Holistic Preparation for Parenthood: A Crucial Undertaking
“If society were truly to appreciate the significance of children’s emotional ties throughout the first years of life, it would no longer tolerate children growing up, or parents having to struggle, in situations that cannot possibly nourish healthy growth.” - Stanley Greenspan, M.D., The Growth of the Mind
As my husband and I prepare ourselves for potential parenthood, I have been doing a lot of research to determine what we should focus on before opening ourselves up to the possibility of children.
To me, this feels like a sacred process. Given my devotion to supporting children in our world by resourcing mothers, I have a very high regard for being intentional and prepared from a holistic lens when it comes to bringing children into the world.
It is a huge responsibility: guiding another spirit through the experience of being human and setting them up to lead healthy, happy, and fulfilling lives — lives of contribution, love, and purpose. A life that creates Heaven on Earth.
My own preparation process and the work I do with clients has lead me to ask: why don’t we educate our youth on this crucial undertaking? If I were to redesign high school education, I would include things like emotional regulation and nervous system health, neuroscience and brain development, building authentic trust in relationships, how to repair conflict, how to take care of your body so you can feel vibrant and energetic, how to heal from your childhood and accept and love your parents for who they are, connecting with your intuition and living life from your own inner guidance, sourcing yourself through nature, etc.
Since I did not get that education, I’ve been spending the last 10 years educating myself in these things. Now, with the lens of motherhood in front of me, these learnings have taken on another level of significance and sacredness.
One of the things I’ve learned in my research has been the crucial nature of the emotional environment in which a child grows up. We are feeling beings after all, and long before a child can think, they can feel.
“The earliest established components of an infant’s psychobiological makeup are those most formative of his lifelong outlook. What he feels before he can think is a powerful determinant of what kind of things he thinks when thoughts becomes possible.” (Jean Liedloff)
The bottom line is, what your infant, toddler, and child is feeling in your home has significant impacts on their brain development - the repetitive thoughts they are going to have, the outlook on life they will have, and ultimately the reality they will perceive into adulthood.
So: as a parent or potential parent, what YOU are thinking, feeling, and experiencing matters. How you take care of yourself matters. How you process your past matters. How you and your spouse relate to each other matters. The stability of your home matters.
Easier said than done, as it seems like our society is not built for people and communities to thrive. Decisions are weighed against how much money can be made vs. what is good for the human spirit and human body. I often feel disheartened about the world I would be bringing a child into, and it really gives me pause — is it fair and ethical to bring an innocent being into this world?
Gilda Radner called motherhood “an act of infinite optimism.” How true that is — hope in a better future lives with our children, so let’s ensure that we set them up to thrive and create a beautiful future reality.
In his book, The Myth of Normal, Gabor Maté emphasizes the importance of the relationship between child and caregiver: “Children’s sense of security, trust in the world, interrelationships with others, and, above all, connection to their authentic emotions hinge on the consistent availability of attuned, non-stressed, and emotionally reliable caregivers. The more stressed or distracted the latter, the shakier the emotional architecture of the child’s mind will be.”
Unfortunately, the way our current society is structured doesn’t lend itself well to parents being able to cultivate a lifestyle that is attuned, non-stressed, and emotionally reliable for a child. Increasing costs demand more time at work. The addiction to “doing” that our culture collectively worships creates pressure to always be doing more, having more, and being more. Since our larger environment (our culture) is not conducive to what might be best for ourselves and our children, it is our responsibility to create an environment that is.
If we can understand how the young brain develops, or at least grasp a rudimentary understanding, we can see why it is so vital that we prepare ourselves and set ourselves up for success to nurture a human being through their infancy, childhood, and adolescence:
“The architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth, continues into adulthood, and establishes either a sturdy or a fragile foundation for all the health, learning, and behavior that follow. The interaction of genes and experiences literally shapes the circuitry of the developing brain, and is critically influenced by the mutual responsiveness of adult-child relationships, particularly in the early childhood years.” (Jack P. Shonkoff)
Early childhood years can often be some of the most exhausting and stressful for parents. Although simultaneously filled with joy and connection, the parents of our modern day are not set up to be stress-free while raising small children. In addition, we are all dealing with our own pain, beliefs, and experiences that we carry with us from our own childhood and the ways society has molded us. Raising children in our current society creates a lot of standards and expectations for children. Before they are even 3, they are being judged for their behavior and told over and over again in subtle ways: something is wrong with you, suppress how you’re feeling, be more serious, disconnect from how your body wants to express your emotions, be some way other than the way you are. I am not saying this to blame parents or caregivers — it’s just the reality of the current ways in which we live — we tell children they are too silly, not patient enough, too loud, etc. mostly because of the social norms, standards, and expectations we inherited and continue to make up.
However, what children need more than anything is to “feel an invitation to exist in our presence, exactly the way they are.” (Gordon Neufeld) “The parents’ primary task, beyond providing for the child’s survival requirements, is to emanate a simple message to the child in word, deed, and (most of all) energetic presence, that he or she is precisely the person they love, welcome, and want. The child doesn’t have to do anything, or be any different to win that love.” (Gabor Mate)
This may seem obvious, however this level of unconditional love is rare. I believe it is at the core of who we are as human beings — we ARE that kind of divine love. However, we often have many barriers to experiencing that kind of love, and often we turn our own internalized shame and guilt into external judgements of others, projecting and spreading our pain.
By letting go of those barriers that have shaped our view of others, we can access the inherent divine love that exists in all of us. As Rumi said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Barriers that shape our view of ourselves, others, and our reality are things like past wounds, decisions we’ve made about ourselves, our thoughts, limiting beliefs, inherited standards, judgements, etc. Essentially: our ego.
