It is a tough job being transparent to the all seeing of a child. What this means for me is working on walking the talk with the kids. Pausing and looking more at what I do, and the genuine affect it has on my children. It is scary the power we have in molding these little people.

My dear friend, and date for the Waldorf night, saw this clearly. She is afraid to put the following quote on her fridge: “Am I worthy of imitation?” And frankly, so am I. Google “am i worthy of imitation” and you get umpteen references to the bible. From what I’ve been told though, nothing associated with God is easy.

Yoga and Pregnancy

My yoga practice as a parent began when I was pregnant with my first baby. Apparently barfing and yoga do not go hand-in-hand, so I learned how to practice non-physical yoga. Being pregnant was a yoga practice in and of itself because to do it well, I had to be aware of my limits and abilities and aware of my actions and emotions on my baby.  Books and videos helped me start up the physical practice in my second trimester. Guidance was important at this stage because I needed to learn how to adjust positions to accommodate the new body I was in. My emotional practice helped me in choosing a home birth, because I could look my fears right in the eye and come out the other side with a confidence and trust that I could birth safely.

Yoga and Birthing

Birthing my first baby was made easy because of yoga. With practised Ujjayi breathing I could ride the pain of contractions and remain focussed and confident. I remember my midwife telling me to push at one point during active labour, and I confidently said ‘no, another little bit and I will be ready.’ Baby was crowning and it felt to me that if I just pushed through when she suggested, I was going to tear. I was dancing with baby and only I could know when to do-si-do. The awareness of my body I had learned through yoga (to push myself to the edge of my physical ability, just before hurting myself) allowed me to understand where baby was and what was needed from me to get her out. I was good at going inward to find my strength and disciplined to rest between contractions, even before I was tired.

My second baby came a lot faster and with much more intensity, and I wonder if it was because my yoga practice was much less integrated in my life as a new mom. Breathing during active labour came more in the form of deep pursed lips and bulging eyes as my girlfriend stared me through the tough contractions… but I digress. Although I had to work harder to find my breath, it was still a useful tool. More importantly, when I was finding the birth difficult, I had a knowing voice inside me that reminded me to surrender to the pain and to live in the moment of each step that was necessary to bring baby to us. Thinking I couldn’t possibly make it to the end was of no use to any of us. Although it was a tougher birth, yoga allowed me to birth at home and without drugs a second time.

Yoga and Parenting

As a parent, it has become increasingly clear to me that I can only be of quality service to my family if I am loving myself. Yoga has been the only solution to my woes and gives me a place to go when I need help. So here I am with a two and four year old, trying to integrate a physical yoga practice back into my life. Not only do I suffer some body image issues that will be helped, I miss the time on my mat I use to meditate and get myself grounded emotionally. When things are spinning, I like to spin them down out of my head, through my body and down into the ground. My husband and I will pull out our mats and do some poses with the kids – they love it and I hope to find classes for families to attend soon. But of course, doing it with the kids does not allow me focus to set my intentions, and then move through a series of postures that help me to integrate the intentions. As with anything I want to do these days, I need to schedule it.

Unconditional love of our kids is touted in attachment parenting circles. Helping our kids work through their problems, requires us to be able to sit their with them through the tough stuff. We’ve been known to lean on bribing and incentives to encourage movement through unwanted behaviour – ‘treats’ are motivators in our family. I’ve learned though that this is just a temporary distraction and of now use to them in learning to work through things. So now that I’m loving myself, I’m figuring out how to guide my kids to love themselves and life. Wanting to be a good role model for them, yoga is giving me tools and knowledge to guide:

Awareness – I want to be able to demonstrate to my children how to find awareness on all levels: physical, emotional, and spiritual. Yoga is the only practice that I know integrates all of these well, making if very efficient.
Intention Setting – I want to be able to teach my children how to identify meaningful goals for themselves.
Finding Presence – My children teach this to me every day. I want them to continue to appreciate what they are getting out of every moment, for the rest of their lives. 

Root Concept

Do any of the words or phrases – presence, awareness, surrender, let it go, pick your battles, blessing or intention – mean anything to you? If so, then I contend you are living a happier life, and one that already includes yogic practices.

