It’s an enormous task to unlearn the habits and behaviors that you were taught as a child when many of those came from painful interactions in the family. What we grow up with always feels normal, even if it wasn’t the experience of other kids around us. We tend to assume that all the other kids are going through the same things that we are. We aren’t taught to fact check our own mind.

It takes years of meeting other people, growing up, and going out into the world without our parents to get some perspective on our childhood years.

When we want to do things differently from our family of origin, when we see the pains and we want to take action to change them, we are changing family patterns of harm. We are healing ourselves and our family line. To do this we need to grow our Inner Mother.

The Inner Mother’s first job is to acknowledge our own humanity. This is the foundation of Inner Mother/Inner Child work.
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But do we even know what our humanity is? It’s the part of us that makes mistakes, because this whole human experience is a trial and error thing.

It’s the part of us that doesn’t understand, because the world is complex and relationships are intricate and often unspoken connections that we make in each other’s presence.

Our humanity is in our grief in the face of difficulty.

Our humanity is in our anger in the face of injustice.

Our humanity is in our ability to give grace and assistance to those in need, and to acknowledge that sometimes the person in need is us.

But instead we’re often taught to bypass our humanity, and that of others through judgment, criticism, and blame. We’re taught that we don’t have to feel the bad feelings, we can project them on others. We may learn that when we struggle we cannot expect anyone to help us. We learn that unless others find us pleasant and easy we are not welcomed.

We may find that we have thoughts bumping around in our heads that are mean, critical, judgmental, shaming, and some of them can get downright cruel. We may direct them at others, but the cruelest ones we may direct at ourselves with the intention of keeping ourselves in line, acceptable, nice, helpful.

We push back on our own desires, dreams, and hopes.

We decide before we ever start going after our dreams that we can’t have them, that someone important wouldn’t like it, that we’d never be allowed. And so we keep ourselves from trying.

We often end up feeling frustrated.

Internally we have a desire, we judge it as unworthy, and we pretend it doesn’t exist. We pretend we’re not so weak as to want something unattainable. We pretend we don’t need any of what it has to offer.

And the antidote to this self-defeating cycle is to acknowledge our humanity. The ways we aren’t perfect, that we don’t know all the answers, that we have needs, and that we want things.

The antidote is in feeling our grief, our anger, our joy, and our desire.

This isn’t easy to do when we’ve spent most of our lives avoiding them.

Maybe it can begin with just wishing yourself well? This was my way in when I was feeling trapped by the internalized judgment of my own desires, and it was clear I needed to let that old judgment go.

I started by saying the Buddhist loving kindness prayer, metta. Every single morning for a whole summer I said metta for myself. There are many versions of this prayer and many applications, but this is what I did...

I cleaned my front porch, set up a small concrete altar for a candle, made a place where I could safely burn incense, and I sat in my rocking chair. I lit the candle, the incense, and said, with my hand on my heart:
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May I be well, happy, and peaceful. May no harm come to me. May no troubles or difficulties come to me. May I always meet with success. May I also have the patience, courage, understanding, and perseverance, to meet and overcome the inevitable troubles, difficulties, and failures in life. May I know that I am loved, may I know that I am cared for, and may I know that I belong.

Offering the words, receiving the words, and repetition changed something in my nervous system that summer.

Parts of me relaxed and made room for the difficult part of my humanity, the parts that had historically felt like failures. I became a little easier on myself, and I noticed that, without trying, I also had more grace for others.

In retrospect, this was one of the most important acts of self-parenting I did. The one who offered the words was my developing Inner Mother. And the one who received the words and was soothed by them was the Inner Child who had never felt she could never be good enough. And developing this kind of internal relationship helped me change my external relationships with very little effort.

I brought more empathy to myself and to my beloveds. I stopped holding grudges. I allowed that we all make mistakes, that we all get tired, that we all fail sometimes. And it doesn’t make us failures. It makes us human.

