Michelle Gale on Conscious Parenting

This conversation comes from A Psychology of the Future: The Online Summit, hosted by Erik Lenderman, where speakers from self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine share ideas about practical psychology. In this session Erik sat down with Michelle Gale to talk about conscious parenting: the question of how adults can stay more mindful and more aware in the way they treat children, their own children in particular.

Erik opened by saying he was glad to have Michelle on, because only one or two other presenters were addressing parenting at all. Most of the summit's topics skip past what, for many people, counts as the hardest part of daily life: holding a family together and running a household. He wanted to hear how Michelle came to this work in the first place, and what conscious parenting even means.

Michelle thanked him and said she was glad he named the difficulty up front. Parenting is genuinely hard, she said, and she wanted parents to feel better equipped for it. She described herself as a practitioner rather than an expert, since she is still working on herself alongside the parents she coaches.

Her interest started after her first son was born. She noticed something uncomfortable: she behaved very differently at home than she did anywhere else. Most of us are like that, she suggested, and we should go easy on ourselves about it. There's a version of us at work, another at home, another sitting with friends at a coffee shop.

What caught her attention was that the worst of her tended to come out at home, with the people she loved most. That pattern held even when her kids were little and became clearer as they grew. It didn't feel good, and it wasn't who she wanted to be, so she got curious about where it was coming from and why she lost her composure more often at home than out in the world.

That curiosity is what set her off on the whole inquiry. She began by working on herself, and over time that turned into coaching other parents, running groups, and doing the same kind of work with them that she had first done alone.