds may be partially off-line. Not simply because of fatigue, but also because we may not understand the subconscious forces that are driving us. And yet, these forces—a series of beliefs buried so deep within our psyche that we may not even know they exist—colour all we perceive and do as parents.

You’ll certainly be aware of some of these beliefs, such as your views on education or household rules. But many more operate on a subconscious level. You may believe that you’re not good enough, for instance, or that you must always please others ahead of yourself, or that you are not worthy of receiving love and affection. You may believe that as a parent you should be all-powerful, or that your child should be happy just because you want them to be. Whatever your beliefs—and regardless of whether they are conscious or unconscious—you will feel their effect, especially in those yucky moments that all parents experience from time to time, when you’re overwhelmed and full of self-doubt and guilt.

Soon enough, you’ll discover an interesting thing about parenting: you will do things for your children that you might not do for yourself. I was a competitive figure skater until the age of sixteen. My mother spent many hours driving me to and from practices and competitions, sitting rinkside watching me, and sewing and adorning costumes. Now in her early seventies, she will tell you that she never spent a fraction of that time doing what she should have done for herself—activities such as exercising, seeing her friends, and making time for her own hobbies. Why would she forego her life for mine? Because she believed, as many parents do, that self-sacrifice is what it means to be a “good” parent. We say and do all sorts of things as parents, some of which we love, some of which we hate, and much of which we are barely aware of and would struggle to explain.

You may find that being a parent can also stir up challenging emotions and experiences. For example, what if you were the kind of organized, methodical, and logical person who always kept a tidy home and prided yourself on your same-day email turnaround? Then one morning you realize you haven’t showered in three days, you are still carrying your baby weight, your house is caked in dirt, the sink is full of unwashed dishes, you have mountains of laundry to do, and growing piles of paperwork are demanding your attention. “What happened to me?” you think. “I’m a mess!” Bam! You are seven years old again, feeling inadequate compared to your older, more capable sibling, and worried that the world is laughing at your incompetence.

What if I told you that in the midst of the laundry, the dirty dishes, and the self-doubt, you would be hit squarely on the nose by the opportunity of a lifetime? That part of doing right by your child includes seizing the significant opportunity that parenting provides for your own growth? Would you take that on at full throttle knowing that it would serve not only you but also your child? This is the powerful gift that comes with being a parent. Parenting is a transformative wake-up call that beckons us to fully emerge into the human beings we were meant to become.

You know that feeling you get when you’re sleeping peacefully and then your alarm sounds and shocks you into alertness? Well, when you’re blissfully unaware of the growing up that you may still need to do, becoming a parent is exactly like that—jarring and unpleasant. But don’t let that deter you. Time to wake up, sleepyhead! Your full and beautiful life as a parent is waiting for you.

The experiences shared by the many parents I have worked with in my clinical practice over almost twenty years, as well as my own experiences as a mom, have shown me that parenthood is full of joyful moments. There’s the wonder of watching your child grow right in front of you—first smiles, first steps, first words. The feeling of warmth that fills you when a smile breaks out on her sweet little face as you walk through the door. The squishy tenderness of his pudgy little hand reaching absent-mindedly for yours. It isn’t all work.

But you will definitely have moments—maybe many of them—that will smack you in the face. I’m not talking here about feeling angst-ridden over the colour of your baby’s poop, or sleep schedule, or an older sibling’s acceptance, or whether it’s time for solid food. That would be too easy. What I’m talking about are the moments of doubt or unease that settle over you, a feeling that you just can’t put your finger on, regardless of whether you are a new or experienced parent. It might be the pervasive sense that something is wrong, or a niggling feeling of depression that won’t lift. It might be the awareness that you are constantly in conflict with others (your partner, family, or friends) over parenting issues. Maybe you find yourself acting in ways that you don’t want to act. And maybe you come to the uncomfortable realization that “I am turning into my mother/father,” or “I don’t want to be a yelly-shouty parent, so why do I behave like this,” or “I swore I would have it together and now I feel as if I am falling apart.”

The good news is that you don’t have to wait for these feelings of doubt and unease to blindside you before addressing and alleviating them. Every person who becomes a parent will experience some version of a wake-up call. It’s universal—which means you can expect it and prepare for it. This knowledge is your power. It is the invitation to step into a fuller understanding of what you and your child need in order to grow in the best way. This invitation is exactly why I have written this book. When you understand the powerful impact of the parent-child relationship on growth and development, and your own needs for rest and awareness, you will be more attuned to how to care for yourself and your child. And this, in turn, allows you to avoid being swallowed whole by parenthood’s rude awakening, saving you from years of angst and upset.

Over time I’ve come to understand the two most powerful influences that affect how we parent: one is how we were parented, and the other is our family’s history. Research shows that we are likely to replicate the programs of our own parents; ¹ that is, we parent as we were parented, even if we swear we won’t. Research also shows that the experiences of our ancestral family members are passed along to us through our DNA.² Although we may not have experienced what our parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and other ancestors have, their feelings and experiences are nevertheless lodged in our genes, and they can manifest in how we respond to our lives as parents and beyond.