So, to provide children with the transformative and healing power of our unconditional, divine love, we need to ensure we’ve done as much as we possibly can to continuously remove those barriers, as I believe that is at the core of being able to provide the four irreducible needs for human maturation (according to Dr. Neufeld):
The attachment relationship: children’s deep sense of contact and connection with those responsible for them.
A sense of attachment security that allows the child to rest from the work of earning his right to be who he is as he is.
Permission to feel one’s emotions, especially grief, anger, sadness, and pain — in other words, the safety to remain vulnerable.
The experience of free play in order to mature.
So how can we prepare, body, mind and spirit, for parenthood? (Or for those of you who are already parents, continue to honor the sacred process of parenthood.)
Here is a list of focus areas my husband and I are working on as we prepare ourselves. I hope they make a difference for you in being more available and accessing more unconditional love for the children in your life:
Nutrition
What we consume has such a big impact on our life force energy and being. Not only is nutrition important from a physical standpoint - ensuring we have the proper nutrients to grow and nourish a healthy human, but it also has big implications on our moods and emotional state as well. This is important for both the mother AND the father pre-conception. My husband and I are focusing on nutrient-dense, home-cooked foods with adequate nutrients, tending to our microbiomes, and accessing joy and connection through food. We are also changing out some products in our home so that they are free of microplastics, aluminum, and other toxic substances. I’ve switched to bringing my own drinking receptacles when I travel as coffee cups are lined with plastic. Real Food for Pregnancy is a great resource for all things nutrition before, during, and after pregnancy.
Movement
Creating strong, flexible bodies that will love us back into our old age is something we are very intentional about. We want to be strong and available for our kids for as long as possible. We particularly focus on building lean skeletal muscle, doing a lot of mobility work, and finding exercise that we enjoy and is easily accessible. This can be a really great mood stabilizer and I am working on making exercise part of my lifestyle and not something I’m doing to work towards a specific goal in short bursts. (I’ve made a lot of progress with Brendan’s help over the last 3 years with this.) I know that exercise will go out the window when I’m low on time and energy, so it’s really important to me that I have engrained the habit before entering into pregnancy.
Connection with Nature
One of our shared values is time in nature. There are so many health benefits from a physical and mental lens when it comes to spending time outdoors, including reduced stress, processing emotions, and a more diverse microbiome. I’m striving for something I saw recently: The Nature Pyramid. Yearly / Bi-Yearly: spend 3 days off grid in a nature experience. Monthly spend 5 hours in a semi-wild area, like a national park. Weekly spend 2 hours outdoors in regional parks and waterways. Daily spend 20 minutes in your local outdoors. This is something we want to pass along to our child, so we want to make sure it is part of our lifestyle before the challenges of parenting take over.
Family Values and Alignment
We are discussing our core values as a household, and how we want to live in alignment with those values. We are both highly intentional, and we want to pass that down to our child - showing them how you can create things that resonate with you and live true to them, vs. getting pulled in by the societal norms and family norms you’re born into. We’ve also been working on articulating our intention for bringing a child into this world. Most people have a child because it is just the next thing to do. We want to make sure we have a clear and beautiful intention for WHY we are having a child, and want to ensure that intention shapes our actions and how we make decisions.
A Strong Marital Foundation / Relationship Health
We’ve done A LOT of work on our relationship, and see it as a living thing that requires tending to. We’ve done a lot of work to move through some of our childhood stuff that inevitably shows up in our relationship. We’ve done couples therapy together, and loved Gottman Method tools. We both highly value our partnerhsip and share equal responsibility in addressing things that aren’t working. We put a lot of “deposits” in the bank by acknowledging each other, responding to bids for connection, and giving A LOT of verbal affirmation of how we feel about each other. We are talking about how in many (heteronormative) relationships, when a woman becomes a mother her focus shifts from the marriage to the child, and she needs the man to step up and own the relationship. We do weekly check-ins with each other and ask these questions: What is taking up the most of your headspace lately? Has there been anything that has been bothering you about me / us lately that I’ve missed? When have you felt the most loved lately? Are you happy with the distribution of household chores? Are we satisfied with our intimate relationship? How can I support you and make you feel loved this week?
Childhood Healing Work
I have seen first hand that parents struggle with their own childhood experiences when they become parents, and get hit with a lot of developmental trauma that they don’t know how to process when they are new parents and are sleep deprived and stressed out. I want to make sure we are both healing our childhoods and have good relationships with our parents and family of origin before we bring a child into our dynamic. We want to make sure we are aware of and tending to ancestral trauma, so that we limit the unproductive or painful patterns we’re passing down. We both have used therapists or coaches in the past to help us with this work. Included in this work is parts work / shadow work, which is essentially doing the work to make sure we can accept and love ALL parts of ourselves, so that we can accept and love all parts of others.
Self-Regulation
We are examining stressors and seeing what habits and routines we need to make sure we have high stress resilience and a wide window of tolerance. We are practicing emotional regulation techniques so that we can teach them to our children from a place of experience.
We are fully aware that much of our planning and preparation can and will go out the window once the realities of parenthood set in. However, I still believe doing this work and creating a plan is important. This might sound like a lot of work - and it is! We spend 4 years in college preparing for our careers, why wouldn’t we spend time preparing for the most important job in the world?
I truly believe that a paradigm shift in how we see and prepare for parenthood could really change our society for the better, creating a world that is peaceful, loving, and focused on what is best for humanity.
Children are as much human as we are. They are beings for us to protect, guide, and nurture so they can create their own autonomous lives. Their experience at every stage of life is valid and important - let’s do the work to love ourselves well so we can honor and love our children exactly as they are.
If you would like support in preparing for parenthood, I am currently working on resources and offerings for couples who are pregnant or preparing to conceive. Email me for more information.
