Nurturing Potential
I believe in a world where parents, families and communities welcome children with joy, curiosity and enthusiasm, recognizing, celebrating and nurturing the hope and potential each child brings to the world, a world where parents are empowered and supported to parent and create environments where families thrive, not simply survive.
After raising six children, I understand the challenges and joys of parenting and family life. I have experienced successes and failures, learning through all of it. I have studied human development for decades. I want to share with young parents what I wish I would have known early in my family life. Working as an RN in psychiatric and family health settings I know the consequences of inadequate and unconscious parenting. Children often become a part of our commodity culture where their essential needs are not met. Children are often identified as the problem in the family rather than understanding their responses to their environment. Their responses to unmet needs and lack of nurture of their innate potential is often manifested in mental illness, substance abuse and violence.
I have worked with parents, doing their best to raise children, often lacking the resources they need. I see the concern for their children’s future and understand the deep longing to “do this parenting thing right”. Often they don’t see the relationship between meeting their own needs and developing themselves to how their children are being raised. They focus on the outer circumstances and the things and experiences they believe their child needs. I get it. I’ve been there. I valued self sacrifice as a mother and willingly gave up many of my interests, desires and goals for many years to give my children all the experiences and things I believed they needed. I sacrificed meaningful friendships and relationships. Like many parents, I lost parts of myself in parenting.
Sacrifice is important and inevitable in parenting as in every relationship. But I encourage you to consider what this means for you.
It is important it for parents to be solid in who they are and what they bring to the world in order to be the best parent they can be. I see the opportunity in parenting to continue to stretch and grow through the parenting years. This is inevitable. Children are our teachers in life’s journey. They help us to see our own potential and give us the beautiful opportunity to celebrate new and emerging life, not only in their child but in themselves.
It is my mission to help parent to live more consciously as they welcome a child to the world, to be intentional in creating the environments, emotional, social, psychological and spiritual, where all in the family can thrive.