The combined effect of these two influences is what I refer to as your “program.” Whether consciously or not, you are run by this program. It lives buried within your sense of self and colours everything you see and do. But when you bring that program out of its deep nesting place and into your conscious awareness, you are empowered to do two things: first, you can predict your program’s influence on your life and the life of your child; and second, you can rewrite the parts of your program that do not serve healthy growth. This is what I refer to throughout the book as “doing your work.”

It is work to acknowledge our deeply entrenched programming. It is work to accept that our interior programs (rather than our unruly and needy children) are what trigger and unsettle us. And it is work to understand ourselves in a new light so that we can live life in the present rather than driven by events that are in our past or buried in our family history.

Keep in mind that even the best parents are simply unable to give growing children everything they may need. This is a static reality of our human existence. However, whether you are already the parent of a baby or young child, are on the cusp of becoming a parent, or are just thinking about bringing a child into your life, this is the time to make deep and conscious decisions about the kind of parent you want to be. In fact, those decisions are the most important step in the growth process for both you and your child.

This is not the time to be daunted and defeated. Even in the most difficult moments, the opportunity exists for parenting to be empowering and inspirational.³ The shame you feel when enduring the judgmental stares of others during your toddler’s meltdown can be transformed into an unwavering understanding of your swagger and competence. Your despair in being overwhelmed by sleepless nights and endless fatigue can be the call you need to understand the limitlessness of your own power. Day in and day out, little and big moments like these offer you the opportunity to choose a story that works for you rather than against you—guaranteed. By exploring these two influences more deeply here, you will be able to understand when they are at work within you, and how best to rewrite your own narrative. And then, duly armed, your choice is in whether or not you answer the call and step into the fullest possible version of spectacular you.

Your Parents’ Programs

As you become a parent, one of the most important things you can do is to deeply consider the parent-child relationship you existed within during your formative years. What pieces of that relationship may still need to be understood and transformed within you? Understanding those core psychological and emotional pieces may afford you the opportunity to “grow up” more fully and, in turn, to be available to the growing up of your child.

When you were born you were thrust into the most intimate space of the parent-child relationship. This first experience of relationship is so potent and formative that it serves as the template for all other relationships to come. The way our parents interact with us shapes our brains and ultimately our sense of who we are in this world. This first relationship can dictate much of what we may become in life.

The parent-child relationship can be viewed as a continuum. At one end is the child who experiences being cared for, physically and emotionally, in a consistent manner. Note that I didn’t say “in a perfect manner.” No parent can ever be perfect. But this template would allow that child to emerge into a solid sense of self, capable of recreating intimacy in other relationships. Statistically, it would also mean that they are much more likely to perform well at school, be healthier, and be less likely to suffer mental health issues.⁴

On the other end of the continuum is the parent-child relationship fraught with challenge. This child’s needs were not consistently met. Perhaps it was a relationship in which a parent’s long absences or lack of emotional availability resulted in the child feeling abandoned, or one in which a child was maltreated or neglected. This baby is likely to grow into a person who struggles in varying degrees with physical and mental health, relationships, and/or employment.⁵

What you need to know is this: it’s virtually impossible for any parent, anywhere, to come into their parenting gig with a neutral, blank slate. Add external societal influences to the mix and it’s easy to see how parenting can become a quagmire of unease and self-doubt. And given that we know how formative and all-important the parent-child relationship is, it doesn’t take a leap of faith to understand that the prevailing cultural and psychological norms of any parent’s day will have a deep influence on that relationship. Resistance is almost futile. So, no pressure!

Your Family History

Though the first source of parental programming is inadvertently passed on by our parents, a second major source comes from generations past via our genes. The collective history of our ancestors is transmitted down the family line through our DNA. The science of epigenetics has revealed that it isn’t purely your DNA sequence that determines the expression of those genes. Rather, the conditions around you can turn on or heighten the expression of some genes while turning off or suppressing the expression of others. In this way, experiences—including traumatic ones—are encoded in the body at the cellular level.

The influence of traumatic experiences can be genetically traced through several generations. Psychologist and author Mark Wolynn describes this transmission of trauma powerfully through stories of his clients with family members who died in or lived through the Holocaust, as well as clients who have grandparents, aunts, uncles, or even more distant relatives who experienced the death of a child or witnessed terrible violence or any other perceived trauma. He provides a thorough and accessible scientific account of how this occurs in his book It Didn’t Start with You.⁶

Take a moment to consider this: females are born with all the eggs they will reproduce from and more. That means that a female’s genetic material was inside of her grandmother at the time of her mother’s conception, and so on down the line. Given the process of epigenetics, this means that a woman’s cells may carry the experiences of her grandmother at a cellular level. For males (who produce new sperm across their lifetime), the link will be stronger with their biological fathers and what was happening in that father’s life at the time of the son’s conception. However, men and women can inherit genetically coded trauma from either or both of their parents, and hence from either or both of their paternal and maternal lines.

