(Stillness in the Storm Editor) As someone keenly interested in solving the world’s problems, I began studying psychology with greater enthusiasm and focus several years ago. Since beginning that research project, what I have uncovered about the human condition, how it forms, and what factors are the most influential, the childhood experience is one of the most important factors. What I learned was that how we raise our children, on average, in the modern world is one of the primary causal factors that lead to the instantiated suffering, social, relationship, and socio-political problems we deal with today. This is what I call a taboo truth, a truth that is so uncomfortable and unsettling, the vast majority of people—even self-declared truthers—scoff at considering it.
Who wants to be told that their most intimate experiences in life, their childhood experiences, played the most influential role in the problems they deal with today at a personal level? Even worse, what parent wants to be told their parenting method or style could be creating lifelong problems in their children—especially given how heroic of a feat raising children in the modern world is? No one, that’s who.
Parenting and Programming
And yet, as the research proceeds, a case continues to be made more robust that well-nigh all the personal and interpersonal problems we face emerge due to how we were programmed as children. Of course, it should go without saying that parents are merely carrying out their own programming, parenting style and modalities are mostly derived from what a person experiences when they were a child. And culture influences that programming to a large degree. By the time you go to have children, if you’re like most people, you already have a host of biases, preconceptions, and behaviors ready to go. But are these really good for our children? Are we just carrying out the cultural programs of our parents or are we questioning the merits of these practices to ensure we don’t make the same mistakes they did?
Most people at least at some level recognize that they have a chance to give their children a better life then they had. But how do you know if you are in fact doing that? How do you evaluate what is “better?” This is where cultural influence comes in.
The fact is, most people lack the knowledge to make a qualified assessment of how their behavior affects other people at a deep psychological level. Most of us have been raised using behavioral modification techniques, that are so woven into the fabric of society, they seem like unquestionable truths. In short, we look to culture to tell us if what we’re doing is right. Generally, if we think everyone else is doing it we tend to assume it’s probably OK. But that isn’t an effective way of determining if something is beneficial or not.
Behavioral Modification
As an example, consider behavioral modification. It’s an aggressive and personality destroying method of interacting with people, particularly raising children. It assumes, the child’s personal choice is secondary to the parent, in fact, that they have no innate personality, that what the parent wants the child to do is the most important, and the child should sacrifice their own personal desires and needs at the altar of pleasing their parent. Although parents don’t think of this way, this is the presuppositional or philosophic foundation to modification.
From the parent’s perspective, it works; a child will be less likely to misbehave and be more motivated to do chores and homework. But the cost is hidden and lifelong. A child loses their capacity to self-evaluate, they literally can’t feel good about their own efforts because they were never given a chance to have a personal opinion about it. Everything always has to be approved or disapproved by the parents. As you might imagine, this forms a personality structure in the child with a greater tendency for codependency, what Stefan Molyneux calls Me Plus programming, wherein a child feels forever lacking in who they are, and only feels complete when they receive the adoration of another.
The Black Box Problem of Microculture
What’s interesting about parenting and raising children is that it is itself a form of microculture.
The parents form a cultural environment via their relationship. They have certain tastes, opinions, attitudes, ways of doing things that become habitual in the relationship, acting as modeling guides for children that are born into that environment.
Microcultures are sealed off from the outside world to a certain extent as well, and as a result, it’s not so easy to compare our microcultural creeds, maxims, and morays against other people, for the purpose of determining merit. That is, you might have a best friend, but they probably don’t tell you what their internal family life is like—at least not all the details. And often we don’t have discussions of merit wherein we tell our friends and family how we deal with a situation, asking for insights on how to improve. No quite the contrary. There is a whole realm of human interaction, the microculture of the family and relationship environment, where our reasons for doing what we do are so intimate, we’d never allow another to evaluate them. To do so would feel very threatening.
What this does is create an extremely compartmentalized family environment. It’s so sealed off from the outside world, it can lead us to believe what we’re doing in this microculture is perfectly fine and acceptable, especially if it’s how we were raised.
The overall effect of this microcultural compartmentalization along with a general culture that tends to make discussions of parenting style a taboo topic, is a perfect storm situation. It makes it so that we lack the opportunity to really understand the effect of familial culture on a developing child, and ourselves. And due to the ego-frameworks active in contemporary life, most people would feel threatened and attacked by anyone questioning their chosen parental style and microcultural attitudes.
As a researcher with a mission to find solutions to problems that affect the human condition, this microcultural anti-evolutionary variant makes it very easy for long-standing psychological problems to flourish. And this is no accident.
The powers that be have known for ages of time that causing deeply ingrained personality disturbances in a population ensures they’ll be much easier to control, mainly due to the fact an individual is struggling to gain internal order, and thus, has no mental energy left to focus on solving world problems, like instantiated corruption via despotic elites.
