How Do You Raise Your Kids to be Happy and Healthy?
If we want to make the world a better place, we have to fill it with happier, healthier people. That means you and your children.
If you are already wounded, sick, angry, disillusioned, depressed, apathetic, anxious, or in any other way disempowered, know that healing is always possible. The physical, psychological, and energetic medicines are getting pretty good at what they do. You just have to search out what you need. But, despite all their combined power, prevention is still the best medicine.
To that end, good parenting is the most important job there is for making a better world. And, just as the healing professions have made a lot of progress in the last thirty years, so have the ideas and practices that make for effective, humane parenting. One of the best places I’ve found that puts the best parenting ideas and practices together is Hand in Hand Parenting (https://www.handinhandparenting.org/).
They believe in setting developmentally appropriate limits while staying deeply connected to your child. They also believe parents need good support for all they do. One resource for you is their parent club (https://ml233-db3bdb.pages.infusionsoft.net/). They offer an impressive suite of classes and services for parents and families. Much of their material is free, while one-on-one consulting, on-line, and in-person classes are very reasonably priced. They even have trained professionals in many communities around the country (and in 23 countries around the world (https://www.handinhandparenting.org/who-we-are/certified-instructors/)). For example, Michelle Pate is the local instructor here in the Seattle area (https://www.handinhandparenting.org/instructor/michelle-pate/).
I have looked over their material extensively and am impressed. Having helped raise four children of my own to adulthood and worked with families in my practice for 33 years, I know how important parenting is and also how difficult it can be to find good information and help that you can trust. How do you know that what you are doing to help your child learn to deal effectively with life is going to result in them growing up to be humane and strong? It takes a couple of generations to prove that a particular construct and resulting techniques actually work.
If you’ve ever been at your wit’s end with your kids, if you’ve ever been exhausted, worried, uncertain of how to help your child through this behavior or developmental stage, Hand In Hand parenting could be your new go-to resource (https://www.handinhandparenting.org/sitemap/). And they have over thirty years’ experience, so they know their ideas work.
Check them out. See what you think. I hope you are as impressed with them as I am. And, please, give yourself the education and support you need in order to do this most important and challenging endeavor: stewarding big souls in little bodies into adulthood.