Archive for the ‘Parenting for Peace’ Category

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Blessing Pregnancy

KristinBlessingway_optIt was my pleasure and honor to participate in a Blessingway ceremony for Kristin, a member of my mountain community whose baby is due this fall. As I watched her sitting in her chair of honor…like a goddess on her throne…and we showered her with our womanly care in various ways — massage, braiding & adorning her hair, laying hands on her belly — I thought about the biochemical messages her baby was receiving during those lovely hours: I am loved… I am celebrated… the world is a safe, nurturing and caring place.

I was reminded of Michel Odent’s phrase, “the function of JOY in pregnancy.” It has a blessed function and a scientifically supported one: to build the baby’s brain in a way to be prepared to thrive and succeed! To read more about pregnancy as “Nature’s Head Start Program,” check out my article on mothering.com.

 

 

Photo by Mary Ann Halpin

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Got “Difficult” Kids? Zip Your Lip w/ me in L.A. TOMORROW!

If your sweet little one has become controlling…bossy…whiny…it may be that you’re doing too much negotiation, collaboration & explanation. If you’re in the L.A. area I hope you’ll join me as we dive into this powerful “Zip Your Lip” tool that can bring SO much more confidence and peace to your parenting!

And if it’s not geographically possible for you to be with us, you can read more about this unexpected connection between too much talking and too little peace here at mothering.com.

GoodLifeZipLipTalkClick on invite above to link to Evite. [Be patient–it’s a slow-loading page!]

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Like Geese, I’m Headed South — to Asheville

I’m off to Asheville, North Carolina to teach an all-day class in how to foster the healthiest brain development in children. Because this is a training for professionals working with young children and/or parents of young ones, I had to give it an appropriately scholarly title — “Towards a Neurobiology of Thriving: A Parenting for Peace Toolkit for Building Healthy Young Brains.”

The cool thing is, even though it is an opportunity for professionals to earn their CEUs (Continuing Education Units), the organizers are making a low-price registration available for any interested parents who don’t need the credits, just the info!

MAHEC Workshop

Sound good? No worries!

Can’t make it to Asheville? We here at P4P headquarters are whipping up some great ways for you to get much of these same great tools and resources…so keep your eyes peeled: this is going to be a bountiful fall season for Parenting for Peace folks!

Toodles for now…

Marcy

 

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3 Rules for Bedtime Reading

New research reveals that fewer and fewer parents share bedtime reading with their children. More than one-third of parents in one study don’t do any bedtime reading with their kids. Whether it’s due to time-crunch, life stress or (as reported by almost half the study’s parents) that their children prefer television, toys or computer games, dropping bedtime reading creates a loss with potential lifelong repercussions. My rules simplify things to help nurture and protect your bedtime reading routine.

I’ll keep this brief, because frankly, I think one of the culprits in this erosion of bedtime reading is the sheer overload of information and choices parents are faced with. How many books, which books, how to choose, when to squeeze it in…ayyyeeeeee!!!

My 3 rules are different from the standard, same-old-same-old you can find in dizzying quantities on the internet, such as the importance of not just reading but also interacting with your child about the meaning of the story, for example. (In fact, that guidance inspires my Rule #3, because there is a pitfall in that recommendation!) Also, the word “rules” is a bit strict sounding. In a distinction made funny & famous in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean, they’re not so much rules as guidelines — to leverage the most possible raising-a-peacemaker bang for your reading buck. {Read the rest at mothering.com}

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Have a Drink!

waterIt will make everything better, I promise. No, I’m not suggesting you have a swig of Mother’s Little Liquid Helper**, I’m inviting you to have a refreshing glass of water. This may be the shortest blog post I’ve ever written, because this is pretty straightforward and uncomplicated: drink more water and get your kids hooked on water! If you already do this, you don’t need to read further. For the other 99% of you, please fill ‘er up and read on. Frankly, I’m a tad annoyed that the First Lady is getting all the press (and some backlash–read on) for something I’ve been yapping about for decades: most of us don’t drink enough water, and we would feel MUCH better if would drink more water.

[** Not gonna lie — there were many afternoons during my mothering-young-children days when I fantasized about having an actual drink…and sometimes I actually even had a drink. Never in an unsafe way — if there was any driving or heavy machinery operating in the near future… but there it is. I guess I’m in a confessional mood. My go-to cocktail? Prune juice with a splash of vodka, because they’d never ask for a sip of my prune juice!!] I digress. {You can read the rest of this refreshing post at mothering.com!}

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4 Ways to De-Stress Back-to-School

Four Ideas for Simplifying Life While Enriching Education

ClassroomIs it me, or does time seem to just keep going faster? Here we are again in the early weeks of a new school year…already!