Being human is one big trial-and-error process anyway. In relating to each other we are always trying to let someone else know what is going on inside of us, and they’re always trying to understand something that is fundamentally unknowable. We do our best, and sometimes, maybe even often, our best falls short.
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* To learn more about 1:1 Inner Mother Mentoring start here.
* To stay informed about the next time I offer Growing Your Inner Mother, get on my email list here.
* To buy the book Landscape of Mothers: Nature Archetypes as a Guide for Mothering you can go to Amazon or Bookshop.org.
* To order The Inner Mother Deck: A Landscape of Mothers Guide you can go to my website.

Last fall I visited my extended family in Oklahoma. These folks were very different from my immediate relatives — looser, warmer in some ways, more sprawling. I liked the feeling of wider connection, the sense of what family could mean when it moves beyond the tight nuclear unit I grew up in. Since my mom died three years ago I've spent a lot of time thinking about family, obligations, connections, and belonging. What we owe each other. What we long for. What so many of us never quite received.
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This is pretty classic Forest Mother territory — so I guess it's no surprise that in the seasonal wheel of Landscape of Mothers, early fall is Forest Mother time. This time around I've been sitting with what family actually means to me, and who is available to create the kind of family I want. Not the family I was born into, but the one I'm still, at this point in my life, trying to build

You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you’re actually a lineage pattern breaker, and that means that you’re taking a stand for healing the pain. You’re taking a stand for supporting the children in the family to grow up healthy and whole. You are taking a stand for them not having to give up parts of themselves to be acceptable and welcome.

You are taking a stand for the welcome and belonging of the child that still lives in you.

You may feel like an outsider in your family, but that just reflects your certainty about how you feel. You know what you don’t want. You can see it happening. You don't want to go along with how things are. You’re sure of this. Even if you’re not sure what it looks like to do it differently.
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You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you wonder what else is possible. You wonder what freedom from pain would make room for in your life. You sense that there is more connection, more care, more freedom, and more belonging available. You wonder what life could be like without the repetition of the painful behaviors, avoidance of responsibility, and poor coping mechanisms that are the root of the shared family pain.

You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you feel tenderly toward your child self that understood the world to be harsh, uncaring, and critical. You don’t want to push her away anymore. You are sensing her need for comfort, acceptance, and care, and you really want to show up for that. You suspect there is much to be gained by seeing her in a new light.

You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you find that you keep repeating the same sorts of relationship dynamics with other people. You’re figuring out that the early relationship training that happens in families runs deep, and that you need some new skills in order to have the kinds of relationships that you want. This is powerful.You are claiming that you want something other than what you were trained to have.

You are getting in touch with your agency.
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You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you have begun to recognize and believe in your own value. You are starting to think that some of the things you grew up believing aren’t really true, aren’t really about you, aren’t yours to carry. You are finding that there is more room than you thought for you to figure out who you really are, and that maybe those who told you who you were early on weren’t correct.

You may feel like an outsider in your family, and you may wish they would see what you see. But they might not want to. That only makes you feel like more of an outsider, and it brings up the grief. They can’t see what you see. They see the world differently. It’s both true that it means that a unique part of you is alive and well inside of the training you’ve had to be who someone else wants you to be, AND that it can feel really sad to acknowledge this.

You may feel like an outsider in your family, but you are resisting being who they want in favor of being who you are.
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That’s powerful. It’s befriending your agency. It’s claiming your birthright to be yourself.

This article is cross-posted with Substack

An ecosystem, according to Mirriam-Webster is “the complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit".” When we talk about a “family ecosystem” we are talking about our family unit, including the environment, relationships, and our social systems of engagement. To build a family ecosystem is to tend to all of our relationships within the family group as equally valid and important.
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If a family ecosystem sounds like what you’re wanting in your family, I have three places you can make small changes that will help you shift into a more relationship focused lens.

1. Focus on relationship not behavior

Much of parenting advice is about how to modify your children’s behavior. This perspective makes it likely we’ll make two critical mistakes if we’re also trying to parent our children with care and respect.
The first problem with focus on behavior over relationship is that we start perceiving our kids' behavior falling into one of two categories: behaviors we want, and behaviors we don’t want. When we see behaviors we don’t want, don’t like, or that we feel strongly about, we tend to call those “bad behaviors” and we go about trying to modify them.