The case histories around intergenerational trauma are eyeopening and numerous. My great-grandmother was separated from her Indigenous tribe when she married a European settler who had come to Canada in pursuit of a better life. After she married, she lost her connection to her people, her village, her community. She gave life to seven children, but sadly she suffered from numerous mental breakdowns until eventually she ended up in an asylum, where she lived until her death. Her young children were farmed out to relatives and orphanages upon her institutionalization, and they endured their own challenging and traumatic experiences.

Time marched on. I came into the world and proceeded to have a fairly typical childhood. My parents eventually divorced. I went on to marry and have my own children, and then I also divorced. During my divorce, I became consumed with the idea of “losing” my children. I wasn’t worried that I would lose my children to the child welfare system—there was never any question of that—but moment by moment, issue by issue, as my boys’ father and I navigated the first year or two of separation and divorce, I was paralyzed by a single thought: What if they choose their dad over me?

Why was I thinking this? As a child psychologist, I am supposed to be attuned to these types of misperceptions. But even my years of education and experience were no match for genetics. I felt angst over potentially losing my children because the loss of my family system is encoded in my DNA. No matter what is truly happening in my life, I will feel this loss at some level of my consciousness, and will look for ways that this trauma is “real” in my life’s circumstances. Knowing the story of my ancestral roots and being aware of the influence of genetically inherited family trauma, I was able to piece together this understanding relatively early on. It was oddly comforting to be able to make sense of my fears in this way, and freeing to know that in the simple act of making the link, I was resolving the issue. I have worked within my own therapeutic process to deepen this resolution and bring a sense of peace into my life instead of fear.

The inheritance of family trauma through DNA is something anyone can experience. Almost always, it involves the replaying of unprocessed trauma—abuse, deaths, scandals, and/or losses that were never talked about, that may have been forbidden topics of conversation, or were buried deep in the skeleton closet. The entire spectacular reality, as Wolynn so aptly details, is a subconscious program coded in your genes. It isn’t anything you have done specifically, although if you are reliving family trauma you will likely feel wholly responsible for it. Sometimes inherited family trauma is discernable because of its peculiar and sudden onset, such as the young man who suddenly started having panic attacks after his twenty-first birthday, the age at which his grandfather was wounded in battle during the Second World War. Other times it will play out and continue to manifest in seemingly mysterious ways, and only when the family’s historical puzzle is pieced together will what is truly happening become obvious. Major life changes, milestone birthdays, and other notable happenings can often trigger the replaying of a family trauma story.

Becoming a parent is certainly a major life change—and, not surprisingly, even this happy event can be the gateway to the reliving of family trauma. This may be because much of what people historically experience as traumatic within their families often involves children. It’s not that children experience traumatic things more often than adults; rather, it’s that when bad things happen to kids it tends to be more traumatic than when bad things happen to adults. Trauma has a more devastating impact on children because their brains are not yet developed enough to safeguard them against the effects. The traumatic experience then becomes the organizing force of the young, developing brain (rather than being processed and buffered by the mature brain of an adult).⁷ As a result, childhood trauma can have significant and lasting effects. A parent who carries trauma from their own childhood can be triggered when their own child reaches the same life stage at which the trauma was experienced.

Although trauma can be genetically transmitted from one generation to the next, that does not mean there is no escape. The same cellular process that transmits family trauma contains the potential for healing it. Any individual can retroactively process their family’s historical experiences to effect real change in their own lives, and in the lives of the entire family system, so that their children will never suffer the same way. Occasionally, with self-reflection, people can accomplish this on their own. More often, especially with deep programs that are having a large impact on an individual’s life, reprocessing and healing will require the support of a trained coach, therapist, or healer.

Let’s be real for a moment. I write parenting books and counsel parents and kids, but I needed someone to guide me. I couldn’t believe that my unconscious mind was running the show. I was reliving old patterns until my counsellor and teacher pointed them out—and then I couldn’t stop seeing them. My counsellor introduced me to modalities I’d never heard of. Some included talk therapy; others worked to bring my subconscious mind in line with my conscious mind. For example: I am a child psychologist and a fierce mama; I know that I am awesome and my kids are lucky to have me. Yet when they went to their father’s house for a night, I worried they were going to leave me. I tried to talk myself out of this thought but to no avail. My subconscious mind believed this, and my conscious mind doesn’t give the orders. My counsellor directed me to a subconscious “healer” who helped me absorb the statement, “My kids will never leave me” until I felt an internal shift. The worry still comes up, but I am able to tend to it now; the walls are no longer crashing down on me.

I also looked for a village of people who would support my personal development. Thankfully, my counsellor had already created one. Every week, she holds a circle filled with people who are facing the challenges raised by their marriages, their children, other relationships, their finances, and their health. They are challenged by the same things I am, and I heal through witnessing their work. When I am challenged by life and stuck in blame and unable to find the opportunity for growth, I can put up my hand and ask for help. When I am not at the circle, I can call any of these people at any time to make sense of what is going on for me. I have created an entirely new village to help me grow myself up while I grow up my children.

