On Parenting

Your children become your energetic atmosphere, not your intentions.

The beautiful thing about the way consciousness seeks fulfillment is that it carries with it the inherent understanding that ALL experiences are fulfilling some exploration, purpose, and intent. Even those that are not our preference. If we look at parenting only through the lens of preference, we might seek to avoid our own parent’s apparent failings or attempt to circumvent disadvantageous circumstances for our own children. You might want to give your kids the life you never had, or deal with their negative behaviors in a “trauma minded” way. And on the surface this intention is a noble one. You saw your own programming, your own inhibitions and self judgements, and you vowed to not pass it onto your children. This is a good thing. What I hope to illustrate through this article is not how your good intentions cause other harms, but instead how there’s a deeper wisdom in all of your programming. That programming itself isn’t the enemy, disadvantageous programming is. That wanting to avoid trauma for your kids is a good intention, but that intention isn’t the information they receive from you. Your kids live in your energy, and your energy isn’t created by your intentions, it’s created by your attention. And in this article I hope to show you the distortions in your own attention and how that unknowingly creates various circumstances for your kids.

Let’s start from the beginning. While a mother is pregnant, all of her experiences of life become the child’s experience. All of it is pre-language, pre cognition. Her emotional reactions, her positive and negative experiences, and the events she faces along with her reactions to those events, these all become an energetic climate. This energetic climate is used by the fetus as a frame of reference for what love should feel like. I call this “Prenatal Programming.”

Lana is a new, health conscious mother. It’s her first kid and she wants to do things right. So Lana spends a lot of time researching, noticing every little tick and discomfort in her body, and immediately seeking the next supplemental remedy. She eats healthy, but also has a very subtle fear reaction that makes her concerned about if what she’s eating is the right thing. Her husband is almost always around, but he has a work trip for a month right in the middle of her pregnancy. It’s been a long time since she’s taken care of everything by herself, driven herself around, met her own needs. Suddenly she has a lot more to worry about. She’s worried about her husband getting sick on his travels, she’s worried about doing right by her baby, she’s worried about something going wrong while he’s gone. But she’s also happy, she feels good in general.

And to most people, all of this seems mostly irrelevant. She’s eating healthy and doing things correctly, that’s the most important thing during pregnancy, right?

But what is the energy she’s living in while doing those things? Remember, it’s the energetic climate that the fetus grows in, not the intention.

The intention is “eat healthy,” but the energetic climate is “worry about health.” The attention is actually on “potential unhealth” in the name of seeking health. The fetus grows in this energetic climate of worry and health fear. This worry and health fear poses a contrast to the underlying optimistic ideals a fetus ordinarily grows in. And this “worry energy” becomes a part of the template for how love should feel. The husband leaving becomes an abandonment wound because of the wife’s reaction to it, not because of the leaving. And that fetus worries about being left in much the same way, but doesn’t know why.

And by the time the baby is born it already has basic templates for interacting with reality. It knows how to seek attention, it knows how to grow, it has a definition for what love is. And then events throughout life enhance and add to those basic templates.

These templates are necessary for life. They give each individual a framework for interacting with physical reality. This framework gives constraints that enable creativity and expression and fulfillment.

We often see these “worry as love” programs as a negative attribute. We don’t want our children to worry. Maybe we are even bothered by our own mother’s constant worries. Simply because we don’t realize that she too runs a “worry is love” program and isn’t aware of it.

These things can be changed, but before you seek to change them, it’s best to understand the framework they exist within. These programs don’t just create advantages and disadvantages for a person, they create fulfillment paths. Fulfillment paths are deep explorations of rich psychological ideas and experiences. Consciousness seeks to explore ALL possible fulfillment paths, all possible experiences of psychological organization and expression.

A child with Down’s Syndrome may seem “less than” other kids in some ways. But they have a richness of expression and love that other kids do not. While they don’t explore reality the same way, they explore a psychological framework that is just as rich and nuanced as anyone else’s, and is fulfilling in its own way. A child who is developing slower than other kids is fulfilling some type of psychological desire and expression that fast development precludes. This fulfillment path includes the rate at which they develop, the parent’s reaction to it, the child’s experience of it, and the contrast between the child’s actual experience and the parent’s reaction. This exploration of conflict and counter creation is deeply fulfilling to consciousness and sets in motion more profound fulfillment paths later in life.

