How To Raise A Parent – We Can All Learn How To Be More Conscious And Self-Aware

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and on today’s episode, we are talking about what it means to be a conscious parent. You might be thinking, “Well, how is it possible to be an unconscious parent? Of course, I’m conscious when I’m parenting”, and technically, that’s right. We are not lying in a bed, unconscious. But are we really aware of all the things that play into our thoughts, our feelings, our behaviors, about ourselves, about our children, about their behaviors? Probably not so much. So what we are talking about with conscious parenting is really bringing a level of awareness to our relationships with our kids, to the approaches that we take with them that allow us to have a deeper, respectful, connected relationship so they can grow into the people they are meant to be in this world. We are also going to talk about why this actually involves us as the adults doing a lot more work on ourselves, than with our kids. So to explore all this today, I’ve invited Ellen Gottlieb on the show. Let me tell you about her.

She is an attorney and certified Conscious Parenting Coach. She coaches parents and individuals, teaching them how to live a more mindful, joyful life. Ellen recently published her new book called “How to Raise a Parent: Becoming A Conscious Parent In An Unconscious World.” She has been successfully guiding parents as she teaches them to shed their entrenched patterns and create deeper connections with their children, which fosters self-confidence and reduces anxiety. Ellen, I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation. Welcome to the show.

Ellen Gottlieb 

Thank you so much, I’m so happy to be here. I’ve also been excited to do this with you and to share with your audience. So thank you for having me.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

I think this is really going to be so helpful for the parents and the professionals in the audience, because so much of what we do as parents or what we do with kids in general tends to be on automatic pilot. I mean, to pull out a little bit further, we tend to do a lot in our lives, even not with our kids, on automatic, and without really thinking about it, without really being aware. So I think this is going to be such a relevant conversation with people. I want to start out with a little bit of your story because I don’t know this, and I’m really curious to know how one takes the path from being an attorney to becoming really focused on coaching and teaching parents how to be more aware and conscious in their relationships, so I’d love to hear about your journey with that.

Ellen Gottlieb 

Oh, I’m happy to share. It is maybe a unique journey, and people tend to be curious. So I still practice law full time. I have been in the medical legal field for decades now, defending physicians, and now arbitrating medical disputes, and I love the work, but I’m also a mom. And I will say that when my children were younger — they’re now 26 and 28, I have two lovely daughters, when they were younger, about 8 and 10, I started to see that things were not going as I had planned. I knew I loved them. There’s no question. We all adore our children, there’s tremendous love. I almost called the book “Why Loving Your Child Is Not Enough”, or “Is Too Much”, but I thought it would be a little complicated. But I sensed that I was knee-jerk parenting. I was parenting the way I knew how. They didn’t come with instructions. I was doing what was done to me, and it wasn’t working. So I decided to go on a journey and to seek out through reading and through coaching, and I was fortunate to meet a very well-known parenting coach now, who is Oprah Winfrey’s parenting guru, Dr. Dr. Shefali Tsabary, we became good friends and really spent years talking about what it means to shift the paradigm to a more conscious mindset. I didn’t even know, Dr. Nicole, what I didn’t know. But I decided that there’s something out there that I didn’t know, and there has to be a better way, and over 20 years, I’ve developed this, and it developed into a practice, because what happened was, I started coaching friends and relatives, and I realized people need this. So I learned how to raise my emotional intelligence, and I was really delighted to try to help other people do the same. So it’s been a very gratifying journey, I have to say.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I love it, and I love the personal connection to it because I think that makes it so real. It’s so easy to sort of be a parenting coach or a guru to parents when you are not one yourself, right? And I think that it’s like when we are parents, when we are in the trenches, when we have lived it, when we are dealing with it, it does make it so much more relevant because we really know what it feels like. It’s easy to give advice or to say “Here, do this.” It’s another thing to actually implement it and do it, and so I love that you bring the real in-the-trenches-I’ve-done-this-as-a-parent experience to this work.

