Guilt: Are You Alive Enough?

When I first saw the cover of Time magazine's issue with the nursing 3 year-old on the cover, I had really mixed feelings. I believe that a nursing relationship is a private matter and that mother and baby/child need to negotiate this relationship according to what works best for their family. Breastfeeding can be a wonderful way to nurture a relationship that goes well beyond nutrition, but this photograph felt like something else.

The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests babies nurse "for at least the first year of life and beyond for as long as mutually desired by mother and child."*  That last part is critically important. As long as is mutually desired. I nursed my kids well into toddlerhood and that worked for us, but it doesn't work for everyone. What anyone else does or doesn't do with their kids should have little to do with what you feel you "should" or "shouldn't" do with your kids. Get information. Make informed decisions. But don't do something because you feel like you should. If it isn't coming from your heart, it isn't going to create connection. And just because something isn't right for you doesn't mean that it doesn't work very well for another parent.

When I moved beyond the picture on the cover of Time, I was struck by the title. Are You Mom Enough?

What does that mean? Are you mom enough for what? I see parents every week who are struggling with the things that have happened since they became a parent. Whether it is a mom who doesn't want to breastfeed anymore but doesn't know how to transition away from it, or parents who are struggling with what happened with their birth because it didn't go the way they planned, I see parents who are all doing the best they can do. And they all have something in common: guilt. They wish they felt differently. They wish something happened differently. They wished they'd known something they didn't. They wish they had been braver, smarter, faster, had a better doctor, or known how hard becoming a parent was really going to be.

Feeling like they're "enough" is not part of their stories. I don't often see parents who say, "I'm so glad that I ended up with the c-section." I hear parents who didn't want it to go a certain way and who don't know how to deal with it when it happened differently than they'd planned.

Instead of it being yet another competition to see who is "mom enough," why don't we see if we can be connected more deeply to our own aliveness, embrace our unique circumstances and decisions, and become compassionate enough to support parents even if we don't understand their decisions and choices. What if we all embrace our humanity, knowing that we're all doing the best we can do with what we've been given? It is in our aliveness, in our consciousness, our awakeness, that we can wise up to the fact that some publications thrive on feeding the guilt mothers are already feeling. When we realize that if we are simply ALIVE, compassionate, and empathic as parents, we can remind each other that we're ALL doing the best we can do until we all feel it within our own bones.

Let's feed a movement of love, compassion and support for each other, instead of the mommy wars. We're all raising this next generation in the best way we know how given our own personal life experiences and challenges. What can YOU do today to encourage another parent? To build up instead of judge? To lift up another parent who is struggling? Tell me about it. Let's make this world a better place- together.

* Pediatrics Vol. 115 No. 2 February 1, 2005
   pp. 496 -506
   (doi: 10.1542/peds.2004-2491)

Book Club starts tomorrow!!

The Consciously Parenting Book Club Starts Tomorrow!!

Tomorrow, we'll be delving into the world of Navigating by Inner Guidance and What (on earth) are your child's behaviors communicating?! 


"Inner guidance doesn't have formulaic solutions, but always comes back to connecting with your children in the relationship, holding the importance of everyone's needs whenever possible."

We'll be looking at what it means to parent by inner guidance and we'll look at some tools and some science to help us shift our understanding of our own behaviors and the behaviors of our children. If you're familiar with my Brain Stoplight, we'll be looking to see how it applies to our parenting, along with understanding the concepts of regulation and dysregulation. We'll explore some real life questions and help you apply the ideas to your own life!

If you'd like to see a real life application of these ideas, check out last week's blog, Reconnection, Not Perfection. 

Book Club FAQs
Do I need to have the book to participate?
No! You can join in the calls and you'll get a sense of what the book is about. It is a great opportunity to ask your questions if you've been reading the book, though. Remember, you can get the first three chapters right now at no cost!

I can't make the live calls. Can I still play?
The calls will be recorded live at 10:30am eastern on Wednesdays. If you're unable to join the live call, we'll have the calls available for replay the following weekend. Just sign up for the Book Club and everything you need will be sent to you.

