Engaged Level

This section continues to have the same three goals in mind—helping your children to thrive, harmonize, and become fully themselves—but goes a layer deeper into the insights, key skills, and practices you will need. Here it should become clear that the best way to help our kids grow into their full potential is for us to continue growing ourselves. Every soul needs an ordeal in order to fully mature, and right now parenthood is our beautiful, crazy-making, and life-changing ordeal.

Insights

1. Your child is aimed at a star of their full potential. Your children were not born to this earth to merely survive, but to thrive. The mystery has given them life to bless us with their unique gifts and specific way of loving, and ultimately they will share these gifts with the world.
2. General human maturation proceeds along three primary lines.* All humans have the potential to grow into autonomous and authentic beings capable of adapting to the challenges and complexity of modern life. Gordon Neufeld parses human maturation into three parallel developmental processes: emergence, adaptation, and integration.
3. Your children will mature ease-fully if you keep the connection fire stoked and their hearts soft.* When we meet the needs of our children, their nervous systems grow in the most fluid and dynamic way possible. The soft heart and an open mind are metaphors for this relative lack of defensiveness and both are core processes at the center of human maturation.
4. Children feel and behave differently depending on what they perceive. When children perceive a threat, their systems move into a state of fear and reactivity. When they perceive the environment as safe, they feel better, behave better, and are generally sweeter and more enjoyable to be around.
5. Reactivity arises when there is an unmet need. The state of reactivity can appear as compulsive seeking to get attention, fearful withdrawal away from perceived threats, or frustration and aggression to get ones way. Recognize these movements as instinctive attempts by your child’s brain to get re-regulated by trying to get his or her needs met, and support them whenever and wherever possible.
6. Defenses are built in mechanisms in the brain designed to protect us from difficult experiences.* When difficult experiences are prolonged or particularly intense, our brain moves instinctually to protect us. It reflexively tunes out the things that are distressing, numbs out pain or discomfort, and disconnects from people who don’t seem to care for us. Many symptoms arise from these defenses, and it is important to see through the symptoms into their origins if we are to help our children maintain their emotional vitality and open minds.
7. There are three factors that push a child to become hardened.* The more sensitive a child, the more stress she experiences, and the less she is brought through the adaptive process, the more likely that she will exhibit the behaviors that we refer to as “hardened.”
8. The development of resilience requires being open to vulnerable feelings.* If we do not help our children learn to stay with vulnerable feelings—such as fear, disappointment, sadness, powerlessness, and the sting of rejection—they will be less resilient as a result.
9. The attachment brain is hierarchical.* The part of our brain that mediates attachment—the loving bond you have with your child—is set up so there is one who is being protected and one who is protecting, one who is being cared for and one who is doing the caretaking, and one who is being guided and one who is guiding. This loving hierarchical arrangement is hard wired into parts of the brain that precede the development of the later developing prefrontal cortex that allow for a more democratic type of relating.
10. Your child requires you to be a loving alpha.* The attachment brain requires that someone is in charge, and if you don’t assume that role, your child’s brain will reflexively move to occupy the alpha position. Deep down, children intuit that they have no business being in charge of protecting, caring for, and guiding the adult. They need you—the stronger, wiser, and more loving other—to be their loving alpha rather than the reverse.

Key Skills

1. Use structures, rituals, and space to create rest. When we bring the right amount of structure into our family lives, our children thrive because they know what to expect and can relax into the flow. When we make sure there is spaciousness in our home, our kids autonomy, initiative, and creativity will bubble up spontaneously from the deeply restful nest we have created.
2. Balance self-care with family care. Do what you can to stay healthy—physically, psycho-emotionally, and spiritually. From our reinvigorated wholeness, we become able to love, guide, and support our children toward their full potential more gracefully.
3. Work on the partner relationship. Make a commitment to modeling love and respect to your children by nurturing the love that brought them here in the first place. If the primary relationship grows stale and disconnected, everyone in the house will suffer.
4. Recognize and respond to state shifts: your child’s and your own. The ability to feel into your child’s state and your own is crucial to making the necessary adjustments needed in day-to-day family living. By recognizing reactivity and responding wisely to restore emotional balance, you can artfully avoid many meltdowns and hurtful exchanges.
5. Get yourself together. In a time of crisis, we must be able to “put the oxygen mask on our own face first.” The ability to pull yourself from the brink of reactivity and aggression is a key to avoiding that “one thing we will always regret.”
6. Embody a loving alpha. Your child needs you to be a stronger, wiser, and more loving other to feel safe. When you take the lead in protecting, caring for, and guiding them, they will relax into your loving guidance and naturally become autonomous, authentic, and loving beings.
7. Choose relationship over being right. When you are able to prioritize being connected with your loved ones over being right, things will shift dramatically toward more harmony and better behavior.
8. Become self-reflective. When you focus more on your own reactivity and behavior than that of your child’s, you will be able to “un-earth” the source of your push-button issues and lessen their charge over time. This skill is a fundamental way we as adults re-engage our own maturation drives.
9. Honor the wisdom of seasons. Be patient—and be present—with the current epoch of your life, the current phase your child is in, and the mood you find yourself in today. The ability to honor each changing season can literally transform your life.
10. Trust yourself. The mystery chose you: the exact nourishment your child needs to become fully themselves. Relax into the deepest, most restful place in your being and trust yourself. You are the answer.

“The wise remain aware of the spirituality of life. Every mother has felt the stillness and the stir of Eternal Consciousness in her womb.  Remember that. Bring that mysterious, silent moment into the clamoring present.” — Vimala McClure, The Tao of Motherhood

Practices

Each week pick one of the practices below, do your best to cultivate this new way of being, and see how it affects your child, your relationship with them, and the entire family dynamic. A more detailed description of each of these practices can be found in the practices section.

1. Mindfulness meditation.By sitting down for 5-10 minutes each day and practicing paying attention to whatever arises in your experience in a non-judgmental way, you increase your “pool of calm” and strengthen your ability to remain open when the going gets rough. This practice flexes a key muscle in your brain—the prefrontal cortex—and enhances your ability to help regulate yourself and your children in situations where others would completely lose it.
2. Grounding down. The first of the three core somatic practices, Grounding Down is bringing your energy and awareness down low in your body and becoming anchored to the earth is a quick and easy way to not fly off the handle when your kids are driving you crazy.
3. Getting spacious. The second of the three core somatic practices, opening your attention outwards in all directions rather than collapsing in on yourself is an effective way of diffusing built up tension that would otherwise lead to unhealthy discharge and aggression.
4. Feeling from the heart. The third of the three core somatic practices, feeling your child from your heart increases your level of attunement and naturally precipitates compassionate action, especially during times of frustration, pain, and disappointment.
5. Inquiry. Compared to the more “up-shift” modes of the somatic practices, inquiry is a “downshift”—a seeking to understand and an allowing of what is arising to unfold in its own timing and in its own way. This non-manipulation of inner experience draws on the power of acceptance and the intelligence of our dynamic emotional system, setting the stage for us to be transformed from the inside out by the infinite wisdom of the Mystery.

Read more about these practices.

* Concepts learned from Dr. Gordon Neufeld.

Next Steps

The fullest version of this engaged level—with detailed explanation of each of these practices—is The Essential Parenting Home Course. It has over 9 hours of MP3 audio material, 9 handouts, and two one-hour calls to answer all your questions.

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