 Ellen Gottlieb

Yeah, I’ve walked this walk, there is no doubt, and I continue to do it every day. I try to wake myself up, try to grow myself up. If someone said to me, “Describe your goal for life in four words”, I would say “Busy growing myself up.” That’s what I have to keep doing. And these two young women in my life, they are my teachers. They have taught me how to be more conscious. And why are our children, our teachers? Because they take us in, right? Not just our words, but our tone, our energy, our feelings, and then we see ourselves in them, and we don’t like it. So instead of turning the mirror or the light to shine on ourselves, we kind of react to them. And that’s where we get stuck.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

So true. We are going to get into how you define conscious parenting, and we are going to give people some tools and all of that, but I want to preface that by talking about who this is for, because I noticed a trend, especially in the world of kids who have diagnosed neurodiversity kinds of things, who maybe have special needs, all of that — There’s sort of this idea in professional and parent circles that “Well, only approaches unique to these kinds of diagnoses, or to raising kids with disabilities apply here.” And I have never believed that that’s true. I think that good parenting and being the way that we need to be with our kids all of the good principles of raising kids applies to the entire range of children, whether they have a diagnosed need, or a special challenge or not. But I would like you to speak to that, because I want all of our listeners to realize that this is for them, whether you are parenting a child who maybe has been diagnosed with autism and it severely impacts them, all the way to maybe you have a child who’s got some anxiety or some mild ADHD things, or anything in between. I want parents to really realize that this applies to all of us, regardless of the specifics of the kids that we have.

Ellen Gottlieb 

That’s a great question. I’ll answer it pretty succinctly. This work is for every human on the planet. You don’t have to be a parent. You can be a parent. You just have to be human. I don’t care what your race, your gender, your gender identity, your religion, it doesn’t matter. We are all human and we all have feelings. And we all need to learn how to raise our emotional intelligence to live a better life, to live a liberated life. You see, we are all enslaved. We are enmeshed in thought patterns, and we don’t even know it. So until we learn what we don’t know, we can’t even begin the work, our way up the mountain. I call it mountain awareness. It’s quite a mountain to climb. It’s hard work, it takes patience. It takes practice and courage. It’s the best work you will do on this planet. So it’s for everyone.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

I just wanted to make that clear, because sometimes people go, “Oh, this isn’t specifically about parenting a kid for autism, so this isn’t for me”, or “Oh, this isn’t specifically about kids with special needs, so this isn’t for me.” No, this is for all of us as parents. This helps all of us bring better versions of ourselves to our relationship with our kids and do that better.

Ellen Gottlieb 

And I would like to share that I took care of a special needs brain damaged sister who was older than me, but I was like the parent or the older sister. And she had enormous needs and was very, very sick for a very long time. So there were medical needs, as well as emotional psychological needs. And as I learned this, it helped her so much, because she got calmer because I knew how to interact with her in a way that would soothe her and that would bring her greater joy. We were so close. I lost her six years ago to many medical issues, but it really woke me up. And of course, I interacted with her whole community and her friends, and I can assure you that this work brings us peace. And if we are more peaceful, we can parent more peacefully.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Beautifully said, and thank you for sharing that. I know that really resonates with people. Let’s talk about your definition of what it means to be a conscious parent. I sort of gave an intro to the general topic with my thoughts about that, but I really would like to hear you say what you think it means to be a conscious parent.

Ellen Gottlieb 

Well, I could talk for a long time on that, but I will start by saying: A conscious parent is one who has cleared up their own emotional landscape. It’s someone who becomes aware of their triggers and learns to sit with them and learns to be the witness of their own mind. I call it becoming the scientist of your own mind, where you become so aware that you know you are triggered, but you understand that your triggers are about your wounds, but you are having a big feeling, and you decide that you are going to sit and observe that feeling and you are going to try to understand it, and you are going to let it sit with you without fueling it with thoughts — Because our thoughts aren’t real. We think they are. It’s another whole part of this conversation. We fuel them like gasoline. So we try to keep the gasoline out of it. We sit with the discomfort. We learn that all feelings are just feelings to be experienced, and that no feeling is either good or bad because happiness doesn’t become our goal. So people say, “So a conscious parent doesn’t want happy kids.” And I say, no. It’s not that I’m standing or sitting here talking with you and promoting great depression in our children. I promise you, it’s quite the opposite. What I am suggesting, though, on a serious note, is that rather than seeking happiness, let’s seek meaning. Let’s seek understanding that the whole spectrum of emotions can be tolerated, that they are temporary, and that they are here as signals so they can help us grow. So an emotionally conscious parent is one who has raised their own level of understanding of their own emotional matrix.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