If we respond to our children’s difficult behaviors by trying to change them, they never get a chance to learn how to work through the difficulty. They are being shown that it’s better to avoid the problem than to face it. But the behavior isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom of a struggle that they are having. They don’t know what to do about what’s happening and so they get bigger; louder, more physical, more erratic. By focusing on the behavior we ignore the deeper struggle, and so kids learn that they won’t be met and helped. They will instead be punished for their outburst.

This often leads to the familiar accusations we hear from teens; that their parents don’t understand them and don’t care about them.

Instead, if an adult came to them, helped them regulate in the face of difficulty, and walked them through the solution, they learn tools for getting through the actual discomfort. They are able to use some of those tools a little bit better next time, and a little bit better the time after that. Offering a solution that aligns with the way that kids learn (by example and by practice) they are better equipped to help themselves through future difficulty.

The second problem we face when we focus on our childrens’ behavior rather than our relationship is that the goals are different. The goal of behavior modification is really to get the child to comply with your expectations. This ignores the child’s experience that is difficult in the first place, and then it goes on to demand compliance with expectations, regardless of whether the child is actually able to do it or not. It teaches them to override their nervous system, ignore their own experience, and to prioritize others’ expectations over their own needs.

If we are not trying to teach our kids to override their own experience and prioritize others, then we may want to reconsider the behavior approach. Instead, we may want to examine what it might look like to see this child through a relational lens.

We might see a child who is having difficulty. We would notice that they are losing their ability to regulate themselves and behave appropriately. We would step in with the goal of helping them navigate the difficulty going on in their emotional world. We would use age appropriate connection, words, and solutions. We would help them notice what was going on, let them know they’re not alone, and help them start to think things through. We would let them use our nervous systems to self-regulate.

Humans don’t learn to regulate by being isolated or punished. They learn through a calm adult showing up to model it for them. When the adult stays steady and faces their difficulty, they learn that they can do it too.

None of this can be diluted to a meme or hack about how to do this. What connections will be accepted by a particular distressed child is probably only known by a few of the child’s closest caregivers, if even they know. Every person is different about how easy it is to respond to touch, to words, to quiet presence. Think about when you feel distressed, what kind of response by a friend brings you comfort? It’s a really personal thing.

So how this actually looks for everyone will be different. The relationship is built slowly, over time. There is no one right way to do it. And the nuances will be different for every person.

2. Slow down, relationships aren’t efficient, they can’t be done quickly

To build relationships we have to slow down. In the midst of urgency our relational skills fall apart. We lose the ability to observe and listen deeply. We discard curiosity for taking everything at face value and not asking questions. To move quickly we have to make lots of assumptions and we do not spend time checking them to make sure we are working together.

Relationships also require more than one connection. We don’t usually consider people to be “friends” that we’ve only met once. It takes more meetings, more conversation, and more exploration to get to know a person. And truly, that job of knowing someone, is never done. There will never be a day when there is nothing else to learn about the experience of another human being.

Relationships take time, and they take repeated connection points. Therefore, a commitment is necessary for a relationship. A decision to come back again and again to keep being curious and getting to know someone.

It’s so common (and I’m totally guilty of this, ask my 19 year old) that we think we know. This is one of the biggest hurdles to relationship with our children. We remember being kids, we had our experiences, we look back and see how things worked, we better understand what the adults were doing. So, not only do we think we know our kids’ experience, but we feel like we understand the whole thing better than we did as a kid. It’s easy to think we know more than them.

If we are focused on relationship, then we remember that the person in front of us isn’t us. They are not a small version of us, or of their other parent. Not only that, they are living in a different time. So, while we have some idea of what they might be going through, when we slow down and focus on relationship, we find curiosity. We can get interested in what THIS person is experiencing. We can start to check our childhood experience against theirs to see if there is common ground. But we approach the whole thing differently.

