Parenting
“You can’t make your kids do anything. All you can do is make them wish they had. And then, they will make you wish you hadn’t made them wish they had.”
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Be the Parent you long to be…
For most of us, the only model of parenting we have is how we were parented. Often this didn’t include us being heard, understood and encouraged as much as we would have liked. We may want to do it differently with our own children, but only ‘know what we know’, and each book we read seems to contradict the other.
Sometimes there’s a fear that if we don’t show our children who is ‘boss’, we’ll fall into a permissive style of parenting and raise little tyrants who don’t respect others.
An NVC approach to parenting is neither authoritarian nor permissive. Neither does it instruct you ‘how’ to parent. Rather, it helps parents to identify and live by their own highest values, and parent from this wisdom.
NVC demonstrates how we can transform ‘power over’ to ‘power with’, and create relationships where everyone’s needs are valued equally, rather than relationships where the person who has most power gets their own way at the expense of others.
“What we are teaches the child far more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.”Joseph Chilton Pearce
Whether you’re a new parent or your kids are already teenagers, NVC offers powerful, immediately applicable tools to begin creating a relationship with them based on trust, mutual respect, connection, harmony and fun.
Communication for Life offers courses in parenting with nonviolence. For further information about Nonviolent Communication, go here. For upcoming courses, go here.
Jocelyn also offers mediation for families and coaching for parents. It is strongly recommended to attend an NVC course before private coaching or mediation, as it will help you get the most out of the experience.
