A Conversation with Lori Petro on Conscious Parenting

This was recorded as part of A Psychology of the Future, an online summit hosted by Eric Lenderman that gathers people working in self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine to talk about how psychology actually plays out in daily life. In this session, Eric sat down with Lori Petro, a speaker, child advocate, and certified parent educator.

Lori founded TEACH through Love, a project she built to spread the ideas behind conscious parenting and better communication inside families. Her focus is on helping households step out of old habits of anger and the cycles of emotional abuse that get handed from one generation to the next. Alongside private consulting and an online program, she puts out a weekly YouTube series called Teachable Moments, and her broader work lives at teachthroughlove.com.

When Eric asked her to explain what conscious parenting means and how she came to it, Lori admitted that the term lands differently for everyone. For her, the whole thing started the moment she found out she was going to have a child. She knew right away that she did not want to repeat the way she had been raised.

She laughed about how much the idea has changed over the years. Back when she first went looking, typing conscious parenting into Google turned up almost nothing. Nobody was searching for it. These days it is everywhere. To her that popularity signals something real: parents want a kind of connection with their kids that a lot of previous generations never had.

A big part of it, she said, is that families rarely recognize the weight of their own trauma. The habits get repeated without question. The patterns pass down quietly and everyone treats them as normal, right up until one person stops and says this isn't working for me.

Lori counted herself among the kids who felt things intensely. She described growing up sensitive, feeling disrespected by the adults around her more or less constantly, and never building the kind of close bond with her parents that she wanted.

So when her turn came, she had almost nothing to work from. No toolkit, no model of the relationship she was hoping to create. What she did carry was the clear memory of what had been missing, and that absence became the thing she set out to do differently.