What if all we needed to do was change how we interact with each other? What if a few brave individuals faced the truth, took the time to gain knowledge of the best way of being, and acted within that best way in their social relationships, particularly raising children?
The good news is that while studying microcultural influences of the familial unit and romantic relationships is fraught with logistical challenges, there’s enough anecdotal evidence available to suggest that yes, a single person’s choice to align themselves to better ways of being directly translates into improved quality of life for them, and their progeny.
Simply put, culture, whether the microculture of the family or the grand culture of society, is the soil from which an individual is grown and raised. If we restore the soil so as to be more in harmony with good practices, if we learn how to talk about have discussions of value and merit wherein we can identify deleterious cultural conditions and replace those with beneficial ones, imagine what we could do? Imagine the generations raised in such an environment of true nurturing, support, and development?
All it takes is you, beginning the self-mastery and social harmony work. And if done well, your children will have vastly improved living conditions. They will be smarter, happier, more productive people, the very kind of people we need in the world to change things for the better.
– Justin
by Staff Writer,
The peaceful parenting approach gives a broader understanding of the dynamics between the parent / educator and the child. To approach parenting challenges in a more constructive way, it’s important for the parent to be aware of (a) what they’re modelling through their responses to their child, (b) the importance of trying to meet the underlying needs that may be driving the behaviour, (c) the skills that the child needs to develop for future situations and (d) that the connection, care and warmth in the relationship is the biggest contributing factor towards a child’s behaviour and needs to be preserved.
The peaceful parenting philosophy that Genevieve teaches equips parents with the tools to transition to a non-punitive connection based parenting approach. It’s based on past and current attachment research and at it’s core is the recognition that to bring about long lasting positive change, parents need to gain a better understanding of what their child needs in their growth and development. A parent gaining a greater awareness of their child’s attachment and developmental needs (when explained in simple enough terms), leads to a greater motivation to learn the parenting tools which hold the value of the parent child relationship at the core.
Genevieve understands that the necessary change needs to happen first and foremost at the emotional level, which is why peaceful parenting puts equal focus on helping parents develop the self-awareness and emotional self-regulation skills needed to change. In supporting parents in their learning, growth and change, Genevieve shares her in depth experience and study of the many and varied tools for self-growth, self-healing, mindfulness and meditative practices.
This contrasts with traditional parenting approaches which often focus on the child’s behaviour in isolation, often using punishment as a strategy for modifying behaviour. Although using punishments, rewards or threats may work in the short term, adopting a punishment-free approach is a key factor in establishing relationships that are based on trust and mutual respect, for creating a healthy team spirit in the family. The Peaceful Parenting approach fosters more willing cooperation, integrity and self-discipline in children (slowly over time as their natural development allows) as opposed to fear based obedience.
Genevieve shifted the focus of her work away from teaching and counselling adults with a wide range of personal challenges (over the previous ten years) to specializing in the field of counselling, coaching and teaching parents. Along with her husband Dan, she founded the Peaceful Parent Institute in New Zealand in 2004, and since that time peaceful parenting has been adopted by parents and professionals around the globe who resonate with this much more respectful and even therapeutic model of parenting.
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Parenting Without Punishment
Parenting without punishment is essential when supporting the child to make choices from a place of integrity, self-discipline and self-responsibility rather than fear of disapproval or desire for reward. Creating a culture of mutual respect, empathy and respectful listening, sensitivity to each person’s feelings and diplomatic problem solving all help to foster communication in the family that’s based more on love, respect and compassion. So, not only is there an alternative to punishment, it’s the only alternative that leads to long term peace and harmony in families and effectively meets children’s needs for emotional safety, security, developing emotional intelligence and unconditional love.
Clear communication, boundaries and limits
Peaceful parenting is based on clear and patient communication and trust in the child’s basic goodness. When a child doesn’t respond to their parent, instead of raising your voice or inserting a thread, instead make physical contact, come down to their level, touch them kindly, calmly get their attention, be clear about your expectations and ask them what they’ve understood. And if it’s an ongoing problem, it’s likely indicative of needing to invest some quality time together to truly listen, to play, to generally rebuild the warm connection.
Limits are set by the parent with confidence, giving the child a very clear understanding of what the limit is, while maintaining a warm connected and supportive relationship with the child. It is an approach that constantly models a much more mature form of communication which fosters connection, confidence, trust, lateral thinking, problem-solving skills, and conflict-resolution skills. Peaceful parenting is a model that aims to meet the needs of both the parent and the child, while teaching and modeling flexibility and adaptability. Peaceful parenting is NOT permissive parenting. Permissive parenting falls into the two categories of being either neglectful when a parent is disengaged or over indulgent where parents are unable or unwilling to hold limits thereby compromising the child’s development of emotional adaptation – adapting to frustrations and disappointments. Overly indulgent permissive parents may believe they’re protecting their child from the frustrations, grief and disappointments that limits evoke, yet when a parent maintains warm connection and empathy while holding limits, when limits seem reasonable and important to hold, they are greatly supporting their child adapt to dealing with limitations, while also helping them develop and understanding about the balance of needs.
