Now, can you share with us some of the advantages that conscious parenting have over traditional parenting? And how can conscious parenting be done in such a way where we don't raise drunk-headed children?

Yeah, I mean, the idea that the only way that you get children who are willing to be harmonious and or children who are cooperative is if you instill the traditional parenting or use that model, I think is Interesting.

It's interesting for me to think about that as a viewpoint, that that's how we develop children who are going to be harmonious is to somehow enforce the do as you're told, because I said so, authoritarian power over parenting.

Because what you develop are children who know that, I guess you could say they know their place and their places that they don't ever upset anyone around them.

So the idea is that we have children who are able to actually stay connected to their inner sense of self in culture, in society and in their family system.

And so that may mean that you have more of a, what do I want to call it, robust intellectual conversation in your family at your dinner table than you would otherwise with children who know that they're not supposed to speak up or say anything that may upset, you know, father knows best, mother knows best, whatever the culture is.

My experience is that when you shift into conscious parenting, you shift into the guidance approach is what it's called.

Okay.

You've been doing this a while.

I've been doing it a while, just the guidance approach.

Before that, I was doing it, uh, as a slightly different program.

But, um, yeah, so I studied under Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of the Restorative Justice in American Prison Systems and the founder of Nonviolent Communication, CNVC, and that just, like, shook my world.

It was so profound, um, especially around the thing that he really touched me was that how I hear you and the power that I have to choose how I hear you had never crossed my mind before, that somehow that was up to me.

And who did you say said that?

Krishnamurti, who's a, um, a very famous, um, Indian sage.

And I, I learned it in the non-violent communication world, and Marshall Rosenberg in trainings, he would have, like, a little black book in his breast pocket, and he would just pull it out in the middle of the conference and start writing things down, and we would ask, "What are you doing?" And he said, "I'm just observing my mind, and how critical it is, and just all the stuff that it comes up with." So the ability to become the observer of your mind, and to see all of the evaluations that it wants to basically throw out there.

Uh, how can we begin identifying the patterns that no longer serve us or the people we care about?

Yeah.

So I think that- Sometimes what will happen is that we have enough space within ourselves to be able to be the observer as opposed to being merged with our experience, so that there's at least enough space for us to be able to see that, wow, I'm in a dance.

Sometimes we call this the dance of anger and defiance.

And, you know, everybody's playing their part, and we're all in this web.

And the dance of, of our pattern of interaction, I notice that I have that same dance going on with this person and that person and another person.

At that stage, hopefully we can begin to be curious about the fact that something around our interacting with these other people is not effective.

So, uh, can you share some practical, uh, tools people, uh, can use to pause, regulate their emotion, and respond more intentionally?

The effort you put into that, you know, being specific with what it was as opposed to just these labels that don't really mean anything.

Absolutely.

Absolutely agree with you.

So, you know, we get into the land of non-blameful descriptions of behavior.

So observation without evaluation, being the observer and just being able to say, you know, when you when you left all your stuff on the floor in the living room, I literally I was walking across the room.

I almost I almost tripped.

I just caught myself.

in ways that we don't even because how many times as adults have we just you know because something happened and then a child does it age appropriately you know like i because i tell parents sometimes you're having a tantrum right now let's you know take a time out i only i i don't i don't require i don't ask children i suggest that parents not give their to put their children in time out i suggest they take time out so they can yeah i do the same yeah