Mindful Parenting Tips

Before we talk about some tips to practice mindful parenting, we need to understand what mindful parenting is. Mindful parenting is being attuned to your needs while also attuning to your children’s needs. Often as parents, we focus on our children’s needs while at the same time neglect our own needs. As a mindful parent, we need to be able to recognize our needs for exploration and branching out where we experience joy, being helped, and attended to while also recognizing when we have a need for connection and building roots that contain nurturance, restoring our emotional balance, and repairing any hurts in relationships. 

Goals of Mindfulness:

-Connecting within our bodies and minds: learn to become aware of our needs and wants.

-Connecting within our relationships: learn to be in the present moment within our relationships and be able to separate our feelings from others. 

-Connecting with the environment around us: learn to live within the sensory world around us and regulate our bodies to adapt to the environment. 

Tips for Practicing Mindful Parenting:

Tip #1: In order to co-regulate, we need to be able to self-regulate.  Regulating our emotions can be difficult due to biological factors, lack of skills, your environment, your mood controls what you do, feeling emotional overload, or may have beliefs that get in the way such as “it is a sign of weakness” or “they are part of who I am.” 

To begin to self-regulate, we need to understand our emotions and be able to articulate those emotions. Example: I feel angry when I do not feel heard and I feel it in my hands, feet, and throat. 

Tip #2: Understand that we can not control everything, especially our children. The more that we try to control them and take away their autonomy, the more stressful our relationship with our children will be, which can cause a rupture in our relationship with our children. Also, it can prevent our children from learning to make their own decisions. 

Tip #3: Give yourself compassion. We can easily give compassion to a friend or family member  who is going through something and we struggle with giving that same compassion to ourselves. We deserve the same compassion and grace that we give to others. It can be difficult at first to give yourself compassion, so start small. Recognize that you are human. You will make mistakes. There is no such thing as the parent parent. It does not exist. 

If you are interested in working on mindful parenting skills, I offer both individual and group therapy services. Please reach out to me to learn how I can help.