Attachment-Centred Parenting

You now have a deeper understanding of the influences working away on how you parent. You know that you bring baggage into this wonderful and exciting role—some that you’ve carried in on your own, and some that has been passed down to you from generations past. Either way, this new knowledge has put you in a much stronger position to break free of habits that may not be in your child’s best interest, or yours. And there really is no better time to take that leap than right now. Society is in the relatively early days of a sea change in our understanding of human development, a change that is leading to a new understanding of what children need from their parents and how their parents can provide it. Thanks in part to contemporary advances in neuroscience and the science of child development, we now know that secure attachment in the relationship between a loving caregiver and a child is utterly essential to a child’s healthy growth.

Attachment theory has brought about a radical shift in the study of child development since it was initially developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the 1940s,⁸ and more deeply studied and scientifically understood through the 1970s and 1980s. Psychologists such as Edward Tronick, Bruce Perry, Megan Gunnar, and Daniel Siegel have amassed a large body of evidence-based science irrefutably linking attachment to healthy child development.⁹ In fact, attachment may be more essential than food in terms of a young child’s hierarchy of needs.¹⁰ What this research tells us is that children need to be seen, heard, and responded to by someone who loves them in order to thrive. Along with the concept of consciousness—understanding the programs that live below the surface in us and run our lives—attachment theory is the philosophy on which this book is based.

The Dominance of Behaviourism

As intuitive as attachment-centred parenting might seem, it is a recent development in our pedagogical practices, coming hot on the heels of a far more pervasive and persuasive approach: behaviourism. The driving force behind behaviourist-influenced parenting was that if you wanted good behaviour in a child, your job as the parent was to manipulate that into being. Indeed, this behavioural manipulation would virtue signal that you were a “good” parent. Today’s parents (or anyone whose parents were born after the 1930s) were likely raised according to the tenets of behaviourism, which was the psychological and cultural norm of their own parents’ day.

A disturbingly far cry from the science-based principles of attachment theory, behaviourism has its roots in Ivan Pavlov’s experiments in classical conditioning, such as the iconic one featuring the ringing bell and the salivating dog. But it was John B. Watson who established and promoted behaviourism as a game-changing psychological theory.¹¹ Watson was an early-twentieth-century American psychologist whose research focused on applying the science of prediction and behavioural control to child development. He went so far as to warn parents, “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument.”¹²

Watson’s work influenced renowned American psychologist B.F. Skinner, whose theories came to dominate child psychology in the mid-twentieth century. Skinner’s approach was to keep children famished for their parents’ love, affection, and approval. Many twentieth-century parents wouldn’t have thought to question this approach, which amounted to withholding love and affection in order to control a child’s behaviour. Behaviourism has ruled the day for decades in Western society, likely in part due to the outward appearance of quick results. What parents and even scientists failed to realize, however, was that these so-called results were achieved through a devastating sacrificial play. The parent’s relationship with the child was wielded as conditional, and it was in rendering conditional a bond we now understand to be essential that a well-behaved child was produced.

One of the earliest societal steps away from behaviourism and toward attachment-focused parenting came with the publication of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. Published in 1946 amid behaviourist fervour, this wildly popular parenting book espoused a more child-centred approach in which parents were encouraged to let their love for their children flow freely, to embrace flexibility over rigidity, to treat children as human beings, and to trust their own intuition as the only true expert on their child. Mothers flocked to buy his book and devoured its contents with relief, making it the second bestselling book of all time (behind the Bible). But Dr. Spock faced a long campaign of public scrutiny and a backlash that blamed him for encouraging mollycoddling, laziness, and a host of social ills. He may have encouraged a step toward attachment, but Dr. Spock was not successful in overriding the popular notions of behaviourism that were deeply entrenched in Western parenting culture.

Unfortunately, of all the psychological theories that influence the pop culture of child-raising, behaviourism is the most dominant, even to this day. You will continue to run into parents (and non-parents!) who are quick to offer advice that feeds off the finger-wagging admonitions of the behaviourists, such as when they advise you to “train” your children using consequences and other disconnection-based antics. Don’t fall for it! (I’ll explain why not throughout this book, and have written extensively on this in Discipline Without Damage.) The bottom line is that the generation of parents influenced by the allure of behaviourism (and who among us has not secretly wished for well-behaved children at one point or another?) would have been hard-pressed to escape trying out some of its tenets on their children—and that includes you.

Above, you learned that you can understand much of your own programming by identifying what was missing from the parenting that was practised on you. As you seek this understanding, you may need a safe place to vent years of anger and sadness. Many of us have tried to explain away our childhood, shut down our feelings, or numb them out. But what we don’t express, we repress, and often it will depress. Once you let it out, you may find it easier to call on compassion and remember that your parents were not bad people or terrible parents; they were simply raising you according to the norms of their day, as well as grappling with their own challenges. The science of child development has added more information to the knowledge bank since then, and this includes understanding the negative impact of behaviourism.

