Michelle Gale: A Conversation on Conscious Parenting
Erik: I keep coming back to Michael Phelps when this subject comes up. While he was piling up Olympic gold for the U.S. swim team, the story surfaced that he'd been diagnosed with ADHD as a kid. The recommendation his parents got was Ritalin. They passed on it and handed him a swimming pool instead. What came out of that was this remarkable physical intelligence that had nowhere to go when he was stuck at a desk. All that fidgeting, the jumping up, the acting out, it was healthy energy. It just needed somewhere to run.
Michelle: What a story. And I'd say the same holds for a huge number of our kids, boys especially. They were never built to sit still from morning to night.
Erik: Right. We've been talking with you as a mother, and I value that angle. But here's a situation plenty of people land in. What if your partner has no interest in parenting this way, or really doesn't seem very interested in being present for the child at all?
Michelle: I get asked that a lot, and my answer is short: it only takes one. One parent who's awake, one who's paying attention. We can't force the other person to choose that. There are times when you do have to sit with a harder question, whether this is the person you want raising a child alongside you for the long haul, but that's its own separate matter. Setting it aside, my message stays the same. Do your own work. Trust that it ripples outward, into the home, into your kids, into the world, and hold that trust loosely, without demanding proof that it's working. We only ever get to work on ourselves. Other people aren't ours to rearrange.
Michelle: It's the same lesson I give my own children when they're frustrated with a friend or stuck in something hard. I ask them, who do we actually have any say over? Whose behavior can we shift? It comes back to us every time. We don't have the power to change anyone else. What we can do is change ourselves, stay grounded, keep doing the work, and then hope. The hope is allowed. We can hope it reaches the people near us.
Erik: That lands for a lot of families, I think. Picture a child enrolled in a public school, gone from nine in the morning until three or four in the afternoon, sitting in an environment that may be anything but conscious. So what does a parent need, in terms of resilience, to be any help once that child walks back through the door? The parent is worn out from a full day of work. The kid has been affected, maybe not for the better, by the hours at school. You've got your own child in what sounds like a pretty unusual school. What are the pieces a parent in that more typical setup has to weigh: the kind of school their child sits in all day, the strain of their own nine-to-five, and how to hold both at once?