Again, this kind of relating isn’t just communication. It takes time, spaciousness, repeated connection, and lots of curiosity to facilitate. But it does have a higher likelihood of resulting in kids that share their experiences with us, are willing to admit their failures and learn from us, and in the long term, they’re more likely to stay in relationship with us as adults.

3. Do family time with less pressure

In the spirit of focusing on relationships rather than behavior, and slowing down, I’ll share one piece of hard-earned wisdom from my own experience. Do less stuff with your kids that requires you to plan or organize or lead. Do more stuff that allows you to be together informally and without structure.

The kids will begin to lead, you will be better able to see their innate strengths, and they will have time to feel more connected to you as fellow humans. It also gives them some experience at being a responsible leader in a low stakes environment, since you’re still there if anything goes awry.

Because family events and holidays can also create a lot of urgency and tons of extra work, especially for moms, I recommend choosing a few holidays or celebrations that you want to make traditions and don’t overextend yourself for the others.

This was a terrible mistake I made early on in parenting.

I wanted to make my children feel special because I was neglected and often left alone in my childhood. So I tried to engage in every single holiday. Not only was I shocked to realize that in the U.S. the kids celebrate some special day at school at least once a month, I quickly became overwhelmed with all of the logistics of keeping up.

Also, I eventually figured out that I didn’t have to do everything for every celebration (I realized that I didn’t have to spend 2 days making special cakes every year for their birthday… they equally enjoyed store bought cakes). Besides, if I focused on having a good relationship with my kid, I was more likely to know the one or two things that make them feel really special and do those, instead of doing a bunch of stuff they didn’t really care about.

If my goal was to make them feel special, then knowing what made them special was way better than a picture perfect birthday celebration.

My advice to new parents is to consider which holidays and celebrations are important to you. Choose no more than three (really, choose what you want, but try to narrow it to three). What about those holidays is important? What values do they exhibit and what do you want your kids to know about those values? What family traditions would you like to pass on? What new things would you like to create?
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Finding the why behind the celebrations and holidays helps stay focused. If it’s been a tough couple of weeks or months, you can scale back but still keep what’s most important to you. It allows you to have flexibility with less risk that you’ll look back and regret the way you did family holidays. It will also help convey those values to your children because they will be consistent (remember, they learn through repetition and practice).

Changing family patterns of relationships is a long haul task. Moving away from the ways our parents taught us their values, intentional or not, takes thoughtfulness, practice, and humility.

​We tend to flounder without an organizing sense of who we want to be as parents and what we want to instill in our children. This may leave us with the feeling that we’re not doing a good job, because we’re kinda piecing parenthood together as we go and it’s not feeling rooted or grounded. 

Changing family patterns is the kind of work we do for a lifetime.

It’s many small meaningful acts, rooted in care, repeated again and again. But it doesn’t have to be a huge lift, it doesn’t have to empty you to fill your kids up.

That brings us to our first fallacy:

1. If it’s hard I suck at it.

Yes, parenting is hard. Especially the way it’s set up with one (or maybe two) adults trying to work for wages to keep the whole family afloat, as well as meeting a whole suite of needs for their children on a long developmental path.

This is the work of a village, and humans evolved under the conditions of having many adults available to help raise children born into the community. It’s hard because you’re missing the support network, not because you are not good at being a parent.

2. I want to do better than my parents did, so I’ll do the opposite of what they did.

This one is tricky. It’s rare that I’ve heard someone say that worked for them. Most often this “opposite” comes with another, related, set of problems. It contributes to the polarizing idea that there are only two ways and you must choose one of them. From authoritarianism, where parents exert strict control over their children and expect compliance, the swing goes to permissiveness in which parents try not to control and enforce, but often find themselves lacking boundaries and routines.

When we buy into the polarity of one right answer and one wrong answer we pit the two extreme ends of a spectrum against each other and skip over everything in between. And honestly, if we just do the opposite, we often just end up with different problems. There are no fewer of them and they are no less problematic.

