Welcome to the Parenting Process

My name is Eileen Paris, Ph.D., and I am a licensed marriage, family and child counselor in California. I have been listening to the needs of children and families for more than forty years. In addition, I co-authored the book, "I'll Never Do To My Kids What My Parents Did to Me!" A Guide to Conscious Parenting (available through Amazon) and have given numerous presentations and seminars to mental health professionals and educators around the world.

I have developed a model for parent education called, The Parenting Process. In order to bring a psychological change to our “global society”, we not only need a vision, but also a healing intervention. To become more fully ourselves, more related to others and our planet, we must begin with the way that we parent. I am speaking here of raising children who have a sense of self, and who experience their capacity to live in relationship. Raising emotionally healthy children touches the concerns of all of us because a foundation of emotional health underlies our ability to maintain a connection with ourselves, each other and our planet.

It is crucial to see the needs of the planet and the person as a continuum. As Theodore Roszak states in The Voice of the Earth., “....as if the soul might be saved while the biosphere crumbles.” He continues... “The great changes our runaway industrial civilization must make if we are to keep the planet healthy will not come about by the force of reason alone or the influence of fact. Rather, they will come by way of psychological transformation.”

The goal of the Parenting Process is to enable children to develop an experience a positive sense of self. Children who can recognize and express their own unique feelings and still have empathy for others will grow into adults who are not torn between their need for intimacy and for independence.These children will be more prepared to meet the emotional demands of the future and to nurture the life of the planet.

The Parenting Process draws on the theories of developmental psychology, contemporary psychoanalytic theory, and infant research and is a culmination of years of practice as a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, and infant mental health specialist. I have taken my experience as a parent and grandparent, as well as my education as a professional and have developed an original method that serves to facilitate a healthy parent-child relationship.

Here is an Outline of the Parenting Process.

Part One:

Legacies: When we interpret experiences with our children in the present through the emotional lens of our own early painful experiences, we can miss understanding and attending to their meanings and developmental needs. I call this susceptibility a “tender spot”. We are going to explore together how we can begin to identify our own history of “tender spots.”

Fragmentation: When “tender spots” organize our interpretation of an experience our nervous system can become dysregulated. The meaning or intensity of the feeling can overwhelm our sense of safety, and we can potentially lose our sense of emotional balance and our bodily sense of well-being.

Grounding: Refers to regaining our emotional balance, our bodily sense of well-being. Instead of being caught in repetitive and painful interpretations of events, regaining a more regulated state of calm and presence often helps us give more attuned attention to both the needs of our kids and ourselves.

Part Two: Understanding Our Children’s Emotional Development

Healthy relationship patterns support a child’s ability to have relationships in which both self and other matter. We are going to look at using three developmental themes that underlie our abilities to create healthy relationships.

1. Bonding refers to the lifelong process of attachment and connection, which infuses the organization of safety and trust. When children can rely on the connection to their caregivers for attuned nurturing, they feel safe. Babies acquire the knowledge of safety and trust through their emotions. Emotional safety nurtures physical and emotional development.

2. Mirroring: refers to the process of providing a child with the experience of feeling seen, heard, understood, and taken seriously. Children need to feel they have been successful at communicating their emotions and that their emotions can be held, tolerated, contained, and regulated by their parents. Mirroring is a process that both strengthens the connection and supports the unfolding of individual differences in the relationships between parents and children.

3. Differentiating: refers to the process of delineating self and other in a relationship. When parents can recognize and support the right of their children to have distinct feelings of their own, they learn to differentiate themselves in a relationship safely. This enables children to experience an expanding sense of authorship of their own lives as they grow and to experience having their own mind. Deep authentic emotional closeness takes place in a dialogue between two connected, yet delineated people.

In my next blog I will discuss guidelines that support these themes and provide an opportunity for skill building. Putting the guidelines together gives us a way to think about a healthy parent/child relationship that interrupts painful family legacies from being handed down.