Parenting, ReParenting & Building a Template of Belovedness
In honor of the often uncelebrated love labor of raising the generation that will inherit this world.
Dear friend,
As parents, we work hard to track and respond to what is happening for our kids. We know they need us in there with them. We do our best to allow what they think and feel to land in us.
We share our perspective and thinking with them, hoping to support the growth of good judgment, self-awareness, and care for others.
Having worked with hundreds of families over these many years, I’ve witnessed repeatedly what brain science suggests is true: when children have ample doses of being seen and responded to with care, they tend to feel more secure. They become more able to stay connected to themselves, so they make good decisions for their lives. They are also more able to take in the reality of other people with care.
Care begets care.
This is how we grow good people—not “good” in the sense of compliant or high-performing, but people who know their own intrinsic wholeness. People who draw out the intrinsic wholeness in others.
But providing this for a young person is no small thing.
As parents, we are trying to build attuned relationships with our kids in a society that moves faster than the speed of attuned relationships. Many of us are parenting while stressed, overwhelmed, distracted, isolated, overextended, or carrying wounds of our own. Parenting often asks us to offer forms of attention and presence that we ourselves may not have consistently received.
Last Sunday I spent the day with a small circle of parents exploring Parenting, ReParenting, and Building a Template of Belovedness. We reflected together on the invisible relational work of parenting: the work of slowing down enough to notice what is happening inside ourselves and our children. The work of listening beneath behavior, to the emotions and experiences rippling underneath. This is the love labor of building an attuned relationship.
What is an attuned relationship?
An attuned relationship is one where we regularly orient ourselves to notice—and feel with—what is happening for another person. We help them feel felt.
When you feel felt, it feels good. (As in, more whole).
As a social species, we need this. Especially young, still-developing nervous systems. Babies, children, and youth look to us to see if we see them, if we feel them, if what they are feeling is alive in us. It’s how they organize themselves inside, and become integrated, sturdy, true. This is how young people come to know:
I exist.
I’m here.
I matter.
I belong.
I have intrinsic worth when I succeed…. and when I fail. I know this because I continue to exist in the warm heart of my parent. So I have courage to get up and try again.
Children function differently when they feel accompanied. Their nervous systems settle down and hum. Their capacity to think, connect, learn, and recover grows.
And parents do too.
One of the things I continue to witness in my work with parents is that parenting is often reparenting. Our children don’t only need something from us; they awaken something within us. Parenting brings us into contact with our own nervous systems, our own histories, our own longings for connection, belonging, and care.
When we connect with a young person, that layer of our own development at the same age or stage, lights up in our long term emotional memory. All the richness and resource we received at that age is available. And the wounds and unmet needs are also there, sometimes igniting like landmines we didn't even know we carried.
We are never just parenting the kid in front of us, we are also always reparenting the inner parts of us that still need care and resolution.
This is why I believe strongly that all parents need spaces of attuned listening. We need places where we can slow down, reflect honestly, be supported without shame, and remember that we were never meant to do this job so alone.
Receiving support isn’t just good for us and our kids. When we help build an inner template of belovedness in a child, that child in turn becomes a cornerstone of Beloved Community. And when we allow our love for children to expand us inside, we too become living cornerstones of the world we long to see for future generations.
I left Sunday feeling deeply moved by the courage and tenderness of the parents in the room. Parents, when provided support, are continually willing to be grown and expanded by loving their kids. This never stops amazing me. The warmth of our day together has rippled through my week. I am grateful, once again, for the invisible, sacred work of building relationships where people can feel seen, felt, and loved.
If you’d like to be among the first to know when I offer another Parenting & ReParenting Workshop or Class, hit reply and let me know. I’ll add you to my list.