Allow your children to experience the fullness of the present moment.

The skills we cultivate in both our formal and informal mindfulness practice can be very useful in parenting. One of the most fundamental skills we can take from our practice is “paying attention”- to read our children’s communications more accurately- and to be more aware of their emotional states and our own reactions to them. Mindfulness also helps us to increase our capacity to bear discomfort- to ride out mental and emotional disturbances- and when mindfully applied, to stay with our children’s distress empowering us to help them deal more effectively with difficult emotions.

Holding our attention with our children and staying present with them is especially important as they learn quickly the temporal continuum of past and future. Grounding in the present is a skill that will further the child’s capacity for heightened attention and awareness- to be in the moment. To be constantly distracted while engaged with our children only resonates with their mirror neurons to be as they “see”. Practice gently bringing yourself and your children back to embracing what is happening in the present moment as wandering into the past and into the future will continue to challenge their capacity to stay concentrated and focused with… being here and now. As a parent, our children tend to model our tendencies and patterns (e.g. attitudinal, emotional, behavioral, etc.)- especially in their early developmental years.

Our interaction with our children- when in “play” is more about being than doing. It’s more about process than result. Mindfulness helps us to recover our ability “to play”- to be grounded in the moment of what is happening with open awareness- intentional, curious, focused, and caring about this purposeful time with our children. “Minding our children” means remembering to truly be with them, and accepting them even if they aren’t always behaving as we expect. The more we practice accepting ourselves nonjudgmentally, and seeing ourselves as part of the larger universe, the more we can really accept our children for what they are… and not what we think they are.

Seeing the impersonal nature of our own mind’s activities- in that we are so much more than our thinking and feeling states can help us to extend this attitude or perspective in the way we see our children’s own actions. To be more flexible and less reflexive or reactive with our children’s behaviors, we need to be more mindful in taking “me” out of the equation.

Simply take a moment here, and reflect on how it seems more effortlessly to redirect other kids than our own as their behaviors don’t reflect on “me”. By loosening our own preoccupation with “me” helps us to not take our parenting so personally. To respond to our children with greater compassion and objectivity- and by accepting their successes and failures less seriously, we may discover how much easier it is to truly enjoy loving and just being with them.

In our practice, we also cultivate our capacity to take “pause” before responding to a situation. We begin to recognize the “gap” or “space” between stimulus and response. We take note of feeling states that arise and the impulse to act that follows… “urge surfing” before we discern whether an immediate response is appropriate for the present situation. This “pause” in awareness gives us the mindsight to further ground ourselves in being more responsive and less reactive in parenting our children. To be openly aware and freely attentive with ourselves and our children, we are less prone to get stuck in reactionary cycles that ultimately pre-condition hurt and suffering for both child and parent. The heat of the moment with our children during difficult situations is a very good place to test the resiliency of our capacity to stay with the “spark” before it becomes a “flame”.To simply observe without the judging mind takes a real shift in consciousness for the parent who has been conditioned through automaticity to act almost instantaneously on their feelings.

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