I like being able to listen to calls like this at my own convenience and to listen to them again later. What can I do?
The calls will be available for purchase so you can explore the ideas at your own pace, or explore the ideas again next year or as your children grow. You can purchase them while the series is being recorded at a discount here.

I'd like to purchase the book. Where can I get it?
The book is only available right now through the Consciously Parenting Project's website as a PFD or a downloadable mp3 audio book. Now is a great time to buy the book because we're having an early bird special! Eventually, the book will be available as a printed book, CDs, and in other e-book formats, but we're still working on those.

Do I have to join the Facebook group to participate in the Book Club?
No! You can just listen in on the live call or to the recordings. The Facebook group is intended to be a place to ask questions and continue the discussion with other parents who are exploring the ideas of the book. It is a private group, meaning only those who join the group can read the posts and join in the discussion. Join here. 


The call will be recorded in case you miss it. And do let me know if you have questions for the call by posting on my blog comments or adding questions to the Facebook group. Hope to *see* you tomorrow!

Reconnection, Not Perfection

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E-book Give-Away! Consciously Parenting, Book 1

Today is the day!! 

I'm launching my first book as an e-book and an audio book: 

Consciously Parenting: What It Really Takes to Raise Emotionally Healthy Families! 

This is the first book in a 4-part series. I'm SO excited to get this book off my computer and into the hands of parents.

I'm also excited to announce that I'm giving away an e-copy! 

Scroll down to the bottom of this post for how to enter. 


If you win and you already bought it, I'll refund your money!

You can also click here to sign up to receive the first 3 chapters at no cost to you.  Here's an excerpt from the book:

As parents, we have a steady diet of conflicting information coming at us from all directions. The long list of essential dos and don’ts has most of us spinning our wheels in indecision, not knowing what we’re actually supposed to do to parent our children. We follow parenting advice from “experts” even if it doesn’t feel right because we aren’t sure what else to do or we feel that someone else must know what our child needs better than we do.

Consciously Parenting is about listening to your own inner guidance system, trusting your own inner voice about what is needed in your family and for your child. It is also about finding what you need and finding a way to meet your own needs in a way that still respects the needs of your child and the needs of the relationship.

Consciously Parenting gives us a compass and a map to help guide us on our parenting journey with 8 guiding principles based on current science, using intuition as our guide. No one knows our child the way we do and yet we’re so close to our own children that we can’t always see the bigger picture. Consciously Parenting is about gaining a different vantage point and remembering that the most important thing we can do as a parent is to focus on the relationship.

We’re going to make mistakes. And that’s OK. Actually, “mistakes” allow us the opportunity to reconnect and repair the relationship when there has been a disconnection, which is a critical part of attachment. Sometimes we will reach out to reconnect and sometimes it will be our child. And sometimes it will take a while before we can see that our own story is getting in the way of reconnecting.

Parenting is a journey, not a destination. We’ll take “wrong turns” and end up in scary back alleys, but we need to remember that it is only a wrong turn if we don’t learn from it. Eventually. Lessons will be repeated until learned and parenting does a great job of providing opportunities for us to learn.

We become parents because we want to have a loving connection with our children. We want to feel joy and wonder and we become frustrated when we feel anger, resentment, confusion or pain, when we see our child is suffering and we don’t know how to help her. Or maybe we’re aware that we are the one in pain. When we begin to focus on the communication behind the behaviors, we begin to see our child in a new light. And we begin to understand ourselves more deeply. Parenting becomes a gift, a treasure.

             Copyright © 2012, The Consciously Parenting Project, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Mandatory Entry:

• Simply leave a comment below letting me know why you’d like to win!

Additional Optional Entries: (not required to win, come back here and leave a separate comment on this post for each additional entry.)

• Like The Consciously Parenting Project on Facebook
• Follow The Consciously Parenting Project on Twitter
• Subscribe to the Consciously Parenting Newsletter
• Share about this giveaway on Facebook
• Tweet about this giveaway, feel free to copy the text below:

Enter to win @tcparentingproj e-book! Enter thru 4/1/12!

