A Conversation with Lori Petro on Mindful Parenting
My mornings follow a pattern. I wake up before anyone else in the house, which makes the whole thing simpler to pull off. My daughter is nine now. She's past the baby stage, so I have a little more room to claim that quiet time for myself, and it helps that I have only one child. When there are three kids tearing around the house, finding that space gets complicated. You have to protect it. That early stretch of the day is mine, and I begin there.
Some days it isn't about the routine at all. It's about carrying attention into whatever I happen to be doing. When I cook breakfast, I'm not cooking to finish and eat. I'm with the process, actually in it, not racing toward the plate. The point isn't the result. I try to bring that same quality to how I am with my daughter.
Something happened recently that stuck with me. Her dad and I had an argument, and she overheard it. She came into the room wanting to step in, to moderate, to be his voice almost, like a speakerphone. Kids do that. They slide into roles. I didn't want her to feel responsible for managing the communication between her parents. We tend to assume these things pass over them, that they don't register. They register.
Afterward I walked into the kitchen and found her pulled in on herself, withdrawn. I asked her something simple and she went stiff, wouldn't answer, wouldn't say what was going on. I caught it right away. This is the point where a lot of us go the other direction: "You have to listen to me, answer my question, I didn't do anything to you." We get defensive. The behavior becomes the problem we want to shut down.
But she was still sitting in that moment from a few minutes earlier. She doesn't like conflict. She's like me that way, though conflict is something we all have to learn to handle. So instead of stepping over the feeling she was carrying and going straight at the behavior, which is the parent reflex, I stopped. I told her, "You're probably feeling upset because you heard Daddy and me, and you don't like hearing us argue." She dropped her head right into my chest.
For me that was the whole thing: naming her hurt out loud. Then we did a little affirmation together. Something like, "You're a great kid, I can get through anything," a goofy little cheer I walked her through. You find what lands for your own child. Keep it light. I let her feel safe again in that moment, and her whole posture changed on its own.