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Mutual Problem Solving
Adopting a democratic, mutual problem-solving approach to parenting lifts both the adult and child out of the power struggle. This approach teaches parents to relate primarily to the feelings beneath the behaviour and to respond primarily to the feelings. When a child’s response shows upset, rather than criticizing them, show care of their feelings “hey my boy, you seem upset, tell me about it”, which helps children learn to identify their own feelings and increases their emotional literacy greatly. This contrasts with many traditional parenting approaches which focus on changing a child’s behaviour using techniques that involve time-out and creating artificial consequences for the child which tends to cause children to feel stressed, defensive, rejected and rebellious These responses create a tense and emotionally insecure environment for children to live and learn in. This tension causes children to feel stressed, insecure and rejected and greatly increases their tendency to be resistant, rebellious and reactive.
Punishments fail to identify and attend to the underlying needs that drive out of balance behaviour and are no more effective in gaining genuine listening, calm communication and willing cooperation from our children as it would be from another adult.
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Role modeling: Do as I do
One of the most profound ways that children learn is by watching our behaviour. When we use manipulation, threats, bribes or punishments of any kind, we are modeling to our children that this is what they should do and how they should be in relationships. Consequently, this will become their default mode in attempting to make others act the way they want them to act. In other words, they will naturally think and feel in terms of manipulating, bribing, threatening and punishing. If a child is then being told by their parents not to manipulate or coerce others, they are receiving two opposing messages: one from their parent’s words; the other from their parent’s actions. And as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words.
Why children behave ‘badly’
Aggressive or hyperactive behaviour, or speaking with “whining” tones, are generally symptoms of unmet needs, the child may be hungry or exhausted, may be overstimulated or they may have a need to release their pent up stresses and frustrations. It may well be an indication that there’s too much chaos and aggressive tones in the family and the child is feeling disconnected, defensive or overwhelmed. From the peaceful parenting perspective, we’re always seeking to explore what the underlying needs may be that are driving the behaviour. When we give children the safety and permission to feel and express their feelings, children can return to balance and again live happily in the moment. When children are emotionally settled and calm, they can naturally give their full attention and enthusiasm to their daily play and learning. On the other hand, the child who carries a backlog of invalidated and unreleased tears and fears is less available mentally and emotionally and will be generally frustrated, unsettled or inhibited – which of course manifests in the more chaotic and resistant behaviours.
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Parents also have needs
The parent’s need for emotional support and release is just as big and just as valid as the child’s and the first is actually a prerequisite for the second. For this reason, we also offer understanding about how the patterns from the parent’s own childhood influence how we parent as adults. Although most parents endeavor to parent with patience and kindness, all parents understand that putting the principle into practice is no easy task and it’s unfair to “expect” ourselves as parents to just be calm and non-critical without a lot of learning, support and quite a lot of processing of our own emotional hurts. It is important that we have the opportunity and support to process our own emotional hurts so that we can move in a more positive direction with our parenting.
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The workshops, seminars, and online Village which Genevieve offers
On the seminars, workshops and eCourses, Genevieve gives information and examples from her years of working with individuals, children and families. She also shares her in-depth study of the work of Dr. Aletha Solter, psychologist and author of “The Aware Baby”, “Tears and Tantrums” and “Raising Drug-Free Children”, the work of Daniel Siegel, psychiatrist, author of “Parenting from the Inside Out”, John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory, Bruce Perry, founder of the Child Trauma Clinic and others in the field of cutting edge research in child development, the work of Robin Grille, author of Parenting for a Peaceful World and Heart to Heart Parenting.
We teach our children through modeling first and foremost. When parents coerce children with punishments, threats and bribes, they condition their child to naturally think and feel in terms of manipulating, bribing, threatening and punishing. If they are then being advised by their parents not to attempt to manipulate others (coercion), the child is receiving two opposing messages; one from their parent’s words, the other from their parent’s actions and day to day communication with the child.
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Recommended Reading:
If you’d like to learn more about peaceful parenting, as well as the articles on this website, you could get hold of some of the books on our Books page. They are all books that work from a similar value system of non-violent communication, parenting without punishment and parenting through connection. We particularly recommend one or more of the books of Dr. Aletha Solter. Dr. Solter is a Swiss/American developmental psychologist and author of four parenting books. Dr. Solter is recognized internationally as an expert on attachment, trauma, and non-punitive discipline.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4GXM4oxWmI
Not sure how to make sense of this? Want to learn how to discern like a pro? Read this essential guide to discernment, analysis of claims, and understanding the truth in a world of deception: 4 Key Steps of Discernment – Advanced Truth-Seeking Tools
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Source:
https://www.peacefulparent.com/the-peaceful-parenting-philosophy/
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