Yesterday, I ran into one of the many instructors I have had over the years and she asked how my yoga practice was going. It is so easy for me to bemoan how little I get on my mat. So I was happy that my answer was a simple sweep of my hand towards my laughing children. She nodded with a knowing smile and no more was said.

Related Resources

Yoga for Pregnancy by Sandra Jordan

Aqua Yoga for Pregnancy – I really learned to care for myself and connect with baby in the aqua yoga class I did while pregnant. 

This one looks good for sharing yoga with children – My Daddy is a Pretzel by Baaron Baptiste

Teachings about Presence – The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Teachings about Awareness - Mother’s Breath: A Definitive Guide to Yoga Breathing, Sound and Awareness Practices During Pregnancy, Birth, Post-natal Recovery and Mothering by Uma Dinsmore-Tuli. 

Written By: Nicole LeBlanc Charlwood

After months of waking every two hours with my daughter, I got pregnant with my son. I was a barfer and would get crazy neck kinks from feeding in bed. I grew very impatient and cranky and needed to find ways to get more sleep, quickly. After responding to her every desire for 20 months, I had to find a way to teach her to self-soothe – and so began the journey of trying to teach my kids to have a strong self-esteem, but that is another story. My husband and I dabbled in letting her cry herself to sleep because it was supposed to be the most efficient, and therefore least harmful to my relationship with my daughter. It struck us as a bit odd thought that a lot of deep crying for four days was supposed to teach her how to sleep.  Like time-outs, it was too hard on our nervous systems and intuitively we weren’t comfortable ignoring the need of our baby for comfort. The book we were hearing about from a lot of parents was The No Cry Sleep Solution. So I photocopied the workbook and took notes every night and watched over about three months as we slowly worked at finding new soothing tools for our daughter while simultaneously weaning her, first of daytime, then night time feeds. I had a list of 14 ideas for helping soother my baby, and I was trying to find the magic solution. It took months of analysing to get her sleeping more through the night. Two days after fully weaning her, she slept through the night.

With my second child, at about 17 months, I saw that I was beginning to need more sleep again and that I was losing presence with those around me. Seeing the early signs of my need, I began to introduce pacifiers, bottles and stuffies a little earlier, before beginning to wean. Our son began to sleep through the night at 19 months, after he was fully weaned and it felt much more naturally acquired. I do have little pangs of guilt knowing I didn’t make it to two years with either of the kids. I’m trying to pump milk for another few months to give our son the physical health benefits, and hope I can get more than an ounce every couple of days, argh. I waited until I was weaning to start pumping. My bad. For replacement of the emotional support the kids had from breastfeeding, we make time for good quality cuddling – the entire family is well-versed in ‘hugs and smooches’ and we encourage lots of massage.

In the beginning I thought that I could breastfeed during the day only and have the kids sleep at night. I learned that with both of our children, it was full weaning that brought sleep back into our house. We do still play musical beds when our one-and-a-half year old is teething or our  almost-four year old wakes from a bad dream. I feel though that we found a good balance of caring for them in their tender ages, and caring for our needs too. Now we can count on a few good nights of sleep a week, which really helps us to be better with ourselves and each other.

Written By: Nicole LeBlanc Charlwood

The following is an embellished exerpt from a compelling article about kids and competition, by Alfie Kohn who is well published on children and the effectiveness of various normal parental and educational tactics used today.

Competition is primarily based on the premise that there is a winner and a loser – the nature of the beast is that there are always way more losers than winners. Having children essentially fail in games and other competitive arenas can in fact make them withdraw and can greatly damage their all important self-esteem and self-confidence. We are trying to learn how to weigh the need to fit into society by engaging our children in competitive activities vs encouraging them to participate in physical activities and games which encourage co-operation and relationship building. And we all know how hard these endeavours can be. I’ve found comfort in the black and white world of sport.

Having fun doesn’t mean turning playing fields into battlefields. It’s remarkable, when you stop to think about it, that the way we teach our kids to have a good time is to play highly structured games in which one individual or team must defeat another.

The Root Issue

For children, young ones especially, competition has been proven to demolish self-esteem, interfere with learning and simply isn’t necessary for a good time.