The key is to find something in the middle that is obscured by black and white thinking. What lies in the middle is healthy boundaries, clear communication, and cooperation. When you find yourself in a double bind (you have two terrible options and it’s difficult to choose between them) it’s often helpful to look for the third thing, the middle ground, the option no one is seeing.

3. I have no idea what I’m doing

I think you do know what you’re doing. You are following your gut because you don’t want your kids to feel the way you did. You want something better for them. And you’re willing to work for it.

At this moment, though, your actions may be motivated by getting away from what you don’t want. You may still not feel rooted in what you DO want. That’s different from not knowing what you’re doing.

4. I have to toughen up my child for the “real” world.

This is often used as a reason not to be kind, empathetic, and meet the child where they are. It’s used an excuse to not have to consider the impact of parental actions on children.

It’s often used in conjunction with a “what if they still do that when they’re 25?” They won’t. Kids don’t go off to their first apartment or to college still wanting to sleep in your bed, or believing in Santa Claus. They grow out of things. That’s what development means.

And early in development they need a lot of guidance about how to use their bodies, growing knowledge and capability, and their creativity to build their lives.

So, what happens if we let these perspectives go? Or at least update them a bit? We get to a place where difficulty with our kids doesn’t make us bad parents.

I know it’s often said that parenting is so hard because kids don’t come with a manual. But they used to.

For most of human history we lived in tribal groups of around 100 people that worked together to take care of one another. They gathered and cooked food together, shared the tasks of maintaining structures, and raised their children collectively.

In this way, parenting was a shared activity of most, if not all, members of the community. Children played in multi-aged groups and took care of younger kids. Adults were nearby if anything was needed, but most of their day the children spent time together.

Adults in those tribal communities had two things working in their favor that we don’t always have anymore. One is, that they had lots of previous experience with children because they were part of those multi-aged groups when they were younger. Folks of different ages were not separated into cohorts the way they are today.
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Second, they had other adults to turn to if they needed help. The how-to-care-for-a-kid-manual existed in the many available people in the group who had parented before them. No one was left to deal with situations in isolation. Help was available.

This is the resource that’s missing these days. And it used to be contained inside of multi-age communities that we don’t really have anymore. There is a continuity of care missing from our family units. And in that continuity was the lived knowledge and experience of the community.

This is why we feel like we’re parenting alone and doing it by the seat of our (exhausted) pants!

Since we’re unlikely to restore the multi-age familial unit in a big way anytime soon (it would require so much more repair than just moving us all in together again), I think we start by looking to systems we do have access to in order to find someone who has navigated this territory before. I hope you already have that in your life; other mamas who are parenting kids a little older than yours, or a wise grandmother, or a friendly neighbor. I wish that for you, and I wish I’d had that when I was a young parent.

We may not have the ideal community, but I do think we are often still more connected than we think. We don’t have to have the whole thing to have elements of it. Maybe it’s worth considering the imperfect ways that these resources do exist?

What about the friends you call, the other mom’s you talk to, or even the other exhausted moms you pass in the grocery store that give soothing and knowing looks at your screaming toddler or your sleeping baby?
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We need solidarity. Give it. Receive it when you get it. Let it in.

And if that still isn’t cutting it, you can find a professional mentor. Think of it as a rent-a-grandmother. I have thought a great deal about parenting in the 35+ years since I had my first baby. I’ve raised my kids, all wildly different human beings who have taught me the value of care, of being seen, and of the impact that seemingly small things can have on us all.

I am a resource for working through the kind of parent you want to be and how to pull it off. I have a lot of skills from all of the repair I’ve done with my children over large and small things. I’ve learned (and still am learning) what it takes to have relationships with my children based on love, support, and shared humanity. I’ve learned how to listen deeply, have good boundaries, and love wholly.

Please do reach out if you’re feeling lonely, isolated, and overwhelmed. Whether you hire me or not, knowing that you’re not alone is often a large piece of the puzzle. I care how your parenting is going. I care how under-resourced you are. Parenting doesn’t have to be this big of a struggle.