So good, such a great definition of that, and really stands in contrast to how the vast majority of us, as adults, go through life as parents or not, being unaware of these things, and therefore much more reactive, and as you said, getting enmeshed in these things that go on, as opposed to being able to sit back and recognize: Where do I begin and end? Where does my child or these other people begin? And then and what am I responsible for here?

Ellen Gottlieb 

Perfect. So I always say that: How are you going to define success? There are external measures of it, I get it. But you could be the most successful hedge fund manager with lots of assets in your bank account, and be deeply unhappy. So it’s my feeling that a person without emotional intelligence is like a house built on sand. To me, success is respect for self, respect for others, a real deep understanding of your worth, but not in an arrogant way. In a very humble way. And certainly, it’s a differentiation — it was a perfect way to put it, between where I begin and that child ends. And it’s all about noticing our ego. Our ego is so invested in our parenting. I often say to clients and friends and parents, “Could you try to parent your child as though they were your neighbor’s kid or your sister’s kid or someone else’s child?” Because when they come home with a C on a math test, you will say, “It’s not the end of the world.” But when it’s your child, you are triggered, because you have a want. And this is where we get into starting to learn that we have great agendas for our children. And when our children come into this world, and they’re not as neurotypical as we expected, we are deeply triggered, because it’s not what we wanted. So what do we have to learn? Deep, deep acceptance. Unconditional love is the key. Most of us are loved, but we are loved conditionally, and we don’t even realize it, and we are loving our children, but with conditions. And this work is about becoming aware of that agenda and then releasing it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Which makes such a difference, then, in terms of how we respond to things and how we show up. And it occurs to me, as you are talking about that, this whole issue of “This isn’t what I was expecting.” I often talk with parents about how we don’t consciously think about it, but before our child is even born, we have created this entire story in our minds of what that’s going to be, of what our family is going to be, and who they’re going to be and what they’re going to be, and who we are going to. We have this whole thing mapped out, without even maybe being consciously aware of it. And I think you are so right, then the child gets here in the world, and we are doing this thing, and when the reality of what’s happening doesn’t match up, we are triggered and we get really distressed by that, don’t we?

Ellen Gottlieb 

We get very distressed, and we are, of course, deeply triggered because we are disappointed, and then they know we are disappointed. They feel at all. And when they feel our disappointment — and we vomit it out. It’s what you call reactivity. And you are right. The first part of my book talks about non-reactivity. I always say, if I could give one tool in a short amount of time to people, it would be what seems so simple, which is the pause and the breath before reacting. But nonreactivity means sitting with your discomfort about your child’s behavior and not wounding them with shame, with blame, with criticism, with judgment, with disapproval and disappointment, because every time we do that we are wounding them. See, we think we are teaching, but we are actually harming. And if we saw physical bruises from something we were doing, we would stop, but these are soulful bruises, and we don’t see them. So we keep going, thinking, “I’m the mom, I have to teach them.” But really what we are is angry and disappointed and hurt, and we are letting them know. And I always say a child who is deeply criticized and judged repeatedly, they don’t love you less, you the parent. They may be angry with you. But they love themselves less, and that’s the danger. And then when they’re teenagers, to the extent they’re able to, we want them to fly. And here, we have clipped their wings. We have. So it’s very powerful, this effect we have on our children, and yet, we are not even learning about how to do it in a way that supports their real growth.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Oh, that’s powerful. Wow. And as you are talking, I’m thinking so much about that I’ll give it the benefit of it being well-intentioned, but really misguided advice, practices, strategies that parents — especially have kids who maybe are exhibiting some challenging behaviors or issues, are given by professionals to handle these things which fall exactly in that category you were just talking about. The intent may not be to blame, shame, or whatever, but that is the result of using consequence, shame-based, child behavior-oriented kinds of strategies. And we are hearing that now from autistic adults, from other neurodivergent adults, from even kids as they’re getting older, saying “Here is what my experience of these kinds of methods and approaches has been, of all of the behavior charts and the punishments, and the focusing on the behavior”, exactly what you are saying. It may not be the intent, but it is the end result that we really do some damage to kids.