In my day [best stated in crochety, old-lady voice], we were very excited for back-to-school, in large part, I think, because summer’s pace was soooooo much slower than it tends to be these days. There weren’t all the summer programs, the series of vacations, the catch-up tutoring. There were long, hot days filled with swimming, catching pollywogs, reading comics and Nancy Drew, and walking to the corner store for candy. Maybe a horseback riding or dance lesson sprinkled in occasionally, or a family outing to the river. Rinse and repeat, for 75 days, and you are ready for the refreshing rigor of school. {Read more at mothering.com}

Image
by CDC on Unsplash

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The Lifelong Power of Birth Imprints

C-SectionSpotlightI cannot let Empowered Birth Awareness Week close without reflecting on the fact that birth leaves powerful lifelong imprints. Our empowerment lies in becoming aware of them and from understanding that these birth imprints are always available to be revised, renegotiated and healed. In a moment I will share for the first time ever the story of my son’s birth imprint and its powerful healing.

Birth Imprints

Birth is one of our most momentous embodied experiences. And even though we don’t consciously remember this huge event in our lives, each of us carries the story of our birth etched on our body and psyche. We care unconscious traces of somatic memory that can keenly influence our behavioral and personality patterns. {Read the rest at mothering.com}

Cesarean image by: Robert S. Donovan through a Creative Commons license

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More Principles for an Empowered Birth

I believe that all women, consciously or not, participate in a collective knowing about the empowerment we might claim in birthing our babies. But instead of empowered birth, as birth anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd has so thoroughly researched, the majority of women have a birth experience that is demoralizing and dispiriting. And that gets parenting off to a less-than-peaceful start!

So to add to the first batch, to further enrich Empowered Birth Awareness Week, here are yet more ways to engage Parenting for Peace principles to up your odds of having an empowered birth.

Principles for Empowered Birth: Part II

WSLaboringCoupleNurturance – Fathers and partners, this is the golden hour for you to express this principle magnificently!

  • You now act as her womb: it’s up to you to cocoon her from phone calls, texts, tweets, visitors, and all other contact—anything characteristic of the modern human, especially lights and language. All such stimulation brings adrenaline to her system. You yourself should use the very minimum of softly spoken words with her—again, so as not to call forth the labor-slowing adrenaline.
    • Rather than humanizing birth, as some reformers call for, Michel Odent suggests we need to dehumanize birth, or rather, mammalianize it—by taking away everything that distinguishes humans: rationality, speech and technology. Cameras are big culprits; the camera-face a woman feels she must put on will right there interfere with the process! Odent confidently declares, “Go ahead, let everyone into the room, chat, watch TV, run the cameras—and she’ll give birth after thirty or thirty-six hours of labor. If you respect the physiology, that same baby will be born in less than five hours.” {Read more ideas at mothering.com}

Image:
Jason Lander, through a Creative Commons license

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Practical Principles for An Empowered Birth

As we reach hump day of Empowered Birth Awareness Week, how fitting that Step 4 of my Parenting for Peace roadmap is actually entitled “Empowered Birth”! The book is based on 7 principles, applied through 7 steps in time — beginning pre-conception and going through adolescence. In honor of EBAW, here is a collection (in 2 parts) of practical ideas of how to engage each of the 7 Parenting for Peace principles in specific ways to up your odds of having an empowered birth.

Principles for Empowered Birth: Part I

LaborWaterMeditativePresence – I can think of few more potent opportunities to discover and practice advanced dimensions of this principle than during labor and birth. Birth anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd, in describing how she charted a new rapport with presence during her second labor (a home VBAC), compares it to swimming a marathon, noting that the champions “don’t count the distance. They enter a timeless dimension, where this stroke is all there is. This stroke, and this one, and then this one. I am in that timeless world. I quit wondering eons ago when the baby will come out. There is only this contraction, and this push, and this pause, and then this contraction, and this push, and—Then the midwife’s Voice, summoning forth my consciousness from its burial in the depths of sensation.” {Read the rest at mothering.com}

Image:
Jason Lander through a Creative Commons license

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Empowered Birth: What Is YOUR Story?

My first birth didn’t feel very empowered. My OB seemed distinctly uninterested in having an empowered birthing patient. I felt meek and under his power. I evolved, my power grew, I switched OBs, and by Baby #2, I had what felt like a very empowered birth. Details in a moment.

When a baby is born, a mother is born. Even if she already has children, each birth experience unfolds new facets of a woman’s being, having to do with feeling powerful, capable, supported — or helpless, incompetent, insignificant. These primal feelings will weave their way through her ongoing life and her relationships — with her children, her partner, herself. Indeed, a mother’s experience of giving birth — whether it’s an empowered birth or not — leaves its indelible imprint, a faint yet distinct watermark on her soul. {Read the rest at mothering.com}

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