Cosmic Parenting: Introduction

From the moment of birth, a child’s individual “nature”—unique temperament, physical constitution, and individual gifts—interacts with the “nurturing” influences in their life: the child/parent relationship, family dynamic, and the culture into which they are born. Children grow up in a context of norms, traditions, and beliefs arising from religion, ethnicity, race, gender, education, politics, economics, and the natural environment. For each person, nature and nurture come together to form the “Child Self,” which evolves over childhood into adolescence and adulthood.  

The purpose of this book is twofold: to serve as a gentle tool for tending the “Child Self” so that the adult lives fully and authentically and as a loving guide for adults raising children. In other words, this book is as much for adults who are not raising children as it is for those who are not. The Child Self needs as much careful tending to as the Child we are raising. Parenting another well also requires that we parent ourselves well. 

My views about human nature, child development, and parenting have evolved over the forty plus years that I have worked with hundreds of children and families. For twenty-three of those years, I owned and ran a Montessori-based early childhood program. Since then, I have counseled, coached, taught, and consulted with adults, parents, children, and teachers. 

I wish to share the wisdom I have learned through my practical experience as an educator, student, counselor, parent, and human being. It is through the integration of the many perspectives of others, my life experiences, and my personal work to grow as an authentic, self-accepting, conscious, and whole person, that I feel I have the most to give to other people. 

Over the years I have anchored my work in the foundational belief that every child arrives here as a unique individual, a “True Self”. 

The kind of nurturing we received as children can reinforce and support our authentic natures (consider an intense, sensitive child who is honored for expressing strong emotions) or it can have the opposite effect on our development (consider an energetic child who is told that being “good” means sitting still). When we are told to live or to act in ways that are contrary to our True Selves, we get the message that we are flawed and need to be fixed. To be acceptable, and therefore safe in the world, we come to believe that our task is to live up to the ideals of perfection, which we have gleaned, sometimes unconsciously, from our families, communities, and cultures.  

The central question this book seeks to answer is:  How do we keep the messages that our True Selves are fundamentally inadequate, or that they are to blame for our circumstances, from defining our sense of worthiness and value as humans? 

As we develop into adulthood, our call is to become compassionately conscious of the internal and external messages that discount or deny our authentic natures, including our tender spots, rough edges, and imperfections. Cultivating this consciousness allows us to act with intention. 

“Parenting” in this book applies equally to the work we do to raise a child (the Child) as well as to heal ourselves through tending to and accompanying the child who lives within us (the Child Self.) Both the Child and the Child Self need support in navigating the confusing, contrary, divisive, and even damaging messages we received as children. With the intention that comes from being compassionately conscious we can make the choices necessary to parent our Child Selves and the Child we are raising, in ways that honor and support the True Self. 

As humans, we inevitably will have times when we do not measure up to the idealized versions of ourselves. We all carry wounds, jags, breaks, and cracks.  But this does not mean that we are unworthy or less than whole. We can be whole and be in multiple pieces, a whole of parts. Whatever is not perfect, easy, or smooth or is “different” is to be loved, celebrated, sometimes redirected, and always held. Only in this way can we find release from the tyranny of perfection. 

Often, when we think that the Child or the Child Self need perfecting, we are trapped in our own cycles of persona, projection, and fear for survival. Perhaps we have come to see our imperfect selves reflected in the Child or the Child Self. With an inflated sense of our own power, we blame ourselves for the flaws we see in them and seek to protect them from who we are and what we have suffered and continue to suffer.

Maria Montessori, the Italian physician, educator, and innovator, acclaimed for her educational method, which builds on the way children uniquely and naturally learn, advised educators and parents to “shed [their] omnipotence, and enter into joyful observation of the child.” 1 To her, the illusion of omnipotence keeps us from seeing and engaging with the Child (and, I believe, the Child Self) as they truly are. I encourage parents to use compassionate self-awareness to keep their own wounds and artificially imposed standards of perfection out of the way of tending to their children and their Child Selves.  

Parenting requires consciousness and the willingness to move the many complex parts of ourselves out of the way so that we can see what is before us—a Child and a Child Self to love both simply and wholly. 

No matter how you were seen, loved, appreciated, or nurtured as a child, I believe we are here to connect the threads of universal awareness, love, and nurturance to the Child Self first and then, if you are raising one, to the Child. Your ancestors may have carried generational trauma and your parents may have been damaged and their wounds may have injured you in ways that impact you today. The good news is that compassionate consciousness can break these cycles. 

We all need to fall in love with the Child Self, and the Child, for our sake as well as the sake of the greater whole. I am writing this book, to help in the return to True Self. 

1 The Teacher Montessori, 1948/1967, p. 122