A child with an abusive upbringing learns a type of resilience and love that no other child learns. They may initially learn that “abuse is love” and find themselves in a series of antagonistic and aggressive relationships they consciously know are wrong, but for some reason they keep repeating. This repetition leads them to change themselves, to establish healthier boundaries, to learn to say no, and to trust themselves after decades of outsourcing their own agency and authority. This transformation is deeply fulfilling, and if we get lost in only segments of the story we miss the intended richness embedded in challenging experiences.

Parents often want to avoid any negative experiences for their kids. And from the physical standpoint this is understandable. This message isn’t about giving them bad experiences either, but instead trusting that their path is unique to them, intelligently crafted, and inherently optimistic even when it’s challenging. They may learn that they’re only worthy of love when they’re sick or injured because they see their parent get extra attention when they get sick. They may act out after a divorce because they don’t know how to ventilate or contain the new emotions they’re feeling. If you only try to stop bad behavior, you miss out on the energetic atmosphere you’re creating around your kids and unknowingly create other programs.

All consciousness seeks attention. When a child is acting out they are doing so because they get a reaction from the parent that is louder than the ordinary attention they get. This extraordinary attention helps them orient to actions that give them attention and so they continue to act out in spite of “knowing better.” This is why your attempt to stop bad behavior often exacerbates the problem. They do things they know are wrong because it’s the only time they get connected and focused attention from you.

When you are worried about someone, worried about your health, or worried about bad things happening, you create the energetic tone for your space. The energetic tone for your space is the “atmosphere of love” in your home. This atmosphere is set by the mother much more than the father. The mother’s reactions to the father, her attempts to control, her fearfulness, these set that energetic tone and the child absorbs that entire climate as “this tone is what love is.” So they inevitably seek it out or recreate it in their future relationships.

When a parent is guarded, afraid of vulnerability, faking strength for their kids, hiding truths...this sets a deceptive energetic atmosphere. Kids don’t even know what being deceived is, but they feel it. Because your energy says one thing and your words say another. This paints a picture for them that they absorb as a template. They see something perfectly natural, a parent genuinely experiencing life, and that gets paired with coverups and fear. So the child learns to do the same, they stop telling their parents the truth for the same reasons. The parent felt vulnerability was dangerous, truth was dangerous, actual reality was dangerous, and so the child adopts those apparencies as well. You might say “I’m protecting my kids from what they aren’t ready for.” In reality you are simply distorting something they already experience by not letting them know the whole truth of it. You telling them not to worry doesn’t mean they don’t feel your worries. And it’s those worries they absorb, not what you say.

In this way your parenting choices shouldn’t be about what to say to them, but what energy to host them in. Can you be non reactive? Can you be calm? Can you be self approving? Can you give undivided attention? Can you trust life’s optimism even in challenges? Can you be vulnerable without seeing it as vulnerability? Can you trust? Can your existence be inherently safe?

These set a very different energetic atmosphere from a parent who must “hold boundaries” out of self protection. A parent who is reactive and emotional. A parent who is always concerned about safety, always needs to be right, always defensive. A parent who needs to see themselves as good parent.

Do you want your kid to see that love is self approval or self judgement? You don’t teach them to approve of themselves by giving them compliments, this only gives them a contrast between what they get approval for versus what they do not. This causes them to seek external approval from you instead of self approval they learned from you. And they learn self approval by seeing you approve of yourself. Not seeing you approve of them. They also learn self judgement by how you talk about and compare yourself to others.

Do you want your kids to be non-reactive and contained? Or do you want them to be emotionally overexpressive? You might argue that emotions are important to feel. But in reality, emotions are just outputs of your beliefs. If you can listen to your emotions they need not be reacted to. The emotions are allowed to exist without them driving the bus. An emotionally contained parent helps their kids position their various emotions in a proper hierarchy, teaching them how to let go and return to a state of optimism. Where emotions aren’t felt endlessly nor do they drive choices or responses, but instead are information that helps them understand themselves. A parent who is contained creates a child who is contained. A parent who compartmentalizes emotion and ignores it, still emits that emotion unknowingly into the energetic atmosphere. So can you be a parent who truthfully understands emotion, sees it for what it is, chooses not to react to it, and instead uses to to better understand themselves and their beliefs? Because in understanding and seeing yourself you stop creating your world unknowingly and you stop being driven by unconscious identity. All things that set a more empowering tone for your children.