What Behavourism Doesn’t Get

The trouble with the behaviourist approach is that it lacks an understanding of three key areas in the development of a child: attachment, developmental awareness, and consciousness. Each is crucial to understanding why a child behaves the way they do. Parenting right from the start includes creating a solid foundation for your child that grows from these three concepts. Let’s explore how each of them can infuse your parenting with the most up-to-date principles in child development science.

Attachment

Attachment-centred parenting emphasizes the importance of relationship and connection. As a basic rule of the human condition, our most significant emotional and psychological events, both positive and negative, will occur during our first six years of life. This is because (a) we form our deepest attachments with our most significant caregivers during this formative time, and (b) this is when a child’s brain is wiring up at the rate of approximately one million new neural connections per second.¹³ You grow as you go.

Dr. Gordon Neufeld, a noted psychologist, has explored in detail how we move through the process of “becoming attached” in the first six years of life.¹⁴ During this process we are danced into our sense of self, into who we are and how we will be in this life. Naturally, there will be other formative influences and experiences in the years to come, but the most influential foundation is laid in those first six years. The takeaway? During those first six years of a child’s life, parents have the most powerful opportunity to reach into that growing brain and wire it up in the best possible way.

Since love and human connection are essential to healthy growth and development, the human child is born programmed and wired to seek out this connection constantly. There is no rest and no growth for the human child in the absence of this connection. All of the child’s energy goes to ensuring the connection is maintained, which leaves little to direct to the task of growing up. And knowing that children are wired to pursue that connection at all costs, it comes as no surprise to learn that children understandably become eager to restore it, should it be interrupted. Often, though, disconnection is mistakenly co-opted in the name of “discipline.” This happens when parents purposely interrupt the connection to alarm the child into seeking reconnection by halting whatever behaviour they are engaged in. Timeouts offer one example of how disconnection can be used to get a child to behave. Others include consequences, the removal of privileges, reward systems, and any other parenting “strategy” that has at its core the spirit of disconnection. Even a tactic like orchestrating a fake “leaving behind” scenario to persuade an uncooperative child to follow plays on a disconnected approach.

If you are in the midst of sourcing parenting “strategies,” you’ve probably uncovered a mountain of disconnection-based approaches (and virtually nothing that would have you leading your child along the trajectory of their optimal growth and development). Any parenting expert who suggests that they have the art of parenting distilled down to a three-step strategy or has attempted to script you through a one-size-fits-all, tightly regimented routine of discipline will rely on disconnection-based approaches, almost without fail, to manipulate the behaviour of children. Child development specifically, and the human condition generally, does not lend itself to regimented, scripted, concocted tricks and strategies. These approaches are mere temptations, luring parents with a purportedly quick fix because they appear easier, tidier, and more convenient than the alternative. But the long view shows us that children need connection. Full stop. They do not need tricks, strategies, and manipulation.

These disconnection scenarios are problematic because they are sacrificial plays of the worst kind. They manipulate the child, putting their greatest need on the line in the name of desirable behaviour. As these scenarios play out over the course of days, weeks, months, and even years—in ways both big and small—the effects can add up. This is particularly troublesome when we consider that neuroimaging studies have shown that, at the brain level, the experience of relational disconnection is akin to that of physical pain.¹⁵ But it’s just as important to understand that you cannot permanently wreck your kid with a few minor transgressions (more on this later). Keep in mind and take to heart that there is always a way to repair through a heightened focus on connection and the championing of healthy, normal development.

You cannot, however, give to your child what you did not get in your own childhood—unless you are willing to acknowledge those gaps and work to fill them in. If you were parented from a place of disconnection, as many parents reading this book will have been, this may be the driving force of your own parental impulses. Even if you experienced a primarily positive childhood, it’s still possible to suffer from the smaller and larger misses of that experience. If you experienced significant wounding as a child, it could be that the blueprint for how to be a parent may be missing altogether. And if that wounding was subtler in the context of an otherwise healthy parent-child relationship, it’s possible that there are some nuanced pieces missing from your parenting code. What does this look in real life? Here are a couple of dramatic examples.

One father I know lost his father early on in life, and then he lost his mother to her grief (though she did not die, she was not able to see and hear her son because of her grief). Sadly, his mother lost her next partner to a horrific death a few years later. This meant that in addition to having lost two fathers, this man also twice lost his mother to grief. Yet through his journey he awakened and is an incredibly conscious, attuned, and present dad for his lucky children. Another father I know journeyed along a similar path, but he lost his battle with addiction, lost his children’s mother to her addiction, and ultimately lost his children when they were placed in foster care. He was unable to awaken. He could not give his children what they needed. If these children were lucky enough to have an adult with a sparkle in their eye and big love in their heart step into their lives somewhere along the way, they would have a chance to develop resilience and heal from all of these losses and ruptures. This is the extraordinary power of attachment.

On the other end of this wounding spectrum are myriad softer scenarios. Many of you had parents who were present and available, but perhaps you were punished with loss of privileges or activities if you didn’t do well at school. A common enough approach, but one that taught you that acceptance is contingent on performance. Believe it or not, that lesson has stayed with you—and until you work through that equation of self-worth with goal achievement, you will be held hostage by the fear of failure. And you will likely pass this same belief on to your children.

