Book I: Consciously Parenting
If you’ve been wanting to do things differently in your family and you aren’t sure where to start, this is your manual. Consciously Parenting: What it Really Takes to Raise Emotionally Healthy Families walks you through 8 guiding principles to help you focus on your relationship (the thing that matters the most in all of parenting) instead of just the behaviors, helping you to see those behaviors (yours and your child’s) as a communication. Through stories, science, and questions to ponder, you’ll finish this short, parent-sized book with ideas you can implement and inspiration for your relationship with your child, no matter how old your child is.
Consciously Parenting:
What it Really Takes to Raise
Emotionally Healthy Families
by Rebecca Thompson Hitt, MS, MFT
Book purchasing options:
⇨ Buy the PDF e-book
⇨ Buy the downloadable MP3 audiobook
⇨ Buy the Paperback from Amazon
⇨ Buy the Kindle version
8 Guiding Principles of Consciously Parenting:
Principle 1: All behavior is a communication. Behavior reflects the internal state of the individual and the relationship’s level of connection.
Principle 2: The parent-child relationship is more important than any behavioral intervention, consequence, or punishment.
Principle 3: Children unfold neurosequentially, and quality, connected relationships allow for the unfolding. A need met will go away; a need unmet is here to stay.
Principle 4: Behaviors occur on a continuum. Behaviors in children (and parents, too) correlate to the parents’ own neurodevelopment and attachment status.
Principle 5: Parental interpretation of behaviors comes from both a conscious and subconscious place, resulting in positive or negative neurophysiological feedback loops.
Principle 6: All individuals have a right and a responsibility to learn to express their feelings appropriately. Feelings allow us to connect to our internal guidance system.
Principle 7: Children need boundaries. We can set appropriate limits for our children while still respecting their needs and feelings- if we are aware of ourselves. (We can ask, for example, “Is this about me? Is this about them? Are my children communicating a need? Is the boundary I’m setting necessary, or is this an opportunity for me to grow?”)
Principle 8: No man is an island. We need to create communities of support for ourselves and for our children. We need to take care of ourselves so that we can take care of our children.
Consciously Parenting 101 (Pay-What-You-Can Membership Community and Course)
If I could recommend just one resource to all families, it would be the Consciously Parenting 101: Dive into Book 1 with Rebecca Thompson Hitt and Jen Kobrick. Whether you’re working to heal or integrate experiences together or you’re doing ok and just want to keep heading in that direction as your children grow, no matter how old your kids are (even if you haven’t conceived yet), this is the resource for you.
