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Class OverviewParenting is a profound and life changing experience, but it can also be very challenging and uncomfortable. Here’s how to make parenting more enjoyable, for the sake of your whole family. (Check out the Top 10 Big Ideas from the class below!) Your ProfessorChris White, MD, is a pediatrician, parent educator, and life coach. He is the creator and director of Essential Parenting, an organization that emphasizes the psycho-emotional development of children and their parents.How to Make Parenting More EnjoyableOn the whole, parenting is profound and life changing. I wouldn’t change it for the world. But it can be really uncomfortable at times. Here are my Ten Big Ideas on how to make parenting more enjoyable. The Top 10 Big Ideas1Eliminate All Nonessentials Before you were a parent, you probably had a long list of things you wanted to do and get accomplished each week. But now you have just been handed another full-time job and there is no way to “do it all” without significant effects on your health, your relationships, and your enjoyment of the one precious life you have. Parenthood is a time to start making the transition from idealism into wisdom. If you have not done so, it is time to sit down with your calendar and examine all of your commitments. Which ones are essential? Which are not? What are the upsides and downsides of continuing with each? This is a time to be straight up with yourself: what am I doing for the sugar-highs that crash me out later and do not really make sense any more? If you shift just two hours each week from non-essential to essential engagements, the effects on your nervous system will reverberate throughout your family and lead to an upward spiral of more presence, greater intimacy, and deeper fulfillment. 2Turn Discomfort Into Growth Parenting can be incredibly uncomfortable at times—whether it be the exhaustion from lack of sleep, the frustration of having no mental or physical space to actually sense your own experience, or the prickliness that comes with being climbed on and tugged at from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed at night. But here is the truth: we are being grown up by this new level of discomfort. It is part of nature’s plan for creating wise beings to help guide our species. If we can remember this, we can turn some of these moments into intentional practice. Try the following practice three times a day, for one minute each time. The next time you feel uncomfortable, instead of going along with your physiologic and emotional reactivity, lean into the experience of discomfort and meet it like a noble warrior. When your preschooler is delivering another one of his three-minute monologues about God-knows what, instead of feigning interest while simultaneously being totally checked out, breath into the frustration you feel and commit to one-full minute of listening like a warrior. This is an opportunity for you to grow while he practices his new skill-set. Reframing a few of these moments each day and practicing being open to discomfort will increase your capacity to lean into all kinds of difficult life experiences. 3Take Care of Yourself We have all heard the saying, “put your own oxygen mask on before putting it on your child.” But can you feel that part of you that is responds, “No way! I am going save my kid first!” The instinct to care for our children and put their needs above our own is natural and healthy: to a point. In some parenting circles, more attention needs to be put on the children. In the conscious parenting community, I usually see the opposite. As conscious parents, we tend to overextend ourselves and this actually ends up undermining our attempts to bring harmony and happiness to our families. Stress occurs when the demands of our life overpower our resources and sense of control. Since parenting tends to erode our sense of control, we are left with the task of developing our resources more fully. Identify what refuels you and makes you a better parent and a better partner. Do you need to do sun salutations each morning for five minutes? Sit in silence daily for ten? Develop a “listening partnership” (described later)? Whatever it is, as long as you see the effects benefitting you and your family in terms of quality of interactions, do it. That is not selfish; it is solid loving. 4Feel the Fleetingness of Now Parenting involves facing some pretty uncomfortable feelings at times. In the early years, there are long periods of feeling bored and exhausted. We do our best to remain interested and excited while watching our little-one practice the completely necessary, but oh-so-tedious task of putting that little cube into the right hole for the twentieth time. “Wow…You did it!” we push out with a smile. But beneath the pleasant façade we often feel, “Jeees-us…..four more hours of this before my partner comes home. How am I gonna make it!?!” This is natural and normal, and part of growing up is tolerating these difficult feelings without trying to change them or make them go away. But there is a practice that can help you feel more engaged in these situations. Once a day, while your little-one is working on her own important developmental tasks, begin to imagine her growing up before your eyes. See her waving goodbye as she disappears on the school bus for the first time. Imagine her as an ornery teenager who is not into hugging you around her friends any more. Feel into what it will be like as your daughter drives away to college, leaving you in the driveway to face a whole new phase of your life: the empty nest. See if doing this brief practice helps you engage more fully with the present moment as it is. This is it. Don’t miss it. 5Create Listening Partnerships One of the most important ways to lessen the stress of parenting and to begin enjoying it more is to have someone else witness you in this time of overwhelm and transformation. One of the greatest pains that humans experience is the pain of feeling alone and isolated. Feeling lonely is a common experience of most of the parents I talk to. I have come to believe that most of this is generated not by actually being physically alone, but rather because there is not enough time and space for us to feel what we feel and have those feelings heard and empathically reflected to us. “Listening partnerships” are a great way to meet this human need that is often overlooked in parenting. Have at least one person that you can talk to at least once a week for thirty minutes uninterrupted. This can be a friend out on a hike or may be done over the phone at night after the kids have gone to bed. One person is designated as the listener for the 30 minutes and the other the speaker. The job of the listener is just to hear what the speaker is going through, what they are experiencing, and how they are making sense of the challenges they are traversing. Questions are asked for clarification only, not to guide the speaker to a new way of seeing or thinking, even if you think that might be helpful. Save that for another time. The goal here is to simply become a “holding environment” for the speaker-parent to be exactly where they are and go through their own process in the presence of a supportive and compassionate other. Listening partnerships can truly transform your experience of parenting and help you back into your naturally wise and loving heart. 