What parents tell me they want for their child...

Whenever I begin to work with a parent I always ask: what do you want for your child when they grow up to be an adult?

What I hear over and over is:

I want my child to feel free to be fully themself.

How beautiful is that!

But that got me thinking...

...what is this 'self' we want our child to fully be?

...I wonder, do I feel like I so solidly know my 'self' now that I'm an adult? To be honest, most days it seems like a moving target, something I'm always aiming for.

The self seems at once so elusive, ever changing, possibly made up of many different components such as personality, temperament, cultural background and experiences; and yet at the same time fixed and unchangeable.

So here's what I've decided about it. And I have a feeling that decades of research in child development, neuroscience, and psychology will back me up...

What parents want most for their child is:

Connection

When a parent says, I want my child to be themself, what they are saying is:

I want my child to have access to all the parts of themselves: their thoughts, their feelings, their wants and needs...

...because at any given moment in time these will guide them through their life as a touchstone to their own insight and intuition, their own authenticity; giving them a sense of place, purpose, and presence in the world, free to choose their life path and express themselves, even during times when nothing seems clear or certain.

The Heart People serves as a guide, using empathy, curiosity, and acceptance of our child's feelings to help our child build the brain pathways towards their own awareness of self. Their own authenticity.

Our job as parents becomes much more simple:

we know that the empathy we give our child wires their brain optimally so that other capabilities like emotion regulation, flexibility, abstract thinking, sustained attention, organization, judgment and persistence are able to emerge with ease as our child develops.

Just one connecting moment, one chance to feel what's true, is a moment to experience the self.

I wish for you many moments of connection in the days to come.

With so much love,

Vanessa