What Experts Say

Those few who are winners become reliant on winning, and even dependant on them to define who they are.  Studies have shown that feelings of self-worth become dependent on external sources of evaluation as a result of competition: Your value is defined by what you’ve done. Worse — you’re a good person in proportion to the number of people you’ve beaten. A child is told that it isn’t enough to be good — he must triumph over others. Success comes to be defined as victory, even though these are really two very different things. Even when the child manages to win, the whole affair, psychologically speaking, becomes a vicious circle: The more he competes, the more he needs to compete to feel good about himself. 

Consider one of the first games our children learn to play: musical chairs. Take away one chair and one child in each round until one smug winner is seated and everyone else has been excluded from play. You know that sour birthday party scene; the needle is lifted from the record and someone else is transformed into a loser, forced to sit out the rest of the game with the other unhappy kids on the side. That’s not how I want to teach my children to have fun, because it’s not. Terry Orlick, a Canadian expert on games, suggests changing the goal of musical chairs so children are asked to fit on a diminishing number of seats. At the end, seven or eight giggling, happy kids are trying to squish on a single chair. Everyone has fun and there are no winners or losers.

What’s true of musical chairs is true of all recreation; with a little ingenuity, we can devise games in which the obstacle is something intrinsic to the task itself rather than another person or team.

In fact, not one of the benefits attributed to sports or other competitive games actually requires competition. Children can get plenty of exercise without struggling against each other. Teamwork? Cooperative games allow everyone to work together, without creating enemies. Improving skills and setting challenges? Again, an objective standard or one’s own earlier performance will do.

When Orlick taught a group of children noncompetitive games, two thirds of the boys and all of the girls preferred them to games that require opponents. If our culture’s idea of a good time is competition, it may just be because we haven’t tried the alternative. Brandeis University psychologist Teresa Amabile was more interested in creativity. She asked 22 girls, ages seven to 11, to make “silly collages.” Some competed for prizes and some didn’t. Seven artists then independently rated the girls’ work. It turned out that the children who were trying to win produced collages that were much less creative — less spontaneous, complex and varied — than the others.

One after another, researchers across the country have concluded that children do not learn better when education is transformed into a competitive struggle. Why? First, competition often makes kids anxious and that interferes with concentration. Second, competition doesn’t permit them to share their talents and resources as cooperation does, so they can’t learn from one another. Finally, trying to be Number One distracts them from what they’re supposed to be learning. It may seem paradoxical, but when a student concentrates on the reward (an A or a gold star or a trophy), she becomes less interested in what she’s doing. The result: Performance declines.

Waldorf education puts cooperation over competition. Waldorf elementary education allows for individual variations in the pace of learning, based upon the expectation that a child will grasp a concept or achieve a skill when he or she is ready. Competitive sports are available, but not until high school when the following principles are followed: Although these teams compete with other schools, they stress teamwork and sportsmanship and welcome all interested students. Foregoing tryouts allows students with more moderate sports interests to participate and learn a sport as they play and practice.

In Montessori education, students learn to collaborate with each other rather than compete. Students discover their own innate abilities and develop a strong sense of independence, self-confidence, and self-discipline. In an atmosphere in which children learn at their own pace and compete only against themselves, they learn not to be afraid of making mistakes. They quickly find that few things in life come easily, and they can try again without fear of embarrassment.

What Can Parents Do?

So that children believe they have access to unconditional love, Kohn recommends, “As for reducing rivalry and competitive attitudes in the home:

• Avoid comparing a child’s performance to that of another child, sibling or even yourself as a child.

• Don’t use contests and make everything a “race”  (“Who can finish their vegetables first?”) Watch your use of language (“Who’s the best little girl in the whole wide world?”) that reinforces competitive attitudes.

• Never make your love or acceptance conditional on a child’s performance. Some parents give subtle messages; they may say to their child, “As long as you did your best…” but Bobby knows that Mommy really likes him better when he wins. Nothing is more psychologically destructive than making approval dependent on victory.

• Be aware of your power as a role model. If you need to beat others, brag about your sports or professional victories, your child will learn that from you regardless of what you say. The lesson will be even stronger if you use your child to provide you with vicarious victories.

It is tough to break old habits, especially with so much of our sense of self, language and identity attached to competition. Just building our awareness on the effects on our young children around it is a big step.

