What the heck is Conscious Parenting?

So this conscious parenting thing...  It seems to be a--erm--movement?  And it is moving in a BIG way.  Fast.  This is awesome!  But... I have my concerns with this quick-moving movement.  Do these people really understand what conscious parenting is?  I'm reminded of the organic movement.  How it started with a feeling and ended up with a bunch of homeless hippies on one end and the USDA owning the word on the other.  While I don't think the USDA is going to own our parenting styles (that would be a mess), I want to define this word here since it is the crux of why I spend all this time on the Internet.  Why I have this blog.

95% of what we do in life is unconscious.  The choices we make in food, jobs, entertainment, spouses.  We know it, too, though maybe not to the extent it controls our lives.  Have you ever heard someone say "so-and-so made a conscious decision to this and that?"  The worst part (or maybe the best part) is that the framework for this unconscious activity was laid in the first six years of our lives while we were in a brain wave state called "theta."  This is why change is so hard.  We want to keep our unconscious stuff going on, for good or for bad.  Conscious thinking takes a lot of energy, and it is the slower-firing part of the brain.  Our unconscious is there to help us make quick decisions based on past experiences.  The conscious brain is there for innovation.  The future.

 The good news is we can be reprogrammed using our conscious brain.  The difficulty lies in what do we want to reprogram and what do we want to keep?  What is even there?  Well, since our unconscious makes a lot of our decisions, we can deduce that the course of our lives is a printout of our programming.  We can see where we have been and make a conscious decision to change where we are going.  Sometimes the past is so difficult that we need help seeing what it looked like.  This is why therapy changes lives.  We can get up on a hill to see which way the forest ends.

So, what does this mean for parenting and natural living?  Well, we can reprogram things we want to change.  For example, I grew up in a house where we were late all the time.  Then I was finding myself being late all the time.  I have thought to myself, "do I want to keep this program or rewrite it?"  Then I decided, and acted accordingly.  We can do the same thing with every parenting decision we make.  I have a hunch that this conscious thing erupted so greatly in the parenting sector because maybe parents have an altered state of brain activity, too.  But that's my personal speculation.

The point is, conscious parenting is about the why and not the how.  For example, many people demonize spanking.  They question what the difference is between spanking and beating a child.  In some cases, there is no difference.  The intention creates this difference.  I will freely admit, my parents spanked me as a child.  My mom called it a tool in the toolbox of her parenting techniques.  She had a very conscious way about her spanking, and used it when it was necessary.  One would not use a hammer to fix a porcelain dish, nor glue to build a house.  The intention is the difference.

So all of you out there wanting to have a "certified conscious parenting" experience, you will have to look for more than unschooling, elimination communication, freebirthing, and breastfeeding.  Those are all things "crunchy" people might do and can be great for health and the free spirit, but may or may not be conscious.  I would argue that in the right person public schooling, disposable diapering, elected c-sections, and bottlefeeding can also be conscious.  Look more upstream than that and answer why.

Conscious parenting is about knowing yourself, knowing your child, paying attention, and making your own decisions.  This is a lot of work.  None of these things has direct output metrics, so if you say you are a conscious parent, I'll believe you.  No one knows more about you than you.

The best part of conscious parenting is being able to tailor the how to each child and to myself in our current stage of life.  I own the tools, not the other way around.  The over arching goal? To maximize happiness and love in each member of my family, including myself.  Especially myself.  If my children see that it's okay for me to be happy and loving while they are in their "theta" state, they would be better off as parents in the future.  Maybe that could continue to the seventh generation.