A Conversation with Michelle Gale on Conscious Parenting
Erik: Most parents I meet seem to agree, almost instinctively, that children arrive to help the adults grow too. We teach them, sure, but they also bring a brand new mind into the relationship. What I keep wondering is this: what stands in the way of conscious parenting? What stops a parent from staying with it, steadily, across the eighteen years or so that raising a kid now takes?
Michelle: A lot of it comes down to the need to be right. We've been living inside an old model of parenting for a very long time. Walk into any bookstore and find the parenting shelf. Yes, you'll spot some wiser books there. Dan Siegel writes them. My own teacher, Dr. Shefali Tsabary, wrote a lovely one called The Conscious Parent. Those titles exist. But something like ninety-nine percent of what's on that shelf is trying to show you how to change your child, as though the child were broken somehow. So the real obstacle, I think, is the belief that something is wrong with them and that our role is to patch it up and set it straight. That isn't why we're here. It doesn't mean fixing never happens along the way, but we have to let go of the conviction that they need fixing, and let go of the hunger to be the one who's right.
Erik: And this broad cultural pattern, strong in the U.S. especially, where kids get heavily medicated with Ritalin and amphetamines if they fidget too much in class or don't obey the teacher closely enough. Is that the same adult wish to mold children into whatever shape we've decided they should be?
Michelle: It is, and it's a much larger thing happening across education. I feel genuinely fortunate. Our kids attend a fairly small private school, the kind not everyone can reach. We're lucky to have the support and the means to send them somewhere like that. Many of the classrooms have no desks. Where there are desks, the children often aren't sitting in them. Last year, in my son's class, every child was allowed to sit on a yoga ball, so they could keep moving. That would make some teachers lose their minds. The kids get to move.