Are you a present (enough) parent?

Here's how to tell:

Not sure whether you’re a present (enough) parent?

Here’s how to tell:

What kind of proof are you gathering?

What are you doing with this evidence?

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Let me expand:

Many parents parent kind of on autopilot - they are either consciously or unconsciously committed to either:

1) repeating their parents style (well, my parents did it this way, and I turned out just fine!) OR:

2) doing the exact opposite of their parents (well, when my parents did this it really didn’t work for me, so I have to do it the exact opposite way with my kid and I’m being really rigid and really literal about it (that’s a tell btw))

I hate to break it to you but these are BOTH examples of trauma perpetuation, not cycle breaking. It’s just that in the case of #1, the pattern is A-A-A-A-A-A through the generations. In the case of #2, the pattern is A-B-A-B-A-B - but it’s still a pattern that is undisrupted.

Both #1 and #2 are not really present parents - they’re both trapped in the past and navigating the present according to the rigid precepts of the past. BOTH of these styles of parenting (#1 and #2) set parents up for misattunement and disassociation.

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A PRESENT parent is a parent who is not just open to contradicting evidence, but a parent who is actively and consciously aware that they are a detective - someone actively and consciously collecting evidence.

They are not just blindly and wholesale deploying parenting styles, assumptions and tactics - gentle parenting, authoritarian parenting, scripting - they are ACTUALLY checking in to see if these strategies (some of which they paid good money for and some of which have been heavily espoused and prescribed by capital-E Experts) are giving the results that they desire and giving sustainable, generative results for BOTH child AND parent.

To be a present parent is to be a curious parent. Once we’ve made up our mind about something, the “reward” is we get to check out, phone it in, take our metabolically intensive cognitive antennae offline.