In the social arc of parenting paradigms we are in a place where most of our parents were told by parenting experts to focus on the behavior of their children. The basic idea is that behaviors that were unwanted were squashed. If there was a behavior that our parents didn’t like, made them feel uncomfortable or bad, or was inconvenient, it was punished. (I also think there’s an argument to be made that this perspective is making a resurgence in the collective conversations around parenting).

While parents are focusing on behavior, from the child’s perspective this is a time of developing their sense of SELF. This results in conflating “bad” behavior with a “bad” child.

Additionally, parents were (and often still are) judged as good or bad parents based on whether their children are compliant, easy to direct, and obedient.

The advice our parents got from parenting “experts” of their day was that they shouldn’t coddle us, we would become soft. They were told to let us cry when it was time to go to sleep because eventually we’d learn how to put ourselves to sleep. They were told that if they withheld their affection we would be left wanting it, and it would make us more compliant, and therefore “better” children.

The problem is that children crying themselves to sleep doesn’t teach them to self-soothe, it teaches them to avoid rest until they’re so exhausted they crash. Babies don’t have brains that can self-soothe yet. It’s not possible. What we know now is that babies develop the ability to work with their own nervous systems through receiving regulation through caregivers (and not necessarily just their mother).

Is it any wonder that so many of us grew up feeling like failures? Feeling like we’re not good enough, like we don’t deserve any better? We grew up feeling unseen, unloved, alone. Our parents were not meeting us where we were in our development. This isn’t necessarily their fault, even if the effects were painful. They were given terrible advice and they didn’t have a lot of resources to figure something else out.

But let’s stick with what happens when a child is raised to be compliant.
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The behavioral lens of parenting leaves parents looking for obedience in children to determine their “goodness” that gets extended from how they are behaving to “who they are”. ​

In addition, children were seen as little adults, and the expectations of children were often beyond what was developmentally appropriate (like the ability to anticipate outcomes, or to control impulses).

It makes sense that we didn’t feel seen, understood, or loved (all to varying degrees based on our individual parents). At the precipice of parenthood or in the beginning of raising our own littles, we might find that we really want to do thing differently. We really want our children to thrive, and now we know more about child and brain development and we can do things differently.

Our nervous systems were built around behaviorism. What we did was conflated with who we were. We were judged against expectations we could not meet and the probability of failure was always high. We were punished when we couldn’t perform. What have we been left with in the wake of these problems?

We’ve been left with generations with low self-esteem and a lack of skills around disappointment, failure, and compassion, both for ourselves and others.

This parenting lens has far reaching implications. How we are parented and how we are perceived as children grows into a sense of who we are and can be as adults. Our beliefs about ourselves are anchored in our early experiences, and as we grow it colors how we see and participate in our communities.

I don’t want to make parenting seem like something we have to be perfect at, but I am trying to argue for getting clear on what we are trying to accomplish in parenting. I want to suggest that it is an important place to put our attention for lineage healing, for community well-being, and for our futures.

Our families are a place of possibility.

So, what if you’re a new-ish parent, and you can see the harms from the past, and you are committed to parenting differently? You know what you don’t want, but you can’t yet see what you do want. Maybe you have visions, parts of the whole, but because your nervous system was grown on behaviorism, you don’t always have what you need to be the one who soothes, the one who stays, the one who softens.

This was where I found myself as a parent when my kids were little. I believed in them as their own little people, that my job was to help them grow and develop into people who could form good relationships with others. I wanted them to believe in themselves, know their strengths and limits, and to have a caring community around them.

I knew what I hoped for my children, but I didn’t know how to get them there.

It eventually dawned on me that the reason I was struggling with the implementation, was that I was still missing an ability to self-soothe (among other relational skills). When they got upset, I got upset. Which meant that my kids’ emotions were running the show and often we were all crying. I was constantly chasing our feelings and trying to fix them.

