Conscious parenting vs. traditional parenting

Conscious parenting is an approach that emphasizes being aware and intentional in raising children. It involves developing a deep understanding of emotions, beliefs, and values and how they may affect children. It encourages parents to validate emotions and to foster an environment of empathy, respect, and collaboration. It emphasizes understanding the child’s perspective, strives to promote the child’s emotional and mental well-being by creating a secure attachment relationship and promoting healthy boundaries and autonomy.

In contrast, unconscious parenting involves parenting without being fully aware of the impact of one’s actions and behaviors on the child’s development and well-being. It can include using authoritarian methods, such as punishment, spanking and control, rather than empathetic and collaborative approaches that prioritize the child’s emotional and mental health.

Why conscious parenting?

An example is when you leave a baby in to cry their way out in a separate room while you are watching TV, thinking about how you will teach the baby the lesson to be more independent. After some time the crying stops…
But, it doesn’t stop because you taught the baby the lesson of how not to be spoiled. It’s because the baby passed out horrified in pain and fear from abandonment.
Babies are not trying to provoke you, nor will they be spoiled if you nurture them when they cry. On the contrary, they will learn that they are alone and start building the base for trust. Babies are helpless small humans and they cannot survive without a caretaker. They can’t do basic things without someone, and someone has to regulate them and teach them how to do it themselves. You can not spoil the baby. You can only help them to get the affection of love and get basic trust.

The same goes with a belief that the child should not get used to the mother’s hands. When you are not carrying a baby while soothing and the child with time stops to ask for it, you didn’t win the game, nor the baby learned not to be spoiled. The baby only learns that this way of love is not possible for them and they start to shut that part down, they stop to expect it. Because babies get love through touch, and if you keep it limited when they need it.

Or, if your small child changes a lot of emotions in a day and you don’t take it seriously. They don’t change emotions because they are trying to bother you, or irritate you, it’s not because it’s acting. I know that many parents believe in this and if you do, please be open for another explanation. The child is simply learning to regulate their emotions and they need help, understanding and support in that. They are not developed as humans and they don’t understand the world the way adults do.

Their emotions and pain are real, deep and overwhelming and the child genuinely suffers. They cannot manipulate you, they are too small for that. If you laugh at them if you not take them seriously and if you act inconsistently to their emotions, this may be a traumatic event for them and they may grow up with lack of basic trust and safety which can haunt them in various ways throughout their life.
It may leave consequences that can haunt them throughout all their life and they will never realize where it comes from as it will be their natural and only known way.

Therefore, let’s normalize conscious parenting and let’s be open to learn and understand different explanations about the development of a child, their capabilities and our important role in all of this.

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