Parenting has a tremendous number of variables. Especially if you’re hyper focused on doing it right -- and thereby energizing the potential of doing it wrong. This is why understanding fulfillment is so important. It lets you let go of “doing it wrong.” In this way you can trust the wisdom of your child’s own consciousness and its desire for fulfillment. That each catalyst and environmental challenge is part of this fulfillment path, giving the child the right personal challenges, inhibitions, and talents to make it develop and organize in the most profound ways possible. The more you can interact with curiosity, the more the quality of love you teach your children will be visionary instead of canned based on your own programming. Your children will adopt your programs, and in many cases your programs are what drive you to worry and interact with your kids in a particular way. So as you change your energy, you’ll find all of those difficult behaviors your children exhibit simply go away.

Change yourself and your relationships and children will naturally change. You are creating “probable children” as a result of your energy. And the children you interact with on any given day are part of a multitude of probable expressions all reflecting the energetic atmosphere you’re creating.

When asked “what do I do about [this particular challenge]” my answer is fairly simple: control the quality of your attention. It’s not about right or wrong, but about how you respond to life. Is your partner your enemy or are you on the same team seeking a common goal? Is life optimistic even when it gets challenging? Is there always a beneficial lesson to learn to grow as a person and a parent? Is there inherent creativity embedded in your worries and stress? Shifting your outlook away from “attempts to control” into adjusting your own energy will make a massive difference in your children’s lives.

Your job as a parent is to program your kids knowingly rather than unknowingly. You don’t program them not to worry by pretending not to be worried, but instead by processing your own worry and letting it go. It’s not about never being worried, but about reacting to your concerns with more empowerment. You teach them how to host a more empowered energetic atmosphere where they are always responsible for their life’s creations. Create a curiosity about life in them.

At the same time, it’s not your job to be their friend. Your job as parent and template programmer is to do your best to establish creative constraints for them. You do this by seeing your own programs, your own life, and attempting to make adjustments for their benefit. You don’t tell them to be home by 7 because you’re worried about danger and trouble, but because it establishes constraints and natural consequences. You don’t punish them to get them to obey, you establish rules and natural consequences rather than reactive ones. Parents who are “disobeyed” and then react in anger/fear are only showing anger and fear as love. They are failing to control and ventilating, and this only teaches the child how not to control themselves even though the underlying intention was to teach them to avoid a potential danger. Obedience should always be secondary to understanding. Through understanding you can build better constraints, which allow for creativity and safety, as opposed to fearful control and helicopter parenting. The apparencies you as a parent agree to do not need to be your child’s reality.

Let’s say you have a teenager who is starting to hang out with the opposite sex. At this stage they either learned it was good to be vulnerable, or they learned to hide their truths from their parents because that’s what their parents did. Because they learned this, you attempt to control them more by giving them more rules in the hopes that they won’t make mistakes. But it’s those mistakes that teach them more than anything. So instead of giving them rules, see them as intelligent. Things you are concerned about, them being sexually active too young, can easily be remedied by teaching them about the natural consequences. Saying “don’t do this it’s bad” leaves them in a state of unknowingness. And they become curious. Curiosity paired with hormones creates bad decisions. But knowledge of natural consequences helps them make clearer decisions. This lets them make their own choices, but with proper information. You allow them their own fulfillment, but you don’t constantly fail to control them, which will make you their enemy. Truthful information, not intended to manipulate them into making the decisions you prefer, will help them make wiser decisions and feel in control of their own life. When they feel like they have agency they are far less likely to rebel and much more likely to make wise unemotional decisions. The same as a child who acts out for attention, so too will a teenager who only gets attention for getting in trouble. Your job is to understand this attention dynamic and learn to listen to things other than yourself. Listen to body language, to their desires and concerns, and instead of seeking to be right as a parent because “you know better,” examine what your child is trying to fulfill. What experience psychologically and physically are they reaching for? If they are reaching for something disadvantageous, can you read between the lines and help them receive that experience through other pathways?