• Giveaway Details:  The give away will be open until midnight EST Sunday, April 1, 2012. Winner will be announced by Monday, April 2, 2012.
• No purchase necessary to win.
• Must be 18 years of age or older to enter.
• If prize winner forfeits or does not claim the prize, prize will be re-awarded at my sole discretion.
• Void where prohibited by law.
• Make sure to leave a separate comment for each entry. Winner will be chosen at random!
• Odds of winning based on number of entries.
• This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.
• NOTE: In order to enter the contest you must leave a comment on my blog post. To leave a comment scroll to the bottom of the post fill in the form. (If you are reading this via RSS, you will need to visit my actual blog to post a comment.)
• If you purchase the e-book and win a free copy, we'll refund the amount of your e-book purchase.
• Good Luck!

Navigating by Inner Guidance in Parenting (book excerpt)

Consciously Parenting: What It Really Takes to Raise an Emotionally Healthy Family by Rebecca Thompson, MS

The following is an excerpt from Consciously Parenting book, Part I, Foundation of Relationships, to be released March 2012. For more information and to continue reading, visit: http://consciouslyparenting.com/book to sign up for more free excerpts and the first 3 chapters of the book at no cost to you.

Navigating by Inner Guidance

Now, as then, so many families are still struggling, and parents don’t know what to do. Many parents have gone from expert to expert only to find themselves back in the same place or in a worse place than they were before they followed the “expert” advice. At a very early age, most of us learned that the answers are outside of ourselves, and so we seek external solutions to our problems. We think that someone else is going to come and save us.

Part of the problem is that we’re afraid to not follow the advice of someone who seems to know what they’re talking about. Even when something about a piece of “expert” advice doesn’t feel right to us, we disregard that still, small voice within us, and things get worse. Or while we may know intuitively that something isn’t right or makes no sense, we don’t know what to do instead. In the past, much of the parenting information out there has been conflicting at best and misleading and damaging to relationships at worst. We’ve all heard so much information about parenting that we don’t know what is really correct anymore.

That’s where I found myself as a parent. I was listening to my heart and doing the best I could with the information I had, but it wasn’t working. I simply didn’t know where else to turn or what else to do to help my family out of the rut we were in on all levels.

Eventually, I realized the solutions to all the things we struggle with personally and as parents can be found inside us. Like the way back to Kansas was for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, what we’re seeking can be found within. The difficulties our children present to us are opportunities for us to grow beyond where we are in this moment. My child wasn’t trying to manipulate me, but he was providing me with an opportunity to grow and learn. Parenting our own children provides a unique opportunity to learn about our early experiences. It puts a magnifying glass on those things that worked well for our own parents and those that didn’t. It allows us to understand how we feel about our own needs and the needs of our children, but only if we allow ourselves to be aware and see the parent-child relationship with new eyes.

Truly connecting with our children takes waking up, stepping into full consciousness, and reconnecting with ourselves and our own inner wisdom. It will probably be one of the most difficult things we will ever do, but it is also one of the most rewarding. I know firsthand that finding your own voice can feel daunting. Like stepping off the shore into the ocean, we must first go through the crashing surf before we reach the calmer, gently rolling waves on the other side. Everything becomes easier when we have passed through the rough water and found that we can handle what floats our way. However, it isn’t always an easy journey. Storms are bound to come up and test our ability to stay connected to ourselves in this new way. Indeed, parenting in this manner is a journey, not a tropical island destination at which we arrive with our luggage and simply  unpack and settle in with a frosty tropical beverage, happy kids in tow.

We’re going to start with you, and you will be modeling what it looks like to stay connected to yourself. By doing so, your children will learn to connect to their own inner guidance rather than looking at external sources to find answers. Your children are going to be on their own at some point, out in the big, wide world without you. Helping them find their own internal compass is one of the best things you can do to help them prepare for the real world. We’ll take a look at what navigating by the internal compass looks like at each developmental stage. (And these developmental stages are based on a child’s emotional or developmental age, rather than chronological age.)

With our parenting decisions, we have the power to create connection instead of disconnection, love instead of fear, peace instead of discord. Then we can return to our natural “perfect” state of harmony, peace, and joy.

Like what you see? Sign up for more at no cost to you! http://consciouslyparenting.com/book

5 Simple Ways to Nurture Relationships

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An Alternative View of Tantrums and Emotional Upsets

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