Ellen Gottlieb 

We do, we do. And it’s fear-based, Dr. Nicole. If you were asking me “Why would we hurt our child? Why would we punish?” We go into fear, and what fear does is trigger a need to control. But what we don’t realize is, if you were a firefighter and you went to fight a fire in a building, would you fight it with gasoline? Or would you fight it with water? So what we do is we pour gasoline on. We actually mimic the behavior we don’t want. We mimic the child’s behavior. So the child is having a tantrum and punching, so we hit them back, or we scream, or we yell. Well, now we are teaching them that this kind of more violent behavior is appropriate. Instead, our work as a more mindful parent is to be the antidote. So you have to always ask, “What does my child need in this moment?” And if your child is having a big tantrum, perhaps they need you to sit on the floor, and have a soft voice, and say, “I hear you.” And try to label the feeling “You are angry. Are you showing me how angry you are?” Or “Are you jealous?” “Are you frustrated?” If the child is able to express their emotion, based on their developmental stage and age, then we work with that. We reflect back the feeling. We might even give them paper and say, “Draw how angry you are. Show me, but no, you can’t hit.” Of course, we have to have boundaries, but it’s the way that we impose them without the criticism and the blaming and shaming, because they wound any child and every child, when parents are so triggered and so frightened, that they then try to control. I say to parents of teenagers, where the teenagers are out of control. “They didn’t meet their 10 o’clock curfew.” I said, “Well, what’s going to happen at 10:15 that didn’t happen at 9:45?” And then you start to see the illusory nature of your rule. Now, it doesn’t mean kids should be out till two in the morning. I’m not saying there are no boundaries, and this isn’t hippie parenting where the kids rule the roost. I don’t want to give that sense. But it’s guided parenting where the parent is not the authority. It’s not “Because I said so.” Or “Because I’m angry,” or “Because I’m afraid.” it has to be “Because I’m here to meet your needs.” What is the child’s need?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

And in order to do that, in order to really be able to think about it in that way, in the moment, and approach our children in that way requires us to do some work on ourselves, doesn’t it? And I know that it’s even in the title of your book, this idea of raising ourselves as parents — talk about what you mean by that, about why it’s important or necessary for a parent to raise themselves. What are you talking about there?

Ellen Gottlieb 

So it’s not the work of the child. I don’t want people to think that the child becomes the parent. That was not the intent. And I don’t think people believe that. I think that’s pretty clear. The point is that by the child’s very existence, because they are taking us in, as I said earlier, they are showing us our patterns, right? So the work is never about the child, when we are parenting. The work is always about ourselves. And that’s what we don’t realize and we don’t get. It’s about learning to be non-reactive, learning to detach from outcomes. So let’s take something easy like grades, because grades are a measure that everyone knows about. And I will share that when I started to learn this work, my children were soon to enter middle school, I decided not to look at report cards. And no one believes me, but I really didn’t read report cards, because whether there was an A or C, I didn’t care about the letter or the number. Grades are there to tell us maybe the child is having a problem. And then let’s try to get curious. Right? So it’s always about raising our own awareness. There’s just no other way to put it. And the child will be okay if we are okay. So instead of demanding that they study all night, how about you be a good role model for discipline and for motivation? Motivation that comes externally will not stay with a child for a lifetime. Motivation that is prompted by fear, by reprimands by criticism, really beats down the child. We want to create internal motivation, so we have to be internally motivated. It’s always about shining the light on us. How am I presenting myself to this child? Is it in a way that’s conscious, where they can learn? Or is it a way that I’m stunting them because I’m being the dictator, the authority, “Because I said so.” My father used to say “Do as I say, not as I do,” and I remember that, but that’s actually the opposite of what I teach.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