Check out Kohn’s article: Five Reasons to Stop Saying “Good Job”

Written By: Chris and Nicole Charlwood

Parents in the Kootenays should be grateful to know that support workers in our communities are being exposed to research and ahead-of-the-curve perspectives on caring for and raising children. Success By Six, Selkirk College, The Family Place, School District 8 and others sponsored “Love Grows Brains”. My attachment-parent heart was aflutter when our daughter’s pre-school caregiver Laura brought this conference to our attention. Dr. Gabor Maté was going to be speaking. We couldn’t wait!

At the lectures, I and many others were like giddy school kids in the presence of a rock star. So when he walks in, wearing all black, looking tired and disheveled, I thought, great and he’s human too. Here is a smattering of what stood out for me.

Friday May 8, 2009 – Selkirk College, Castlegar BC

Inspirational with a swift boot-in-the-ass reminder that parenting well these days is a lot of work.  Dr. Maté and his co-author friend Dr. Gordon Neufeld both like to say, and I paraphrase: It shouldn’t be this hard. But despite knowing more about how to parent, it is more difficult than ever to do it well. Attachment parenting is made more demanding because it does not fit the modern day mould that encourages the punishment-reward model of altering our children’s behaviour.

Maté talked about the confusion we seem to have between “bad behaviour” and the “process of a person becoming a person.” A mom in the audience asked about coping with her kids bad behaviour. Dr. Maté returned with a question: What is the poor behaviour your child is exhibiting? She described it as: He’s one and a half and gets into things he shouldn’t. Maté’s response: Well that is what he should be doing at his age. He is acting instinctively curious, demonstrating the behaviour we would want to see developmentally.

As parents, how often do we say, “I hope this is a stage”? If it takes us understanding the development of our children better to give them more compassion, let’s try to find a simple model to follow along as our kids grow.

A father in the audience asked if: in the heat of a melt-down or siblings at each other physically, is it o.k. to physically address a child… such as picking them up and removing them from a situation.  Maté came back with: sure, when it is reducing harm and not creating it. Do the least amount necessary to keep anyone from harming themselves or others. Love them and calm them down – demonstrate how to do this by modelling the behaviour you want them to do.

My daughter has pointed out to me in heart-breaking ways that I have picked her up hard and upset her a couple of times. When she is scared of me, she acts out. When she is loved, we find our middle ground. I’m also learning how to communicate with her after the fact, when everyone is calm and rational, to apologize to her for my poor behaviour and sometimes to discuss why something she did was upsetting to me. This approach has really cut down on unnecessary melt-downs, those that happened because I was too unaware of my own issues and how I played them out on my kids. If being yelled at, for example, by someone is stressful for you, think of how much more true it would be for a child who’s not yet developed the capacity to cope. Conversely, just because you think your kids should handle whatever you throw at them, doesn’t mean that you are teaching them how to handle it. And that is your job, not theirs.

Many times during the five hours of lecturing and discussion, Maté raised the issue of expectations. If we as parents and caregivers could get over our neurotic selves (my words, definitely not those of Buddhist Maté) change our perspective on what we expect of our kids, we will reduce stress in our and our childrens lives. This will provide for them a better environment in which to grow healthy and productive lives. On Saturday he discussed that we put too much emphasis on genetic inheritance of disease and behaviour, that both are related to prenatal and early childhood stresses. As people get more and more serious illness and as more of us and our children are not emotionally equiped to handle the stresses of life, we need to go back to the idea of strengthening our relationships. We should really be stepping up to our responsibility as parents and communities to provide much less stressful environments for our children. One that provides more love, attention and presence.

I really appreciated how the audience was willing to say: “But can you tell me exactly how you would handle blah blah blah situation?” He could eventually be brought to advice… reluctantly.

Saturday, May 9, 2009 – Rossland, BC

The Biology of Loss – What happens when attachments are impaired and how to restore our children’s mental and emotional health

Dr. Maté started the morning by noting the large audience – approximately 200, and the clear interest in understanding our relationships with our children better. Referencing his books on addicition, stress, parenting and AD(H)D, Dr. Maté wove for us the connections between the loss of good relationships with our children, the level of stress parents face today and the large and growing number of children on medications for developmental and psychotic behaviours. He quotes:

“The paradox remains, how could the absence of something or somebody [attached relationships] create such disturbances… There must be a biology of loss, and we must find it.” Dr. Myron Hofer

“Developmental experiences determine the organizational and functional status of the mature brain.” Dr. Bruce Perry.

