Michelle Gale on Connection, Community, and Conscious Parenting
When I want to really reach my kids, I jot down the questions I'd like to ask and then I pay attention to when they're most receptive. For us that window is the evening, right around bedtime. If I've let bedtime slip too late, I feel the loss, because those late minutes are usually when they soften and start talking. Both of my sons, the older one and the younger one, open up then. Parents of teenagers tell me the same thing holds true. The kid takes a shower, decompresses, and suddenly a little opening appears where a real conversation can happen.
There's another piece to this, and it comes back to a question you raised earlier about parents who are at work all day while their children sit in schools that aren't exactly supporting them in a conscious or mindful way. My honest answer is that parents need people around them. Find a few friends who are raising their kids with the same intention, if that's available to you. If it isn't, go looking for it somewhere else: a Facebook group, a course, some corner of the internet where this kind of parenting is the shared language.
My own teacher, Dr. Shefali, runs a training for parents in conscious parenting, and there's a Facebook page connected to it with around 150 parents trading ideas and holding each other up. That sort of thing exists and it's spreading. You can absolutely do this work alone. The practice is yours to do solo, and that matters. But if your partner isn't drawn to any of this, or you're parenting on your own, having some kind of community becomes something close to necessary. I think we'll keep seeing more and more parents move in this direction.
Erik: I love that. So the idea is that building community gives a parent a source of nourishment for themselves, which then lets them talk openly with their child about what's going on inside them. Not dumping it on the kid, not asking the child to manage the parent's feelings, but being honest. Could you draw that line a little more clearly for me, and for people listening? Give us a concrete picture: what does it look like when a parent offloads onto a child, versus when a parent simply tells the truth about their inner life in a way that connects?