And what ended up helping the most was having a new paradigm.
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I didn’t just switch to a different paradigm of child development or expert advice (though I did still gather research), but I changed my focus from managing everyone’s behavior to centering our relationships. I began to look at our family as an ecosystem. Perceiving that each of us is a valuable individual within that ecosystem with autonomy, yet acknowledging that we are interconnected, and we impact each other.

I had to learn the skills of presence, listening, and self-soothing. I had to learn to co-regulate, to be the one who was steady. I worked with my Inner Mother who was able to care for me as I was caring for my kids. I prioritized my own healing so that I could be the parent I wanted to be.

My youngest is 18 now, and when I look back on this ecosystem orientation of parenting I see the benefits. We know how to stay through difficult discussions. We know we are held by the others in the ecosystem. We have all practiced dealing with our own disappointment, staying through hard times, and what it means to do relational repair. It’s not easy, and it hasn’t made us a “perfect family” by any means, but it does mean we have a foundation of care.

It also opts us out of the conversation about whether any of us are “good” or “bad.” We are as we are, and it is known that we have an inherent belonging, we are part of our family ecosystem. This allows each of us to express our own will, to receive feedback from how it impacts the ecosystem, and for all of us to adjust (or not) as necessary.
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What would it be like to set down the precepts of behaviorism, that focus on what people do rather than who they are, and to consider looking through the lens of ecosystem? What would we see in our family if we weren’t measuring their compliance to our preferences? Who would be standing in front of us, and what would they actually be capable of? What would we be capable of bringing to our family if we redirected all the energy we put into getting their compliance?

I often write about the big picture, the ways we are connected to nature and the archetypal forces of both nature and the Mothers. And I know that these writings do not always contain helpful pointers, scripts, or step-by-step strategies. I think there are enough life and parenting hacks in the world, and I trust that’s not what you need if you’re still searching for some kind of answer to what ails you.

I am writing for those of us who do not want to be told what to say to our kids when they’re having tantrums, but instead are trying to find a different way of being part of our family entirely. We’re looking for the path no one else has laid, because ours is a necessary path for our particular family line, given the harms we have caused, the harms we have endured, and the needs of the individual people in our family ecosystem. We need a new support structure, a new foundation, a new perspective, and we are the ones who want to bring it.

And while Landscape of Mothers can sometimes help in the practical day-to-day realm, I know that there is no one right way to do life or parenting. Each person, each relationship, each family has their own unique skills, tools, gifts, coping mechanisms, and traumas. And while there are themes, because of the interlocking complexities, there is no one right answer. There is no ubiquitous plan that will ensure the academic, relationship, and future financial success of your child or family.
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I would argue that who we are is a much more important legacy to leave our children than anything else we can give them. The world is changing rapidly and new technology (and new problems) will arise that we could never have guessed at. And so our biggest gift to our children is to see, articulate, and nurture in them their connection to who they are. We can trust that they are becoming the people they need to be for the world that is ahead of them. And that what they most need is our having seen and valued them as they human beings that they are, so they trust themselves.

I’m trying to say that it’s great to have scripts and hacks and behavior modification tools, but those are only useful insofar as we know where we want them to take us. If we aren’t using these tools to help our kids be the most themselves they can be, what are we doing? Are we using these tools to get them to comply with what we want? Or are we using them to manipulate? Or to control?

And this is where the larger vision of Landscape of Mothers comes in. And it’s why I talk more about perspective and intent and the systems of the natural world than how to deal with a toddler tantrum. Because there are a bunch of ways to deal with a tantrum, and the “best” way is going to be the way that your nervous system can meet them where they are. You can’t really think your way through relationships, you have to be present, you have to feel them.

In Landscape of Mothers we recognize that how you deal with your child is rooted in a bigger vision of what you think your role is as parent. It includes your sense of responsibility for your child’s inner experience, and what you consider important and desirable traits as your child grows into an adult. So parenting isn’t really just about how we raise our kids, it’s who we are when we spend time with them and who we tell them they are. When you’re really clear on your parenting intent and framework, it’s much easier to choose the appropriate tactic you want to take around the behavior of your child. ​