And I think that there is so much of how we were raised, and sort of a generational component in this, right? I think many adults come to their experience of parenting not really having done much reflection or becoming conscious at all around how we were impacted by various parts of how we were parented and raised. Sometimes I’ll work with parents who are like, “This is the type of environment I was raised in, this is how my mom or dad did this with me, and I grew up saying I will never do that to my kid.” So with big things, we recognize that, but I think there are a lot of smaller things. There are a lot of things that we just really aren’t aware of that have become embedded in us, that we sort of tell ourselves are just how it is, or aren’t necessary or important parts of what it means to parent kids. We need to really examine those stories and those experiences to see if that’s something we want to carry into our own parenting, right?

Ellen Gottlieb 

Absolutely. So what you said is very interesting, because we have often said to ourselves when we are children, “When I’m a parent, I won’t do it that way.” But we have to really deeply understand that what we fear, we manifest. What we don’t like is exactly what we do to our children. We may watch ourselves do it to our children because we don’t know a way out. That’s what conscious work does. It gives you tools to stop and to pause and to not knee-jerk. But let me tell you that what we dislike and fear the most is exactly what we manifest. If we had a parent who was lazy, I could promise you, if you haven’t done work, you are going to have a lazy child. If you had a parent who drank a lot, you probably may have a child who drinks too much. All kinds of patterns get repeated because there’s direct trauma and there’s intergenerational trauma. So in other words, we pass our trauma down, but we also inherit trauma from our parents. So it’s a very complex process. And this is why it’s always the work of the parent to start to understand what your trauma was and start to deconstruct it. So when I work with clients — and I’m not a therapist, I don’t have medical training, but I tell them, “We are going to talk about your past a good bit, because we have to understand it so that we can start to shift away from it.” So there’s a lot of behavioral work that needs to be done, but we do what we don’t like to our kids. One client was always reprimanding his kids because they spilled their milk, or their elbows were on the table, and I said, “Tell me about your dinner tables when you were a kid.” He goes “Ugh, my father used to yell at me all the time.” Well, here he is, yelling at his child. What he hated the most. Simple example. He woke up, he said, “Oh, my goodness, I’m doing just what I promised I wouldn’t do”, because he didn’t have a tool. So this work has to be done, Dr. Nicole, with a lot of self-compassion. People come to me and go, “I blew it, my kid is 18 or 16 or 20”. There’s never a bad time, and it’s never too late, and it’s never too early to start finding a new way.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

That’s a great point. And I think with you talking about the piece of fear driving this, and you mentioning how the things that we most fear repeating or most fear happening with our kids, tend to be the things that we end up bringing about, it strikes me that for parents of kids with any kind of disability, any kind of challenge, especially more maybe significant reactive and behavioral challenges, the biggest fear that the vast majority of these parents have is, “Oh my gosh, what if my kid never outgrows this? What if my kid turns into an adult who at 18, at 21, or 30, is still throwing themselves down and kicking and hurting people and doing all this?” And when I explore that with parents, I’ve had parents of even two and three year olds, who are able to, when they really become aware of it, tap into that that’s what they are anxious about and reacting to in the moment. It’s not this three-year-old who is having a meltdown, but this story in their mind about how this kid is going to be as an adult, and what then? And so I think that’s very powerful, what you are talking about there.
Ellen Gottlieb 