You as the parent must set boundaries and act as a guide for your kids. You do so through how you host your own energy. “Rules for thee, not for me” becomes counter creation because of the energetic mismatches. So you don’t set boundaries in an effort to create child laborers to do the chores, but instead craft a world where everyone has a part to play and agency/natural consequences within that paradigm. Aim to give your children control of their immediate surroundings, empower them to make their own choices and face natural consequences of those choices even if you know better. Don’t give them consequences because you don’t like what they’re doing. Consequences should be real-world consequences, not manufactured obedience. That means you need to practice letting go, examining what you’re afraid of, and finding a way for yourself to always be zooming out to see a bigger picture that contains fulfillment rather than just preference.

Children who trust in optimism, who believe that survival is guaranteed, will naturally be more abundant, creative, and kind. One only becomes self centered when safety and self preservation become too large a concern such that they have no room to consider others. You as a parent make room not by “telling them to be nice” but instead establishing the conditions where there’s always room for it. When they believe life is abundant and optimistic they no longer worry about sharing. But when they are forced to share they are confronted with the internal conflict of “you’re asking me to give up what’s my possession so someone else can have it when they want it?” Imagine your boss coming into your room and telling you to give your computer to another coworker right now regardless of whether you were in the middle of something. Sharing and cooperation are natural expressions when life is abundant and trusting, they become unnatural when they are contorted into a “should” and a lesson about behavior. Instead of teaching your children about “shoulds” teach them about natural consequences of their choices and let them make decisions with agency. This agency almost always leads to more abundant and loving interactivity with life.

What are natural consequences? Natural consequences are the natural response from people or life that would come as a result of a behavior. If you keep being mean to someone the natural consequence is they’ll not want to talk to you any more. The unnatural consequence is “if you keep being mean you’ll be grounded for a week.” Giving unnatural consequences creates imbalanced responses to life, especially later in adulthood when the adult still runs some of those childhood programs. The adult literally fears getting in trouble for stating their opinion because them speaking up was associated with getting in severe unnatural trouble as a kid. A child staying out past curfew has the natural consequence of being tired the next day. The unnatural consequence is a worried parent, who spent hours telling stories in their head, tells them they can’t hang out with their friends. A child’s job isn’t to prevent their parent’s worries, that’s the parent’s job. If the parent can’t trust life’s optimism then the child certainly won’t learn how either. So you look at a situation as if it was done by an adult. If an adult does or says that thing, what are the natural responses that life would bring as a result of that choice? If a kid stays up all night playing games and is tired in the morning, they might ask to stay home from school, but the natural consequence is that they have responsibilities and staying up all night doesn’t eliminate those responsibilities. This gives the child the agency to choose if those consequences are worth it or not, and it eliminates the parent as the potential enemy. The parent is just the guide and the child still gets to make his or her own choices and face the consequences of those choices. You help a child understand those consequences by saying “you should go to bed soon, if you stay up too late you’ll have a hard time getting up in the morning.” This is different from saying “turn off your game now and go to bed, it’s bed time.” The consequences tell them how to interact with their choices and gives them the choice. If a child is misbehaving in public you don’t buy their behavior with treats, you recognize their misbehavior is attention seeking and you pause what you’re doing to see what the underlying concern is. When you understand their concern you can help them find a remedy to it. If they don’t accept that remedy, their concern becomes their own natural consequence and you tell them you can’t help them. A child learns to whine and complain because you give them attention by solving their problems for them. If you can return their responsibility to solve their problems for themselves, you can help to eliminate these types of public outcries.

This article is meant to give you a new frame of reference for parenting. Instead of being blind to your own energy, it requires a deeper level of personal responsibility. I hope it plants a seed in you so that you can see these subtle interactions of your energy with theirs, and how their behaviors are merely reflections of the qualities encoded in your attention. If anyone wants more nuanced or specific explorations of this subject, ask about it in the comments and I’ll cover those ideas in future articles.