Presence & Authenticity With Children

ELIANE SAINTE-MARIE is the founder of Parenting For Wholeness, creator of the acclaimed Clean Parenting program, author of Clean Parenting - The Peaceful Parent’s Essential Handbook, and mother to three wonderful adult daughters. Here she shares her gift of helping parents take peaceful parenting from theory to day-to-day reality.

In my own family, as well as many families I work with, I find presence and authenticity in parenting to be the key to accessing a quality of relationship with our children, and a quality of flow and aliveness in our lives with them, which most parents don't even realize is possible.

I am a parenting coach, and most moms come to me thinking they need to build new skills in order to be effective parents. But though I teach some skills, the bulk of the work is designed to help them become present.

Present to their children: to their children’s inner experience, essence and uniqueness. To truly see their children through every interaction with them.

Present to themselves: to their values, so they have clarity in their priorities and focus. To their feelings, their needs and their own experience, so they have access to their own guidance. To their conditioning, so they can become aware of obstacles and hopefully be free of them.

Present to what’s happening in the moment, instead of being in their heads, caught up in some narrative that does not support them to deal with the situation effectively.

Some parents come to me seeking specific parenting techniques and solutions to parenting problems, but I don’t provide them. In part, because I don’t believe it’s what best serves parents in the long run, but mostly because no one else can know what’s right for them, for their children, for their family. When trying to make a decision, our mind can only consider a limited number of factors at a time. But our inner guidance is usually taking all the relevant factors into account, like:

• Our values

• Our child’s unique personality

• What he’s been through and what he’s going through right now, which might influence his behavior

• Our life as a whole, including our schedule, other people etc.