Well, that is very powerful, what you are saying, because in that moment, with that two-year-old, this parent is bringing all that fear. Fear of the next two, or three or ten decades. And it’s that fear that’s controlling how the parent is behaving in this moment, and let me tell you: That child is feeling their fear, and the behavior gets more concretized. It gets stuck. That’s the irony of all of this, is that we parent in a way that we want the behavior to change, but we make the behavior more stuck. We don’t give space and air for the child to perhaps shift, because we are on them because we can’t tolerate it. So what I would say to the parent you are talking about is that there is a lot of work to do on acceptance. There’s a lot, a lot of work, especially when your child is not in the typical way that you were hoping, right? We had wants, we had desires, we had dreams. And now instead of this parenting being the trip to Italy, maybe it’s now been the trip to a different country that we didn’t want to go to, and it’s painful. I work with many parents in this circumstance. So the first thing we work on is acceptance. I can’t tell you that 2-year-old won’t be doing that when he’s 20, but I can say that he’s more likely to still be doing it if you are reacting in fear and reprimand and shame and punishing and consequences. So the best chance, there’s no guarantees ever, but the best chance is if we have a more mindful approach. Even with a more neurotypical child, I tell a parent: There are no guarantees that they’re not going to be wild teenagers drinking and doing whatever, but let me ask you: If you have two 15-year-olds, and one’s been parented in a way where they’ve been seen and heard and honored, and they haven’t been criticized, they have been allowed to be themselves, and they haven’t been pushed to be in every activity or be at the top of the class; They’ve just been themselves and they’re fairly joyful and content, then now you have another child who has been raised with a quite an agenda, who has been punished and criticized, he has been told is wrong a lot, from little things like “I don’t like the clothes you pick out”, to “Your grades are unacceptable.” Who is going to be angry? Who is more likely to act out once there’s a little independence?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Oh, such a good point. Let’s get into a few tools because I think you have shone a spotlight on so many important things for our listeners to be aware of here, and I can almost hear in their minds going. “Okay, yeah, I get this. This makes sense. I need to make some shifts here. How do I start doing that?” So let’s get into maybe a couple of tools that you think are helpful starting points.

Ellen Gottlieb 

Sure. There are many tools, I actually include what I call a little conscious toolbox in the book, and I’ve already come up with more because that’s an ever-evolving process. But if I were to give one idea that I’d like to share, it’s the idea, and I said it earlier, of the pause and the breath. So your child has just triggered you, and no one can trigger us like our children can. I don’t care whether they’re neurotypical or atypical, they can make us really angry. And the idea of taking a pause and taking a breath — a real intentional breath now, not just the breathing we do all day. Like you said at the beginning, we are all conscious, we are alive. We are also breathing all day. But are we breathing with purpose? Are we focusing on that breath? So I asked you to count in and count out for a few counts, three or four counts on your breath, and then ask yourself a question: How am I going to approach this in a new way? How am I going to approach this issue, so that I don’t have a mess to clean up afterwards, so that I don’t wound, so that I teach? And in that momentary pause, which seems simple, but is so challenging, we get to make a choice about how to respond. I use the word respond instead of react. So the most important tool to me, in my life, which I use all the time, is non-reactivity. And I’m really pretty good at it, so I give myself a B. If you can get a C+ in conscious parenting, you are ahead of the game. I’m pretty good at non-reactivity. I lose it sometimes. But not nearly as often, because it’s a practice. And I do want to mention, Dr. Nicole, that this is like going to the gym. You can’t do this once. People call me and go, “Could you fix my kids? I have an hour.” No, I’ll try to fix you, and I need more than an hour because you have been doing this for 30 or 40 years, so give me a little more time. But pausing and breathing and trying to take a different approach. Ask yourself, “How can I do this differently? How can I do this without shame, blame, criticism, or judgment? What can I do not to inculcate fear?” The way we do that is we open up some space. So maybe we ask the child, “Was that your best choice?”, as opposed to “Why did you do that? That’s wrong, don’t do that!” What’s the best choice? So pausing, breathing and thinking, and using tools. Reading a little bit about some tools that are available. There are just ways of saying things to your child that are more conscious, instead of “Don’t spill your milk!” So if it’s a younger child, you might say, “Who spilled the milk?” Instead of anger, you are just being curious. So curiosity is another wonderful way to start engaging with your child. Another important tool, very hard one, it is related to non-reactivity, is listening. Again, we think we listen, and we think we are connected. So the big pillars of conscious parenting are connection and boundaries. And we all go, “I’m connected, I love. I’m connected”, but we are not connected in the way that our children feel heard. Are you willing to listen in a way without interrupting, and without countering that child, and just listening? And I’ll tell you when it’s hardest. It’s hardest when they don’t like what you are doing. So they come to you and go, “I don’t like the way you made a rule, it’s not fair.” And you go, “But I….” right away. What about when we pause and we breathe, and we say, “I hear you”, and we reflect back? Another wonderful tool is reflection. “I hear that you are angry about that rule. Let’s talk about it. What’s making you angry? How can we adjust this rule in a way that you can live with it?” Give them agency, give them a little power. At two years old, children should have some power over their food, over their clothing. It doesn’t matter if the stripes and the polka dots clash. And if you bought the dress for the bridal shower or the wedding, and the kid doesn’t want to wear it, you don’t have to have a fight. So reflection, pausing, breathing, listening are all ways of promoting deeper connection.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

