I’m the first to admit that I wasn’t ready to be a parent and that I was ignorant about the importance of parents (versus genes) in child development. With 20/20 hindsight, there are many things as a father I’d like to go back and change. Now when I see my daughters and sons-in-law raising their children consciously, in a way that means that these children, unlike their grandfather, won’t have to rewrite a lot of negative programming, I wonder how I could have been so ignorant. I’m reminded of Bharat Mitra’s description of organic farming, which could also serve as a description of conscious parenting: “How beautiful. How natural. How simple.”
A great resource is a British psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt’s book Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain.
In the next post, we’ll look at Sue Gerhardt’s book and how nothing is inevitable.
