In simple terms, it means being sensitively aware of your child. Aware of your child’s challenges, joys, and frustrations. It is also about being sensitive enough to know what role to play in a situation as a custodian of a child.
Why custodian? Because the first step in the evolution as a conscious parent is to understand that we don’t own our children. They have come through us but not by us. As custodians, we have to nurture them, provide them a fertile environment, be our authentic selves with them, give them the requisite tools and allow them to spread their wings in the way they feel most comfortable.
Not so long ago, when we used to live in joint families with many children around, they had emotional support, and their needs were being met by other members of the family, such as cousins, grandparents, or aunts and uncles. If one of the parents was not able to play the role or was carrying their own unhealed inner wounds and reacting from a place of hurt, it wouldn’t have affected the child as much because someone else would have compensated for that lack. Today, with nuclear families and lack of day-to-day meaningful connections— as most children are increasingly living in virtual worlds, they have to rely on their parents. Now more than ever before we, the parents, have to step up, become sensitive and conscious to the needs of our children.
For a parent to become a custodian, they must overcome their own emotional baggage and limiting beliefs. As a parent, we must evolve and learn to live in the now with an acute awareness of the sensibilities and emotions of our children.
What does a conscious parent look like?
A conscious parent is one who constantly introspects; is always willing to work on themselves, is ready to clear their emotional baggage and limiting beliefs. Being intuitive, creative, playful, and having a sense of humor mean that a conscious parent is a good listener and can connect with their child. Once they are able to connect with their child at this level, they will not need tailored-made solutions, they would innately know how to respond to their child’s need. Every situation and child is unique and only when you connect with your child in that given situation, you access the solution. All answers are there deep within you, one just needs to enter that silence and space to be able to access it.
Parents need to create an atmosphere where children want to open up and share their feelings. A judgmental parent, or one that is always distracted with the outer world, or one who is quick to jump to ‘add salt to taste’ solutions is bound to lose out on the confidence of their children. Such parents are unable to move past the iron wall children make around their feelings.
A conscious parent understands that every moment is not a preaching moment; sometimes a child wants an active listener and they are able to come up with the solution themselves. So sometimes, it is OK to just listen, hug your child and validate their feelings. All of us want to feel connected and avoid rejection. So, our children need to feel loved and protected, to feel that they are good enough and that they matter.
It’s a bit of both, a science and an art: as parents, we need to become conscious of our own inner wounds, heal them and not look in our children to find opportunities to correct them. The world outside of us is a mirror image of what is inside of us.
