with Shelly Birger Phillips
This week’s guest blog is from my stepdad Jim:
As a person “of a certain age,” I have to admit to an occasional bit of amusement at Shelly’s parenting tips. Some seem a little odd (as I suppose my ideas about parenting seemed to my parents) and some just seem like old ideas dressed up in new words. But the basic theme of this blog, Conscious Parenting, isn’t a concept I ‘d encountered before and it’s one that has a lot of meaning for me as both a stepparent and a biological one.
This week’s guest blog is by Kendra:
My 14-month old son, Trent, has recently developed a new scream so incredibly grating that it defies description. It’s times like these that I am glad I have a mindfulness practice.
When I was in my early 20’s I lived in a Zen monastery for several years. Back then, mindfulness meant hours & hours of seated meditation and spending most of my time in silence & contemplation. Mindfulness meant bowing silently to my fellow monks instead of mindlessly asking, “hey, how you doing?” & raking the courtyard with such precision that every rake mark was parallel.
Today I want to share something I learned from NLP (otherwise known as neuro-linguistic programming) called a “state change”. We’re always in some sort of emotional state, whether happy, sad, excited, or frustrated. And often it feels like we’re at the whim of our emotions. When I’m frustrated it seems like there is no way to transform the frustration into something else. But there is! We can consciously create a “state change” in ourselves and often in others, pretty much any time we want!
This week I watched a fascinating video about baby led breastfeeding. It showed newborn, days old, and months old infants maneuvering themselves into a good nursing position with very little help from their mothers. Babies were deliberate in their movements bobbing and clearly searching for the nipple. And, when they found it on their own, many mothers reported that the latch was more comfortable than it had been when they had tried to help their babies find the nipple. What an incredible innate ability babies have!
Reading to your kids is a crucially important part of your job as a parent. And sometimes story time can begin to fall through the cracks of our busy lives. So this week, I’m writing about the many reasons story time is such an important part of parenting. I’m hoping to re-inspire you to commit to a daily story time for your kids whether they’re one-year-old, six, or twelve.
My parents all helped to teach me a love of reading that has enriched my life immensely. My mom and dad read to me every night before bed when I was very young. My step-mom read me “Little Women” over the course of several months when I was nine. My mom read chapter books to my brother and me as my step-dad drove us miles and miles on our family vacations. And in junior high and high school when I showed an interest in science fiction, my step dad turned me on to Douglas Adams.