Whether the wounds are deep cuts or small nicks, it’s essential for every parent to understand that we must make sense of them in order to avoid unintentionally handing them down to a new generation. But as you explore and work through these wounds, don’t get stuck on the idea of being “wounded.” Simply think of wounding as a normal part of being human. And over-identification with what went wrong in your childhood will not serve you or your child. Instead, accept that there is work to do, and that all of it is within your grasp. Parenthood shines a light on the necessity of this work, which will give both you and your child an amazing chance to grow up healthily.

Developmental Awareness

How many times have you sat in a restaurant and watched a child under the age of six receive a scolding for not sitting still during a meal? Or heard a three- or four-year-old admonished for not sharing? Or observed an eight-year-old punished for having a meltdown when asked to take out the garbage? Or witnessed a fourteen-year-old get grounded for freaking out when told they couldn’t hang with friends on a Friday evening?

The parental response of punishment and consequence for such actions is not an uncommon occurrence in our world. Yet each one of those examples represents a child with an underdeveloped brain responding exactly as they should according to their stage of development. Many of us fall into the trap of expecting a child to absorb and adopt adult behaviour even though the human brain doesn’t fully mature until sometime in the mid to late twenties.

That six-year-old fidgeting at the dinner table is incapable of sustained focus and attention; the three-year-old simply cannot share; the eight-year-old hasn’t developed the self-control needed to stay calm in the face of a roadblock like “chores” when what he really wants to do is shoot hoops; and the fourteen-year-old is bound to lose control of his feelings in the face of big emotions. So settle down, big people. Your kiddos are being and doing just what they are meant to be and do along their entirely normal developmental journey.

The trouble is that waiting for development to occur can be bothersome for us big people raising children in a fast-paced world. We try to hurry development along rather than championing it at every point along the way. But children are not small adults, and we cannot force them into adulthood. Self-regulation will look different in a baby, a toddler, and a preschooler. Babies bite because they know no other way to settle their bodies down. Toddlers have tantrums because they are trying to figure out how to become their own person, even as they lack the ability to settle themselves in the face of heightened emotion. Preschoolers shove, push, hit, and don’t wait their turn because those behavioural niceties are still a foreign language when they are taken over by a big desire or need. We must respect that children are growing a brain at the rate of billions of neural connections a day. That level of growth will need to continue for years before they have any natural ability to manage their impulses and make “good choices” with some semblance of consistency.

Once, after I presented a workshop, a father told me how his nine-year-old son had been struggling to manage his big emotions in response to disappointing news or requests by his parents to complete chores. Every time the child lost it, his parents would reprimand him for his “bad behaviour” and use behaviourist-inspired strategies such as consequences, timeouts, and removal of privileges. One day, after yet another of these incidents, the father asked his son in exasperation, “What is wrong with you? Why can’t you do as you are told and stop reacting like this? I’ve told you a million times!” In his gorgeous, infinite wisdom, the son replied to his father, “Dad, what is wrong with you? You’ve told me a million times and I still can’t do it. Why do you keep telling me the same thing over and over when I can’t do it?” Nailed it.

You cannot make growth and maturity happen faster by demanding its progression. As David Loyst, a child development specialist who works with children with autism, says, “I’ve never seen a plant grow faster by pulling on the top of it.” Instead of demanding development, a parent’s job is to inspire it and champion it. Now recall that connection and attachment are the foundations for healthy child development. When a child is asked to adopt behaviours that are not yet a natural part of their developmental repertoire, that child is forced to reject development in the name of acquiescence so that they can maintain the connection and secure approval from their parent. How many times did this scene play out for you as a child, whether in your home or in a classroom?

Many of us have internalized this scenario, this dance of “do it or else you will pay with a loss of approval, acceptance, or connection.” And now we risk recreating it as parents—unless we are willing to bring it to our awareness and work determinedly to sidestep it. We need to understand wholeheartedly how relationship is essential to healthy child development. And we need to simultaneously reject the option of withdrawing attachment and connection from our children in the name of good behaviour or unrealistic developmental expectations. Growth takes time. Development takes time. Building a strong relationship with our children will ensure that this all goes down exactly as nature intended.

Consciousness

Humans have developed the understanding that our minds are who we are (thanks to Descartes, “I think, therefore I am”), that our minds define us and our concrete reality. We can be led to believe that the thoughts we have about what has made us happy or angry or sad or scared, about why someone looked at us a certain way, about why our child did or did not get into the school we wanted them to attend, and indeed about why our children behave as they do, are a reflection of an absolute truth. But to believe that your thoughts are your concrete reality is probably one of the most torturous misconceptions humans experience.

When my son entered the fifth grade he changed to a school an hour away from our home and had to start taking the school bus. He began to complain about the antics of the older children on the bus, who would sometimes tease and use foul language. One day early in the year this behaviour escalated and prompted me to contact the school so the situation could be turned around. Make no mistake: my mama-bear self was out in full force. I was angry!