6″Do Less” Parenting We have grown up in a culture that pretends that we are the movers and shakers of the world; that we are the ones that make everything happen. This distortion of reality is particular detrimental in parenting. The truth is this: we do not grow our children up; Life does. Our role as parents is supportive. We either provide the nourishment Life needs to do its work, or we withhold it. The outcome of believing that we are the primary source of our child’s development is that we end up working way to hard. We become revved up trying to make sure they get enough interactions and stimulation for brain growth. We over-involve ourselves trying to prevent every difficult situation and make sure they feel 100% safe. It is time for a little “do-less” parenting. Pick a five-minute period to try this practice each day. When you feel the impulse to interfere—to show your son how to do something more efficiently or manage his interactions with his brother—go ahead and act out the first impulse. But the next impulse you have, just notice it and don’t act on it. Put a space between reaction and action. Alternate between interfering and not, and track how things turn out. I have found that when I do this practice (in non-dangerous situations of course), that everything turns out about the same with only half the work. More trust equals more rest, presence, and enjoyment. 7Identify and Schedule Revitalization We all have different needs in terms of alone time, time for one-on-one intimacy, social time, and time with our children. Knowing your particular system’s desire is essential to moving toward nourishment and self-care in a way that works for you. Now lets be clear: there is no way you will get 100% of what you want. Your children need you. Your partner needs you. And you have certain responsibilities as a parent. But knowing where you “reset” the best is crucial. Without this, you will be adrift at sea hoping for good weather and merry moods to carry the day.Sit down and write out the ideal vision of that you would like your life to look like: no practical aspects, just your ideal vision. How much alone time? How much partner time? How much time with the kids? How much time on creative projects and on your purpose? How much time with friends? Don’t put the hours you think you should be spending; choose the balance that makes you come alive! You will of course have to reconcile this with your children’s needs, your partner’s needs, and other realities of life. But knowing your ideal and being proactive about scheduling will not only make parenting more enjoyable, it will also benefit your family. 8Keep Your Emotions Flowing One of the ways that we deal with the stress and discomfort of parenting is to shut down and dissociate from the uncomfortable feelings and emotions that become generated. While this is natural and sometimes a useful way to get through tough situations, it can lead to bottling up our emotions. We then sometimes explode in anger or alternatively become deadened to our children, partners, and life more generally. It is really important to consciously engage in keeping your emotions flowing in a healthy way. The starting point for many of us is to express and discharge our bottled up negative emotions in a safe environment, away from the kids. Having “bitch sessions” with your partner on the couch with a glass of wine at night can be fun and liberating. Watch movies or listen to music where you can identify with the frustration, pain, or perhaps sadness of the characters, but at a slight distance. Allow yourself to be moved and shed some tears. Crying is incredibly refreshing to the nervous system that is overloaded with tension and discomfort. Not only are you more open and in touch with the beauty of life after a good cry, but you are also more available for those around you. 9Create a Village Most of us know the importance of creating a “village” to help raise our kids. But let’s be honest: in the conscious parenting community, many of us suck at it. We put too much of the burden on ourselves to raise our children single handedly. It’s nuts, but we do it anyways. So if you haven’t already, create a village around you. Find the people in your community who want to be around the kids. Grandparents and other local family members should be the first obvious choices, but if they are not local find a “substitute grandparent” who is in a phase of life where they miss children and want to be involved in some way. Get together regularly with your neighbors, even if they aren’t “perfectly conscious.” Kids learn different things from different people, so as long as they are not clearly harmful, allow others to give you a break from time to time. Go the store for them while they watch the kids play together. It is far better than two families going separately to the supermarket, lugging all four kids in tow. The nearby-neighbor safety net is incredibly important. Even if you don’t use it much, just knowing you have someone nearby to rely on is very reassuring and alleviates stress. 10Get Spacious One of the most challenging feelings I have as a parent is the sense that the walls are closing in on me. The demands I have faced as a father are more intense than any other period of my life—and I survived a pediatric residency working 90-plus hour weeks with 36-hour shifts every fourth night! So here is a practice that has not only saved me from exploding many times, but it has also opened my awareness into the numinous on occasion. The next time you feel yourself wound as tight as a drum, find a little space to do the following practice. Take a deep breath filling your belly and chest with air, and on the exhale imagine the air dissolving out of your belly and chest in all directions. Follow the air as it floats out into space in front of you, behind you, to each side, above your head, and down into the ground. Rest in the space at the end of the exhale and before your next inhale. On the next inhale, again fill your belly and chest fully, and then dissolve outwards in all directions, like melting butter on a hot skillet. Do this for three breaths, and after the third exhale, simply allow your awareness to rest “out in the room” or all around you in the park or wherever you happen to be doing the practice. You can even do this practice when you are not feeling tension, just hanging out on a playground bench. “Getting spacious” can help you perceive the profound openness of the moment.