The Yin and Yang of Discipline
Have you ever felt confused by the seemingly contradictory advice from “parenting experts?” You are not alone. Each approach to parenting — especially in the arena of discipline — claim to have the best method and often flatly refute the views of the other approaches. This drove me crazy, until one day the pieces snapped into place. Children need a variety of forms of nourishment to grow up whole and reach their full potential. Just like the physical body needs a variety of foods to get its complete nutritional requirements, the developing psyche needs a broad palate of...
Read MoreAutonomy and the Emergent Process
Without the internal fire to become ones own person – to develop your own beliefs, feelings, desires and motivations – we do not feel responsible for our actions and instead live in a perpetual illusion of victimhood. Last week I relayed Daniel Pink’s proposal that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are the areas that we should focus on developing if we want to bring the best out of human beings. This week I will take autonomy and widen it into a more useful construct: the emergent process. The emergent process is one of three streams of the maturational process as...
Read MorePreserving Intrinsic Motivation
When unconditional love and genuine enthusiasm are always present, “Good job!” isn’t necessary; when it’s absent, “Good job!” won’t help. Alfie Kohn In his book Drive, Daniel Pink lays out the overwhelming evidence that Behaviorism — the use of punishments and rewards — is not the best way to motivate people. And I will promptly add, especially if those people happen to be your family. Though the book is primarily aimed at helping business practices re-align with the scientific evidence on how people are actually motivated, the conclusions are directly applicable to...
Read MoreWholeness, not Perfectionism
“Do not doubt your own basic goodness. In spite of all confusion and fear, you are born with a heart that knows what is just, loving, and beautiful.” Jack Kornfield, The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace Sometimes when I speak about the importance of wholeness, I see signs of fear and stress appear in parent’s faces. For some, Preserving Wholeness is just one more thing that they have to do in their already busy lives. For others who are really doing their best to give their son or daughter everything that they themselves never had as a child, it’s another...
Read MoreWholeness and Integration
So what is this concept of wholeness that we are talking about? What does it mean to grow up in an environment that helps you preserve your wholeness? Are any of us really not whole? It is true that at one level of perception — the perception that some meditative traditions refer to as the non-dual — we are all whole and perfect exactly as we are. From this state of awareness, the entire world is experienced as one singular Consciousness. This underlying field of Presence is referred to by many names: Nature, Life-force, Spirit, God, Consciousness, True Nature, the Tao, and Love to name a...
Read MoreThe First Agreement
I am going to start of our series of discussions on Preserving Wholeness with a story to help us become rooted in the wider context of Life. This story points to “the world behind the world” and the “long-view” — two insights that can help re-integrate us when things begin to feel out of balance. The First Agreement There is a mythological story that exists in many cultures throughout the world that speaks to a certain dimension of human life: the drive to become fully ourselves. The African version of it goes something like this: Before we are born, each of us...
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Chris White, M.D. is a board-certified pediatrician whose parenting work aims to optimize the developmental potential of children and their parents. He regularly writes on 