And so important. That connection, then, opens the space for other kinds of things to happen. And I think that’s where the fear comes in, it’s in, “If I take that pause, if I don’t get on top of this problem or this behavior instantly, then it’s just going to get bigger, and it’s going to be a bigger problem.” And what you are talking about is really very counterintuitive, right? That, no actually by stepping away from it, by leaving some space, by taking a few moments, I’m actually not fanning the flames of it. I’m allowing some of the intensity of this to come down to where we can deal with it. But I think there’s a very big fear in the vast majority, not just of parents, but of anybody dealing with kids — teachers in schools, therapists, professionals, of “If I don’t immediately do something about this, then it’s just going to be a way bigger problem.”

Ellen Gottlieb 

But you see, that’s fear. So in our fear, we want to fix, we want to rescue, we want to protect. And what we are doing is we are really cutting off their needs. I mean, we are cutting off their ability to figure this out. Now, this is where attunement comes in. If a five-year-old is being bullied, I’m not saying sit back and let them go every day. You have to be wise about it, and you have to know when you are going to advocate, based on developmental age and stage and biological ability, and emotional ability, and when you are going to sit back. That takes some attunement and discernment. You may work with a coach to understand when. But the key is always to watch yourself feel triggered. So again, it always comes back to us and our fear. We cannot parent wisely and mindfully when we are in a state of fear, and we want to protect and rescue. But is that always the best thing? And I’ll tell you, with children in high school, they don’t want to be rescued and protected. If you want your teenager to talk to you, don’t keep giving them advice and tell them how to fix it. But say I just want to hear. Be the container, be the listener, be the deep listener. I sometimes say take your kid away from their screen. If you have to go out for coffee — another tool I really love is special time, where each child gives each parent a little bit of time. It’s actually scheduled. And the child gets to choose the activity, hopefully with no screen, and there’s just connection. When someone calls, you say, “I can’t take this call right now, I’m having special time.” Let’s make our kids feel that they are more important than anyone, but not because we have an agenda, and not because we want it our way. So the desire to fix. “Oh, my gosh, do I have that? I just think I know better. I mean, come on. I know. Come on. I’ll tell you what to tell…”, I have children with bosses. Tell your boss this. Don’t allow that? No, it’s not for me to tell her what to tell her boss. It’s for me to listen to some of the discomfort that she may be having, and to say “You got this. I trust you.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah, and to let them lead with that, especially as they get older, but really, at any age, whatever is developmentally appropriate. And some of you are listening and you are like, “Well, my child isn’t a good communicator, my child isn’t able to talk about things like that”, or “My child doesn’t talk at all.” We are talking about listening here in the broader sense, that we can always listen through really close observation. We can see through what the other person is doing, what the child is doing through their body language, through their actions. We can listen in lots of ways, it doesn’t just have to be the words that are coming out of their mouths.
Ellen Gottlieb 