On the next school day, I drove my son to the parking lot where the bus picks up all the children. I parked so that anyone looking out of the bus windows would be able to see my face. I even rolled my window down to make sure they could see that I was watching. I watched closely as my son got on the bus and started walking toward the middle to find a seat. Then I saw some of the older boys pointing. My son turned back and walked toward the front of the bus, where he took a seat. I nearly leapt out of my car and onto that bus to tell those awful kids that they weren’t going to dictate where my son sat, much less say or do any of the other unkind things they’d been up to. I held onto myself, though, trusting the bus driver to manage the situation. All day I told myself stories. All day I played out the exact way I would put those boys in their place once and for all.

At the end of the day my son hopped off the bus and into our car for the ride home. I waited for the right moment in the conversation and did my best to be relaxed as I asked him what was up with the older boys on the bus that morning. He looked at me, confused, and so I explained that I’d seen him walk toward the back and then turn around to take a seat near the front after they pointed at him. And then the most fabulous thing happened. He laughed.

Now it was my turn to be confused. He explained that the boys weren’t being mean at all; rather, they were being kind. He said he likes sitting near the front; he gets less motion sick, plus it’s quieter. He didn’t often get that seat because a younger boy sits there. On that day, however, the younger boy was not on the bus and so the older boys had generously let him know the seat was available, should he want it. Well. How had I so misinterpreted what I saw through the windows of the bus that morning?

The answer is that my perception was distorted. Without any distortion, what I would have seen that morning is my son getting on the bus, the boys pointing, and my son turning back to sit down near the front. The end. True, my son’s earlier experiences on the bus had distorted my lens, but the bigger distortion came from my mind, my experiences. In fact, throughout the whole experience, a pre-existing “program” from my subconscious mind was running the show.

When I replay the experience of believing that the older boys on the bus were unkind to my son, I relive feelings of panic, fear, indignation, and shame. I would love to tell you with absolute certainty where those feelings came from, but the truth is I cannot. Perhaps they reflected a previous childhood experience of feeling unsafe around other children, or older kids, or people in a position of power over me. Perhaps they flowed from a time in my childhood when I was in trouble for something, unable to defend myself, and then punished accordingly. Or perhaps it was the result of a buildup of childhood experiences that led me—and perhaps you in your own circumstances—to feel as I did. Here is the important thing to know: the knowledge of where these feelings and thoughts flow from does not have to be crystal clear for you to work through them. You just need to understand that your thoughts are not always grounded in objective reality. And this is where consciousness comes into play.

The subconscious mind is formed by our past experiences. As a result, living consciously requires that we understand that our reactive thoughts and feelings in any given situation, and the resulting behaviours, are going to be a reflection of our past.

In his book The Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton tells us that the subconscious mind is running the show, and at twenty million bits of information per second, no less (the conscious mind can process merely forty bits of information per second.)¹⁶

Being consciously oriented means bringing the subconscious mind to the surface and making sense of those beliefs with the conscious mind. To be conscious is to deeply understand that when you feel unsettled or upset or angry or sad, those feelings are not purely a reflection of the current situation but are influenced by the experiences you had when your mind was being formed. Most often you won’t be able to pin these feelings of upset to a specific event. They may be an accumulation of early experiences, or they may be the result of something that happened when you were pre-verbal, leaving you no known narrative with which to link them. Either way, when you are experiencing a big, loud, overwhelming feeling, know that you will be best served by making sense of that feeling by understanding its links to the forming of your mind.

Where parenting is concerned, the problem with subconscious behaviour is that if you interpret your perceptions and feelings as truthful and use them to guide your responses, you are essentially parenting from the past. You are not responding to life as your grown-up self. Instead, you are responding as your child self. And children are not equipped to raise children. To parent as adults, we need to make sense of the workings of our subconscious mind, which is why parents today are being invited to do their own work. Raffi Cavoukian, the celebrated children’s troubadour, included “Conscious Parenting” as one of the nine principles of his Covenant for Child Honouring, one that is championed by the Dalai Lama.¹⁷

We must dive into the feelings that are potentially triggered by day-to-day living and parenting and make the link between these feelings and our formative past. Our next task is to take care of the child within us—that little boy or girl who was misunderstood or not fully seen or not completely heard or who otherwise didn’t get their needs met —and reassure our child selves that we see and hear them fully. Until there is connectivity between your adult and child self, you may feel at odds. You may have the unsettling experience of being disintegrated rather than integrated.

Recently, I sat in my office with a mom who was expressing her significant frustration at the mess her children seemed to constantly leave in their wake. She was beside herself, trying to get them to co-operate in keeping their home tidy. I listened to her story and to the long list of things she had tried in an attempt to get the situation under control. She joked that she must have the worst case of obsessive-compulsive disorder I had ever seen. I asked what her home was like when she was young. She described a large family of eight children with parents who were unavailable physically (they were workaholics) and emotionally, in that she and her siblings were more of a nuisance than celebrated beings. She said everything was loud and messy and out of control, and she’d hated that. In the middle of her description her eyes widened. “Oh my goodness!” she said. “It’s not them, it’s me, isn’t it?”