The brain is responsible for the following functions: pain relief, pleasure, attachment, impulse regulation, emotional self-regulation, stress regulation – all not fully functioning in people with addictions. Adicts brains are not fully developped. “The necessary condition for all these brain circuits to exist is access to a consistently available, emotionally stable, non-stressed nurturing parental care giver.” Dr. Daniel Siegel says: “Human connections create neuronal connections.. For the infant and young child, attachement relationships are the major environmental factors that shape the development of the brain during its period of maximal growth… Attachment extablishes an interpersonal relationship that helps the immature brain use the mature functions of the parent’s brain to organize its own processes.”

The effects of biology of loss can be experienced as prenatal stress of parents, early separation – emotional and physical, postpartum stress and childhood abuse (including emotional unavailability of parents). We are told now that “… people are influenced by past experience without any awareness that they are remembering.”

Maté blames the general malaise of parents today on their loss of power to parent. He described how the pervasive use of coercive power – use of punishment and rewards, win or lose – only pushes children away from parents and into the arms of less capable and usually less mature people – their peers, or as Maté refers to them: the enemy. He used a simple example both days to demonstrate the human instinct to counter coersion – what Dr. Neufeld calls “Counterwill.” He asks someone in the audience to stand and put up a hand to touch his hand, like they are going to play the mirror game. With hands touching, Maté starts pushing. In both instances, the people instinctively met his force with an equal and OPPOSITE force. An analogy for when we demand our kids do things rather than having the patience to guide them to be motivated to do it on their own.

We are equipped with the coercion model of parenting that doesn’t work. Combine that with being less and less physically and emotionally available to our children, and they naturally seek support they need in other places. Read Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peersfor more on how we are driving our children into the arms of other children to teach them their life skills. It is a lot of work to raise kids well, and he is opptomistic that the shifts we need to make to get on the right path again are really doable.

And parents can’t do it well these days because the ideal of a neuclear family is pervasive, separating us from each other. We need to build ourselves new villages and focus on rebuilding our relationships, not just with our kids, but with everyone.

The he says emphatically: “Don’t take your kids to play groups and preschools.” At once I got a huge lump in my throat and up went my hand. Choking back tears I asked him to reconcile for me the need to build village and the need to keep our kids collected, or close. ” We connect with our community and find like-minded parents at playgroups and our daughter goes to preschool”… I start pointing at Laura who is a row ahead of me, taking deep breaths and babbling to everyone about what a wonderful elder she is. We chose to have Laura in our lives, to help support us in raising our daughter. Maté moved from the black and white, don’t do it, to the grey, do it well. He reassured me that if I am going to these playgroups and participating with my children, not sitting on the side, then we are doing fine by our kids. If my daughter’s teacher is loving and supportive, and we as caregivers are connected, then it can be done without injuring our relationship with our child.

Later I asked Laura if it was ok to call her an elder – she laughed and said, “Well I am. I am a mountain with snow on top.”

Another mom asked Gabor Maté about reconciling where we come from and who we are trying to be for our children. She talked about a challenging relationship with her father, wanting to honour his role in her life, and the stress she feels because they don’t see eye-to-eye on parenting. “Don’t worry about what other people want, just do what you can and feel you should do ” .  This really hit a chord for me. My husband and I have both struggled at times with what was going on for our parents when we were raised and wanting to shift things for our children. Maté suggested: “Just polietly thank them for their advice, and go ahead and do what you want.” Sounds so simple…

Maté’s final quote: “Action has meaning only in relationship and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict. The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action.” J. Krishnamurti

Yesterday I was at Mother Goose – teaching parents and kids to bring song into their lives – and a mom, Meredith, asked me how the conference went. I answered that it was affirming of our choice to attachment parent, and a strong reminder of how hard it is to do so. Her perspective is that we are evolving, and we can only do what we can do in the grander shift that needs to happen. I hope the amazing woman and mom I met, who fell into a depression after the conference, can find some comfort in this idea.

Written By: Nicole LeBlanc Charlwood

I invite those who were present at either of the Dr. Gabor Maté sessions to comment below with your perspectives.  To all readers, we are interested in your real examples of his perspectives working for you and your family or clients.