What I’m really talking about is presence. That’s what you are saying. We can also communicate through our presence. “You see, I want to be here.” So parents say to me, “They won’t shut off the screens at night.” I say, “Tell me, are you on your phone?” “Oh, well, it’s for work.” No, no, no, no, no. True. Be the role model you want. You don’t want your kid on that screen, then get on the floor and play Monopoly. Then connect with your child, start reading a book together, read a series together, listen to music, be present. It doesn’t all have to be words. In fact, often kids won’t trust you for a while when you shift into this paradigm, and they won’t talk until you have sat with them enough in presence and they start to trust. “Oh, I’m not getting criticism. I’m not getting advice. I’m not being rescued. They just want to hear me.” Remember, there are two questions that every human being, I believe, asks through throughout their whole lives. I think it’s a reason for being, to ask the question and search for the answers to: “Do you hear me? Am I worthy?” If you are willing to hear me, or just to be with me to be present with me, as you say, then I must matter. And so this work is all about imbuing our children with self-worth. We want them to have self-worth, but it’s all full of conditions and it’s about their external accomplishments. And I’m trying to switch this, turn this around and say let’s make self-worth about our internal sense of self, separate and apart from being the best athlete or the best musician or the valedictorian or the most popular. Just let them be comfortable living in their skin. People say “What do you want for your children?” I say “That they can live in their skin”, and then hopefully, their trajectory is higher and better, but that’s on them. Can you live in your skin? Are you comfortable in yourself? Do you feel okay inside? What else is there?
Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah. “Am I heard? Am I worthy?” Such important things for us to reflect on in our own lives and relationships, but also in thinking about if our children are asking those questions, how would they answer those in terms of their experience with us? Right?

 

 

Ellen Gottlieb 

I never thought of it that way. How would our children answer? Wow. “Am I heard? Do you hear me? Are you willing?”, and that means with all my ugliness. It’s not only when I come home with the 98. It’s when I come home with the F, or when I get reprimanded, or when I’m hurting in some way. Can you just sit with my pain? And the reason we can’t sit with our children’s pain is because we haven’t learned to tolerate our own, and that’s why this work is about learning to tolerate all of your own emotions, and then teaching your children that they can tolerate theirs.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Oh, Ellen, this is so good. I could talk to you for the rest of the day, but I know that we are at a time constraint here. I have absolutely loved this conversation, and would really love to have you back at some point to continue this, maybe do a part two, because I know that we are going to get so much great feedback, and there are going to be so many follow-up questions and things. So we would love it if you are willing to come back on at some point.

Ellen Gottlieb 

Sure! We could do a Q&A!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Great. I want to make sure that people know where they can find out more about you and your work, and particularly the book that you have out.

Ellen Gottlieb  

Oh, I’d love to share that. So the book is called, “How to Raise a Parent: Becoming A Conscious Parent In An Unconscious World.” I will share that there are a lot of lessons in the book, but they’re all illuminated by vignettes and stories to help parents see how to try to implement some of the lessons. And there’s a toolbox. It’s on Amazon, it’s on my website. My website www.enlightenedparenting.co. It’s important to say it’s .co for coach, not .com. You won’t find me if you put in .com. So enlightenedparenting.co. My email address is ellen@enlightenedparenting.co. If anyone is interested in the book and feel free, or not, if anyone does read it and enjoys it, I would appreciate Amazon reviews. I’m told that they’re important for certain algorithms, so that would be lovely, but please don’t feel any obligation. It’s a new endeavor. It’s an endeavor that comes from my heart. I started it and dedicated it to my sister, who I called my greatest teacher, because she was limited in so many ways, and yet such a powerful, loving person who knew how to live in the present moment, and taught me so much about raising my consciousness. So I owe her a great debt. And it’s dedicated to her.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Wonderful, beautiful, I hope that all of you go out and get the book. I know that you will love it and find it so valuable just as a parent, to somebody working with kids, just as a human being. So Ellen, thank you again, so much, for taking the time to be with us today and sharing all of this wisdom with us. We really appreciate it.

Ellen Gottlieb 

Oh, Dr. Nicole, it really is my pleasure. I’m so happy to be here. Thank you very much for having me.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

And thank you, as always, to all of you for being here and for listening. We will catch you back here next time.