All of her frustration, her frantic efforts for control, and her feelings of desperation harkened back to the time when her mind was forming. And now, responding to her own children from her four-year-old mind, she was feeling the flood of it anew, and mistakenly finding cause in her children’s developmentally appropriate behaviour. The trigger occurred in present time, but her panicky, overwhelmed feelings came from her past experience as a panicky, overwhelmed child. The chaos in her childhood home had made this mom feel disoriented and unsafe. She’d been powerless to bring order to the home, and that powerlessness may have been even more frightening than the noise and mess that caused it. It’s also possible that she may have been temperamentally more sensitive to disorderly environments than her siblings, which would have made an already stressful home environment downright traumatizing.

As author and Jungian analyst James Hollis says, it is often our narrative about our childhood experiences rather than the experiences themselves that brings us stress in our adult lives.¹⁸ But as an adult, this mom knows now that she is not powerless. Although she can’t control everything, she can see to it that her home is functional and the most important things are attended to, even though there may be more mess in the house than she would ideally like. When we allow ourselves room to grow, we can be fully available to the growing of our own children. Thanks to the inevitable organizational upheaval that comes with having children, this mom was presented with a wonderful opportunity to tend to those little-girl experiences within and grow herself up that much more. And with this awareness, she became much more capable of acting as a competent guide for her own children.

Think about your own parents for a moment. Did they do this type of conscious, mindful work within themselves? If they did not, they likely responded as their child selves rather than their grown-up selves when parenting got tricky. In turn, this means it would have been almost impossible for you to come through your childhood completely unscathed. And that one simple recognition presents grown-up you with a fantastic opportunity. The bottom line is this: if we parent as we were parented—and fail to do the work to create consciousness around the process—then we can only bring our child as far as we were brought ourselves. This is truly the most amazing gift that is given to us as parents: the opportunity to recognize clearly what our work is, to do that work, and to grow both ourselves and our children in the process.

Creating a Program All Your Own

If the potential exists to change your programs at a cellular level, then it’s also possible to create your own program and eliminate those from the past that no longer serve the interests of you or your children. This requires taking the time to recognize, understand, and work through the programs that are living in your subconscious system; to connect those programs to the experiences in your present-day life that are bringing you stress and upset; and to grow from there.

But we also need to dismantle some of the societal programming surrounding the reason we become parents. One of the most insidious myths new parents face is the notion that becoming a parent is meant to make you happy—that parenting is a gigantic, euphoric, idyllic, heart-warming experience. This myth does not line up with the emotional reality of many new parents, who may be thinking one or all of these things: I will never get this right; my baby doesn’t like me; everybody thinks I’m doing this wrong; it’s pathetic how scared I am. This internal conflict can force even the most steady and even-tempered individual into their child self and ancestral family programming. Suddenly you are acting like your mother or your father, or even one of your grandparents.

The truth is—and some of you may find this shocking—we do not become parents to be happy. Multiple research studies show that parents are among the unhappiest groups of people.¹⁹ Instead, and unbeknownst to many prospective parents, becoming a parent is a precious invitation for growth that will either gently present itself or smack us in the face, as the need fits. One of the reasons we become parents is to finally get the chance to grow up ourselves. But the task of growing up is not for the faint of heart. It takes commitment and grit and a massive sense of humour and humility. The American scholar Joseph Campbell made this same point about marriage: “I think one of the problems in marriage is that people don’t realize what it is. They think it’s a long love affair and it isn’t. Marriage has nothing to do with being happy. It has to do with being transformed, and when the transformation is realized it is a magnificent experience.”²⁰ You can apply the same ideas to becoming a parent.

Know that you can change the story about challenging parenting situations while simultaneously accepting their difficulty. It’s a universal truth that parents of babies and young children may not get as much sleep as they are used to. If you find yourself in this boat, you have two choices. You can think to yourself: “I am so exhausted! I cannot cope!” Or you can turn over this negative mantra in your mind and say instead: “My body will do for me what it is supposed to do, and I am grateful for visits with my baby in the quiet of the night.” Maybe your toddler is having a lot of meltdowns. Do you choose to think, “I cannot believe that on top of everything else I now have to deal with an unruly toddler!” Or will you choose to think instead, “I love his ferocity of spirit”? Part of being an adult is to fully own your reality and to know that you have created it with your thoughts—the good and, yes, the bad. But more important is to fully embrace the idea that if you don’t like a thought, if your story isn’t working out for you, you can choose a different one. Parenting is not about waking up every day bathed in happiness; it’s about waking up every day fully alert to and immersed in the living of life. Understand that making sense of your own experiences of being parented will be essential to growing up yourself, and your child, in the best possible way. Through time, openness, and hard work, you will land on a universal truth: the best way to make sure that your child turns out okay is to let that little person inside of you grow up into the adult they were meant to be. This is the greatest gift of parenthood—the invitation to create a program all your own that allows for equal-opportunity growth in parent and child. Wow. Thanks, kid!